Flan de Dulce De Leche
Ingredients
Directions
We’ll need a pot or pan to make our sugar. Use a medium to high heat setting. Put a little sugar and let it start melting, when about 50% of it has melted continue to add more sugar gradually and mixing around with a wooden spoon. You can go slow with this process; you don’t have to crank up the heat all the way, but it does have to be relatively high for the sugar to melt. We need the sugar to have flow but not be very dark, because the darker it gets the bitter it will become and it will not have the taste we want.
You should be looking for a darken yellowish tone in the sugar as you scoop it out of the pot. It will flow quite easily as it is very hot but it will harden a fair amount when it cools down, so we need to work fairly quickly from here.
We want to move straight into pouring a small but considerable amount into our moulds. Use a cloth when handling the moulds because the sugar is very hot, and the moulds get very hot as well. Depending on the size of the moulds you use, you may need more or less sugar.
For the moulds perhaps using porcelain is best, they are called ramekins, so get yourself one of those for an easier time.
Start first by beating the dulce de leche and eggs together, you can do this all at once or add half the eggs and whisk and the other half later. Just make sure they are very well mixed, so you have to whisk quite aggressively.
Once we got that mix well, we need to add the sugar and whisk a little to incorporate into the mix.
Lastly, add the milk and mix gently otherwise you can make a mess.
Time to pour our mixture into the moulds, you want to leave about 1cm from the top of the moulds. It’s not that they rise but it’s a lot easier to handle this way.
Make sure you pre-heat your oven to 140 C.
We’ll need a large reservoir to place the moulds, because they need to rest in a body of water that reaches about half of the mould when cooking. If you want the moulds to not slide around, place a couple of paper towels underneath and that should give them some friction, preventing them from sliding around.
Cover all the moulds with a sheet of aluminium so they don’t dry out in the oven.
You can add the water now but that can be a challenge to move the whole thing to the oven, it would be really heavy and hard to manoeuvre, especially if the oven is down low. So, my suggestion is to fill the reservoir when you have it in the oven
Flan can take quite a bit of time to cook. These little (240ml capacity) moulds took 1 hour to cook. You can check if its done by lightly tapping the top of the flan and it has this ripple effect, a very slight ripple. So depending on the mould you use, it may take a little less or more time to cook.
We need to let them rest at room temperature for half an hour and then place in the fridge for a couple of hours and they will be ready to be enjoyed!
To get them out of the moulds, place the mould in hot water, boiling water will work best and let them rest there for maybe 5 to 10 minutes. You can try and dislodge them a little with a knife by running it around the top gently. You should be able to press down on the edges of the flan and see it separate a little.
You can enjoy them by themselves, add more dulce de leche or cream to the side.
