Recipe: Crème Brûlée

1 Cut your vanilla bean in half lengthwise, scrape the seeds and put them in the cream. Heat gently.

2 In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks and sugar together, then add the cream just as it comes to a boil. Stir gently, being careful not to create foam, then pass through a fine sieve by gently pouring the cream onto the strainer with a ladle, always to avoid foam on the creams.

3 Turn your oven on to 220°F (105°C) (thermostat 3+).

4 Pour the cream very slowly into your small porcelain or terracotta ramekins. Cooking time: 1 hour 15 minutes. The cream should be trembling, just set. The cooking time is the same for all steam oven cooking, at minimum, in the middle of the oven, on a rack in a bain-marie.

5 Let cool without forgetting the key point: it's as your creams cool that they will set.

6 When serving, to caramelize your crème brûlées, you have three options: either under your oven broiler, or with a small kitchen torch, or as in fine dining restaurants with a heated iron white-hot.

This recipe is a bit pricey, it's true, but once you've tasted the result, you'll think of that 98% of crème brûlées prepared with rare concern for profit margins by cooks or pastry chefs confusing this recipe with that of a custard, using whole eggs, milk instead of cream and vanilla flavoring, covering them with sugar and caramelizing them with a torch. Paul Bocuse and the Troisgros brothers had indeed been my father Gabriel's commis in the kitchens of Lucas-Carton.