PicoBlog

Hi! Happy July! I hope that your summer thus far has been filled with sunny days, good books, and lots of lake/beach/pool days. And ice cream. A lot of ice cream.

We’re continuing right along in our cooked custard saga with crème anglaise. It’s a silky, smooth custard that is used for many things—most importantly as our beloved ice cream base. This month, you’ll find a recipe for basic vanilla bean anglaise sauce (at the end of this newsletter) plus there are two brand new ice cream recipes coming your way in the next few weeks. I just can’t wait, so let’s jump in!

I vividly remember my first introduction with crème anglaise, though I didn’t know what it was at the time. As a kid living in the Sunshine State, we spent a fair amount of time at Disney World, and our favorite in-park meal was the Octoberfest-themed German buffet nestled in the back of the Epcot World Showcase. There were brats and sauerkraut, schnitzel and kugel, polka music and mid-dinner dancing, and best of all, apple strudels with a vat of vanilla crème anglaise. And since it was a buffet, there was as much anglaise as you wanted—a real dream come true.

Crème anglaise (or “English cream” in French) is a custard-style cream sauce used for all sorts of dessert applications—like drizzling over apple strudel or cake or even just a bowl of fresh berries. It, like pastry cream, falls into the big pastry category of cooked custards. There are two main, easy to remember differences between crème anglaise and pastry cream: starch and boiling. The methodology and most of the ingredients are the same, except pastry cream incorporates flour or cornstarch and therefore needs to be boiled. This results in a much, much thicker custard.

Crème anglaise on the other hand, is thickened only with egg yolks resulting in a thinner, silkier, more pourable sauce.

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