Double Your Fun

The internet says to make pastry cream on the stove, shouldn’t it be cooked in a double boiler?

Here the internet is actually right – and I’m not just saying that because my kitchen wisdom is delivered via the magic that is the internet. Pastry creams are custards; very basic custards made of eggs/egg yolks, milk, a binding agent, sweetener and vanilla flavoring. Rather than a standalone dessert, pastry creams tend to be used as a building blocks - Ice creams, donuts, cake fillings - all call upon pastry creams to make a better dessert.

Pastry creams thicken between 175-185ºf. An electric stove heats at about 2,000ºf – Gas burns at a 3,000-3,500ºf, a double boiler is only going to warm up to 200ºf and some change – it would seem that a double boiler, a pan set over hot water, would be a safer bet for keeping the pastry cream within its proper temperature window between not thickened and curdled.

But the addition of the binding agent traditionally flour, more nouvelle recipes call for cornstarch, insulate the egg proteins and allow for the intense heat of the stovetop. Well that and constant stirring motion diffuses the heat.

A calibrated thermometer is the best way to keep track of the heat, remove from the stove at 170ºf  (the residual heat will continue to thicken the sauce) and pour into a cool bowl – if you let the mixture climb over 190, the sauce will start to break apart - first little puddles will form. Boiling the pastry cream will scramble the eggs in the dish, well it isn’t really scrambled eggs with all the sugar but that is what it will look like.

Some authors recommend not to touch the pastry cream after goes into the cool bowl because the additional stirring breaks down the starch matrix, other authors advise to stir constantly so the mixture cools – much like the internet there is a little inconsistency in information.

Perhaps here, the internet recipe was confused, there are similar custard sauces such as crème anglaise, zabaglione and sabayon that call for the use water insulated double boilers. Or maybe the web shares my near religious belief that the single biggest obstacle standing in the way of good home cooking is high temperatures – to the novice or distracted cook the high heat of the stove would cause the pastry cream to break/curdle.

I’m curious why you are looking up recipes on a medium you find suspect? Because it is acceptable to look at the internet at work; but no cookbooks in the cubicle – how unfair is that?  Saucyman is always double sourced for your protection, but largely unedited, so mistakes happen. On the book-side, despite legions of editors, my experience is not every cookbook is 75% accurate. As fun and easy it is to make fun of the veracity of interwiki information, I think any cook should be skeptical of recipe by an authors they haven’t tried before.

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