Foodward Bound: Jasmine crème brûlée

My husband is a bit of a fan of Heston Blumenthal and recently we bought his book Heston Blumenthal At Home which contains a lot of his recipes for the home cook as well as some more complex ones, such as ones which require dry ice or a sous vide. We also received a cook's blowtorch as a wedding present, so of course it was necessary to combine the two and make make one of Heston's crème brûlée recipes (of which there are three).

Ingredients (serves 2):

125g whole milk

20g Jasmine tea leaves

200g double cream

3 medium egg yolks

25g caster sugar

Weighing out the Jasmine tea leaves

First I put the tea leaves and milk into a saucepan and heated them to 60°C. While this was happening Calum got a little distracted by taking pictures of the kitchen and the milk ended up boiling, so we had to throw it away and start again. This time it went to plan:

Heating the milk and tea

Checking the temperature of the milk

Once the temperature reached 60°C I removed the pan from the heat and let the mixture infuse for 10 minutes. During this time I weighed out the sugar and separated the eggs, retaining the white for later use.

Weighing the sugar

The egg yolks

After 10 minutes had elapsed I strained the milk, putting it into a saucepan along with the cream and bringing this to a simmer. While this was going on I put 5g of the sugar in with the eggs and whisked them together until they were creamy in colour:

Me whisking eggs

When the milk and cream mixture had reached a simmer I added a small amount to the eggs to temper them, then added the rest of the mixture and combined them as seen below:

I then poured the mixture into two ramekin dishes which I placed in a roasting tray and boiled the kettle.

After removing any bubbles from the surface of the egg custard I then filled the roasting tray with boiling water so that it reached two thirds of the way up the ramekins.

Then I covered the tray with tin foil and put it into the oven (which had been preheated to 140°C for half an hour. Once the custard had set but was still slightly wobbly I removed the dishes from the oven and dried them off, leaving them to cool at room temperature for 15 minutes before placing them in the fridge for a couple of hours.