yuzu

I’ve been on a yuzu kick of late. This lovely citrus was introduced to us at our favourite Melbourne restaurant. With travel seemingly off the cards for a while, and the restaurant itself rotating various dessert items in and out, I decided to address my cravings for yuzu crème brûlée by making some of my own.

Ingredients

3 egg yolks
300ml thickened cream
3 tablespoons yuzu syrup
Pinch salt
Sugar to top

Note: my tablespoon was probably a little closer to 25ml than the 20ml Aussie standard…

The recipe is designed to nicely scale – 1x egg yolk, 1 spoon yuzu for every 100ml cream. Feel free to experiment with the quantities to suit your own preferences!

I don’t own ramekins so I made my crème brûlées in Chinese teacups. These quantities should fill 5 tea-sized serves. The recipe should work in ramekins but I haven’t tested – these quantities would probably would fill 2 Ramekins, maybe use a x5 scale (5 eggs, etc) to fill 4 ramekins?

Method

• Preheat oven to 180°C/160°C fan forced
• Heat 300ml thickened cream in saucepan on the stove with a pinch of salt. As soon as it appears slightly frothy, remove from heat. Do not let the cream boil.
• While the cream comes to heat, separate 3 egg yolks. Whisk together the egg yolks with 3 tablespoons yuzu syrup
• Pour warm (not boiling!) cream into the yolk mix, stirring to combine. Take care to not cook the eggs! I recommend using a spatula to scrape up the yolk mix from the base and sides of the bowl so it can be entirely integrated.
• Evenly portion the custard mixture between teacups/ramekins, place the filled containers in a deep dish/roasting tin
• Pour boiling water into the outer dish until it is 1.5cm from tops of the teacups/ramekins. The custards will be cooked in this water bath
• Transfer the custards in the water bath to the oven – cook for 30 mins or until tops are slightly darkened
• Remove the custards from the water bath and allow to cool before transferring to a fridge to set
• Before serving, top custards with sugar. Spoon half a teaspoon of sugar over the top of the custard, and then rotate it gently to distribute the sugar over the surface. Caramelise the sugar with a kitchen blowtorch

Where to get yuzu

I got my syrup from Mountain Yuzu – they are an Australian grower of yuzu, and they also import a number of yuzu products. Using the syrup makes the recipe really easy – because there’s already beet sugar in the syrup I skip adding any sugar to the custard mix.

My first experiments with this recipe used Yuzu Tea – I was lucky enough to snag the last jar they had in stock at the time. While I ended up deciding that the syrup was easier to use, the yuzu tea has proven itself a tasty accompaniment with toast, cereal and as a drink. I also finally decided to give this Yuzu Ice Cream recipe a shot despite not owning an ice-cream machine, and it came out great!

I’ll add some photos next time I make a batch!