Things are getting better. Using less liquid provided a flat bottom once again and I removed the egg whites in this recipe. Here is the recipe
Canele Recipe (makes 6.5 Canele)
7/8 cup whole milk
1.5 tbp unsalted good quality butter
1.5 – 2 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup cane sugar
.5 tsp sea salt
2 large egg yolks (or you can use 2 whole eggs)
(if you use the whole egg it will be lighter/less dense)
1/3 cup flour + 1 tsp + 1tbs (95ml)
2 – 2.6 tbs Kahula (yes, this is the secret to my Canele)
Add milk and butter in saucepan
Scald milk, bring to 180-185 degrees (183 degrees)
Add the sugar to the milk & butter mixture and dissolve
Put 2 egg yolks in a small bowl and scramble a little bit
pour over milk mixture slowly to temper eggs
In a bowl combine sugar, salt, & flour
Pour egg mixture over dry ingredients
Blend together in a blender or try to mix out all lumps
(some strain the mixture, this can help, but I don’t usually do this)
Add vanilla & Kahula
Refrigerate for 48 hours
Coat molds with beeswax and butter mixture
Bake
Fill molds to about .5″ below the top
Use lower middle oven rack
preheat oven and dish to 475 then lower to 450 and bake 15-20 min
lower oven to 375 bake 40-45 min (look for the rich deep brown color)
Testing baking in a Le Creuset (I don’t recommend this)
My wife is a great cook and has good taste in cookware. She recently bought a Le Creuset dutch oven. We talked about it and thought would be a good idea to bake the Canele in the dutch oven. These are heavy cast iron pots. The retain heat really well. We figured because of this the cooking temperature would be more consistent. This turned out to be a bit scary I’ll go over the details below.
I preheated oven along with the Dutch oven. Then I placed the molds inside this screaming hot pot with high sides. Just getting close, I could feel the heat radiating from the pot. I couldn’t use tongs to place the molds inside because the silicone with soft sizes and liquid batter would be crushed. I couldn’t use gloves because with them on I didn’t have much dexterity. I had to put them in with my bare hands. I thought several times I was going to burn my arm on the high sides. This was terrifying and I would strongly recommend against it unless you are armor plated. Next time I’ll use my wife’s Le Creset braiser. It has much lower sides.
This batch came out really well, however they didn’t have a very dark crust. The flavor and texture was excellent. One nice thing about cooking in a pot was the ease of taking them in and out of the oven. I could easily grab the handles and take the entire batch out. My new cotton oven gloves were just barely up to the task. I could feel the heat of the 450 degree pot as I lifted it. I know that I couldn’t have held it too long with out temperature rated gloves.
The damn things raised way out of the molds again. Higher then I’ve ever seen them. Here is a photo, it doesn’t show it, but they raised up two or three times higher then the one on the right.
I took this batch out several times to tap and shake them back into their molds. My wife was very enthusiastic about this and helped by using tongs and shaking them side to side. The funny thing was the pot was so hot that they kept rising even after taking them out of the oven. I placed the pot on top of a cutting board and could smell the remnants of the pot cooking onion bits left on the board.
One thing I don’t like about the rising effect the exposure to the oven heat over bakes and burns the edges. For some reason even thought they rose significantly out of the molds somehow the pot protected the edges from burning. There were air pockets in some of them, others were more consistent.
This post is part of a 7 part series on Canele