Chilean · Dessert
Leche Asada
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, warm spice humming through the middle, with warmth in the tail.
Ingredients
- 1000 ml whole milk
- 180 g caster sugar
- 6 large eggs
- 1 strip lemon peel, pith scraped away
- 10 ml vanilla extract
- 1 g ground cinnamon
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Warm the milk with the lemon peel and cinnamon until it steams, then take it off and leave it 10 minutes for the peel to give up its oil. 10 min
- Whisk the eggs, sugar and vanilla only until the sugar has dissolved, keeping the whisk under the surface so you raise no foam, then pour in the warm milk in a thin stream, whisking.
- Strain into a 22 cm baking dish and lift off any froth with a spoon.
- Set the dish straight on the oven rack and bake at 180C (350F) for 45 minutes to 55 minutes, until the top is blistered dark brown in patches and the centre still trembles. 45 min
- Serve warm or cold from the dish, cutting down through the browned skin.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Moscato d’Asti
- Also Right
- Late-harvest Riesling
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling elderflower
Citrus desserts need a wine sweeter than they are, with acid enough to keep up: light, frothy, and low-proof wins.
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