South African · Dessert

Melktert

Intermediate
40 min
roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Vegetarian

rich · warm-spiced · floral · fiery Leads with richness that coats and comforts, warm spice humming through the middle, on a slow, honest burn.

Ingredients

250 g plain flour
125 g cold unsalted butter, diced
60 g icing sugar
1 large egg yolk
30 ml cold water
3 g fine salt
1 litre whole milk
1 cinnamon stick
60 g cornflour
40 g plain flour, for the filling
180 g caster sugar
3 large eggs
30 g unsalted butter, for the filling
5 ml vanilla extract
5 g ground cinnamon, to finish

The skills inside

The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil Rubbing fat into flour

Allergen screen

Found: gluten · 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

Rub the cold butter into the 250 g flour, icing sugar and salt to coarse crumbs, bind with the yolk and cold water, line a 24 cm tin and chill it 30 minutes, then prick the base, line it with paper and baking beans and bake at 190C (375F) for 15 minutes, lift out the paper and beans and give it 5 minutes to 8 minutes more until the base is dry and sandy. 30 min
Bring the milk to a bare simmer with the cinnamon stick, take it off the heat, and let it stand 10 minutes. 10 min
Whisk the eggs, caster sugar, cornflour and 40 g flour to a smooth slurry, temper it with a ladle of the hot milk, then return everything to the pan.
Cook over medium heat, stirring into the corners, until it thickens and then bubbles lazily for a full 2 minutes. 2 min
Beat in the butter and vanilla, pour into the shell, dust heavily with ground cinnamon, and chill 4 hours until it cuts clean. 240 min

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Rubbing fat into flour 47 recipes

The fat is cold when it starts and still firm when the rubbing stops, and the bowl has not warmed under the hands.
Stopped early, while it still looks like coarse crumbs with pieces of fat visible in it, not worked on to a smooth even sand, which means the pieces have gone.
Nothing is greasy or glossy and nothing has smeared into a paste against the side of the bowl.
Liquid added last and only enough to bring it together: pressed, it just holds, with no wet patch and nothing sticking to the hand.
Rested cold before it is rolled or shaped, so the gluten relaxes and the fat firms again after being handled.

Where it goes wrong The fat was too warm, or it was rubbed until the mixture looked uniform. Once the fat has melted into the flour there are no solid pieces left to steam apart in the oven, so the bake is sandy or tough instead of flaky, and nothing done later puts those layers back.

The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes

The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.

Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.

At the Table

The Pour: Sauternes
Also Right: Demi-sec Champagne
From the Taps: Belgian tripel
Zero-Proof: Jasmine tea

The sweetness rule is absolute: the pour must be sweeter than the plate, and acid keeps it from cloying.

Family notes

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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Melktert The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the South African kitchen