Colombian · Dessert
Postre de Natas
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with a sweet edge rounding the corners, acid holding everything up to the light, on a slow, honest burn.
Ingredients
- 2000 ml whole milk, unhomogenised if you can get it
- 250 g caster sugar
- 2 cinnamon sticks
- 1 strip lemon peel
- 80 g raisins
- 40 ml brandy
- 2 g fine salt
The skills inside
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · alcohol
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
- Soak the raisins in the brandy while you work.
- Bring the milk, sugar, cinnamon, lemon peel and salt to the barest simmer in your widest uncovered pan, then stop stirring and leave the surface completely alone.
- Each time a wrinkled skin sets, lift it off whole with a fork into a bowl. Keep at it for about 90 minutes, until the milk beneath has reduced by half and gone the colour of straw. 90 min
- Fold the skins back in with the raisins and their brandy, breaking them up roughly with the spoon, and cook 10 minutes more, until a spoon drawn through it leaves a track that fills back slowly and the pan holds about 900 ml. It is still pourable hot. 10 min
- Pour into a dish, cool, and chill 4 hours, over which it sets to a spoonable pudding. 240 min
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.
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
- 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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