Puerto Rican · Dessert
Tembleque
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 800 ml unsweetened full fat coconut milk
- 80 g cornflour (cornstarch)
- 120 g caster sugar
- 1/2 tsp fine salt
- 1 cinnamon stick
- ground cinnamon, to finish
The skills inside
The wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
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
- Whisk the cornflour and salt into 200 ml of the cold coconut milk until no grain is left on the bottom of the bowl.
- Heat the remaining coconut milk with the sugar and the cinnamon stick until it steams, then fish the stick out.
- Pour in the slurry and stir without stopping, right into the corners of the pan, until it thickens, then keep going until slow bubbles burst through the surface and a furrow holds behind the spoon for a full minute.
- Pour into a wetted mould, press cling film onto the surface and chill 4 hours, until it wobbles as one piece. 240 min
- Turn out and dust heavily with ground cinnamon.
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 wobble & the skewer: testing a bake 135 recipes
- Tested at the true centre and the thickest point, not at the convenient edge: the edge is done long before the answer is.
- The skewer comes out as the recipe describes, clean and dry or carrying the stated moist crumb, and it does the same on a second test in a different spot.
- The wobble is read in motion: nudged, the centre moves as one set mass with a faint tremble, rather than a liquid ripple travelling across the surface.
- The other signs agree with the test: risen and just shrinking from the sides, the top set and dry to a light touch with no wet gloss on it.
- Pressed lightly at the middle it springs back and leaves no lasting dent.
Where it goes wrong It was judged on the clock and on how the edges looked, so a centre still liquid went to the rack and sank as it cooled, a dense wet seam under a perfectly browned top.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Demi-sec Champagne
- Also Right
- Off-dry Chenin (Vouvray)
- From the Taps
- Fruited sour
- Zero-Proof
- Coconut water with lime
Tropical sweetness wants bubbles or Chenin’s honeyed acid: richness met with lift, not more weight.
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