Dessert Atlas · Dessert
Umm Ali
- Easy
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, toasted, nutty warmth throughout, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 300g puff pastry, baked crisp and torn into shards (or croissants, or the traditional roqaq flatbread; the dish forgives and adopts)
- 1L whole milk + 200ml cream, heated with 120g sugar and 1 tbsp vanilla or a cinnamon stick
- The treasure layer: 60g each pistachios, almonds, hazelnuts + 50g raisins + 40g shredded coconut
- More cream (100ml) spooned over the top for the broiler
- A wide baking dish; a broiler; a crowd, because Umm Ali refuses to be made small
The skills inside
Tempering a custardThe broiler: heat from above
The words inside
Malbec, Zinfandel & the New World Crowd-Pleasers
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · nuts
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
- Bake the pastry to full crisp gold; tear into a buttered dish; scatter the nuts, raisins and coconut through the shards.
- Pour the hot sweetened milk over everything: the pastry drinks and slumps; press gently so all of it bathes.
- Spoon the extra cream across the top.
- Broil 5–8 min until the surface blisters bronze and the corners bubble. Rest 10 minutes; serve warm in deep spoonfuls: crisp top, custard-soft middle, treasure throughout. 8 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.
The broiler: heat from above 22 recipes
- The element is fully lit and the compartment is hot before anything goes under it. A broiler switched on with the food already in place browns nothing for several minutes and then burns it in one.
- The distance was set before the dish went in, not adjusted afterwards with a hot dish in one hand: how close it sits is the only heat control this method has.
- Somebody stayed with it for the whole time. The window between pale and bitter is tens of seconds, and nothing under a broiler is ever safe to walk away from.
- The surface has coloured evenly right across, having been turned at least once; every grill has a hot corner and none of them say where it is.
- What is underneath is no further cooked than when it went in. Top heat is there to finish a surface, and anything that came out hotter all the way through was reheated rather than glazed.
Where it goes wrong It was treated as an oven setting: food in, timer set, cook walks away. Radiant heat from above has no gentle phase, so the surface goes from pale to bitter inside a minute while the inside is untouched, and there is no stage in between to catch.
Tempering a custard 59 recipes
- The hot liquid went into the eggs a little at a time with constant whisking, and only then did everything go back to the pot.
- The heat under it stayed gentle throughout and it was never allowed to boil.
- Stirred continuously and right into the corners of the pan, where it thickens first and sets unnoticed.
- Judged by behaviour: it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon and hold a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- Taken off before it looks finished, and strained. Residual heat carries it the rest of the way, and a custard held on the heat until it looks right arrives past right.
Where it goes wrong The hot liquid went in too fast, or the pot went back over full heat to save time. The yolks set into threads before they could thicken smoothly, and a scrambled custard does not come back; straining hides a little of it and nothing hides the rest.
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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