Crème Anglaise is an easy, versatile and very luxurious dessert sauce that turns anything it touches into something special. Drizzle it on top of bread puddings and fruit crisps, pound cake, chocolate cake, brownies or blondies. Pour it over a bowl of perfect fresh fruit for the simplest, most elegant dessert of all.
Crème Anglaise is a custard sauce, made with milk, cream and sugar thickened with egg yolks in the same process you’d use to make the base for vanilla ice cream, just without the churning and freezing. I used free-range eggs with bright orange yolks for the batch I made for this post, and those eggs gave this custard its beautiful deep golden color; if you use eggs with pale yellow yolks your sauce will be more of a creamy off-white color, and still delicious.
Vanilla is the only flavoring in Crème Anglaise, so this is the place for the real thing: use a plump, moist vanilla bean so you can see the flecks of vanilla in the sauce, and smell its exotic perfume.
Making this ahead and what to do with leftovers:
- Crème Anglaise needs to cool and then chill for several hours before serving, so plan ahead to make it early in the day or the day before.
- It will keep for at least a week in the fridge, so make it ahead or use leftovers within that timeframe. It also freezes well, for up to a month. Thaw it overnight in the fridge – not at room temperature.
Crème Anglaise
Ingredients
- 1 cup whole milk
- 1 cup heavy cream
- ½ a large, moist vanilla bean
- 6 large egg yolks
- ½ cup granulated sugar
Directions
- Step 1 Put the milk and heavy cream in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Slit the vanilla bean open and scrape out the seeds. Add the seeds and the pod to the milk mixture. Heat the mixture until it’s scalded – just below the boiling point, the surface of the milk will develop a wrinkled skin.
- Step 2 Meanwhile, whisk the egg yolks and sugar together in a medium bowl. When the milk mixture is scalded, remove and discard the vanilla pod. Use a ladle to add about ½ cup of the hot milk to the eggs, whisking constantly. Add another ladle full of the milk, whisking. Then pour the egg mixture into the remaining milk mixture in the saucepan, whisking constantly. Use a rubber spatula to scrape any clinging bits of egg yolk or sugar in the bowl into the saucepan.
- Step 3 Cook the mixture over medium heat, whisking constantly, until it begins to thicken. Switch to a wooden spoon and continue cooking, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens enough to coat the back of the spoon. Run your finger through the custard clinging to the back of the spoon, and if it leaves a path that doesn’t close back in, it’s done.
- Step 4 Pour the sauce into a clean, medium bowl, and cool to room temperature. (To speed cooling, place the bowl in a larger bowl filled with ice water, being careful not to let any water splash into the sauce.) Once the sauce is cool, chill it until very cold, several hours or overnight, before using.
