The last couple weeks have been filled with working out gluten-free bread recipes. I started with a recipe that I’d printed out a few years ago and had never tried. The bread turned out okay … but not great. I want GREAT! Like can’t believe it’s gluten-free GREAT!
I did like a few features about how it was prepared so I went with that and changed up a bunch of the ingredients and ratios. Took me a while to get it perfect but it also left me with loads of egg yolks I needed to use up since it uses only egg whites.
If you’re ever left with a bunch of egg yolks, custards and puddings are a great way to use them!
Do you know the difference? It’s simple … custards thicken with egg yolks and puddings thicken with starch. Occasionally, a pudding will have eggs, but not usually. For instance, those nasty boxed puddings are thickened with GMO cornstarch. This espresso custard is thickened by cooking the egg yolks from my pastured chickens with some sugar and cream.
You would think using my pastured chicken eggs would provide the perfect medium to begin the custard journey but alas, I had a big problem to solve. See, in art school color theory class, we learned that orange, green and brown are all related. Mix orange and green and you get brown. Apparently, when you combine brown and orange, you can get green too … like green custard.
Being that it’s Spring and the grass is growing quickly, my chickens’ egg yolks are a rich, deep orange – not the pale, yellow yolks that is common for commercial eggs. So … when I combined my dark orange egg yoks with the light brown from the espresso powder I got GREEN. A horrid, pukey green.
If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know I don’t use artificial colors or flavors in any of my recipes. I like to keep it real. That meant I couldn’t add brown food coloring to fix the disgusting green product.
Think, think, think …
I did the next best thing and added a little black cocoa. It didn’t take much to deepen the custard color to a rich brown. One teaspoon added just enough color without adding chocolate flavor. If you don’t have black cocoa, it’s not necessary, just know your custard, if you use pastured egg yolks, may be a little off in color.
If you’ve never made a traditional custard before, don’t let it intimidate you. As long as you add the hot mixture to the eggs very slowly, stirring constantly, it’ll be fine! Make sure to use a long-handled whisk so you don’t accidentally splash the hot mixture onto your hands as you’re stirring.
[tasty-recipe id=”5163″]