France Meets China in a Luxurious Custard

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/magazine/french-pastry-techniques-custard.html

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When I was starting out, teaching myself to cook and bake and trying to make a career in food, I would corner every chef who would give me a minute and ask what I had to do to get good. From line cooks at neighborhood joints to chefs who wore starched whites, their advice was always the same: Learn the basics.

It’s what a master would tell a tyro in just about any field, and I took the counsel seriously. Because my first love was desserts, the basics I studied most closely were French, the bedrock of pastry. I baked my way through several books, but my bible was “Lenôtre’s Desserts and Pastries,” by Gaston Lenôtre. The book contained dozens of recipes for basic doughs and batters, creams and syrups. And then I moved on to the recipes that put these basics together to make cakes, tortes, tarts, petit fours and other desserts with many parts.

But what I really wanted to learn was how to use these tools to build my own creations. Then, as now, a fruit, a fragrance, a combination of flavors or a new texture could set me dreaming about a new sweet. I wanted to know how to make desserts from the inspirations I found around me.

The memories of those early days came back to me recently during a conversation with Daniel Skurnick, the pastry chef at the French restaurant Le Coucou in New York City. We talked about classics like gâteau St.-Honoré and Paris-Brest, canonical desserts with layers of basic batters and creams. It was only later that I discovered that he is also the pastry chef at the pan-Asian restaurant Buddakan.

I imagined him as a character in “The Incredibles,” ducking behind Le Coucou in SoHo to stash his whisks and ditch the butter, grabbing bamboo steam baskets and coconut milk before racing to Buddakan in Chelsea. The truth about how he works turns out to be not so fantastical. Like most pastry chefs trained in this country, Skurnick was educated in the French fundamentals, and he uses them at both restaurants.

“When I auditioned at Buddakan,” Skurnick told me, “I created a bunch of desserts using what I knew: the flavors that I’d become familiar with when I lived in Thailand and traveled throughout Asia, and French techniques.” That the basics paved his path to working at Buddakan convinced me, once again, that they are the Esperanto of the pastry world.

Although the cuisines seemed disparate to me, Skurnick saw similarities between them, pointing out that rice pudding with mango, a staple throughout Asia, is not such a distant relative of riz à l’impératrice, the French rice pudding with candied fruit. “Add a poached peach — its texture is like a mango’s — and they could be cousins,” Skurnick said. When I wondered aloud if there was a custard, one of my favorite desserts, that would be comfortable in both Asia and France, Skurnick said he would make me one.

What began as a pastry geeks’ game of dessert geography turned into a recipe so good that I’ve made it repeatedly since Skurnick gave it to me. The custard relies on egg yolks for structure and has just enough sugar to legitimize calling it a dessert. Its flavor, subtle but clarion, is singularly that of ginger. And it’s steamed, as many Asian but few French desserts are; that’s the key to its lithe texture.

The ginger custard is lean and spare — it’s made with just five ingredients — but it’s luxurious, which is what I think custard is meant to be. It quivers and quakes and makes a gentle “thuck” sound when you dip into it. It jiggles precariously on a spoon, and if you press a little of it against the roof of your mouth, it disappears in a moment. It’s strikingly similar to crème caramel — a classic French custard baked in a caramel-lined mold, not unlike a flan. But this has a caramel syrup that is flavored with pepper, cloves, nutmeg and ginger — spices common to both French and Chinese cooking. It’s a perfect custard, and a perfectly delicious bridge between worlds.

Recipe: Daniel Skurnick’s Franco-Chinese Steamed Ginger Custard | Spiced Caramel Syrup