Mastering making custard from scratch

When we were kids, we loved to say, “my heart beats lumpy custard for you,” when a sister or another nemesis dared to share some details, we deemed irrelevant. We thought we were at the peak of our quick comebacks and retorts back then.

Little did we know that we would one day live to dread the thought of our custard being, just that, lumpy. Custard was made from scratch with custard powder, milk and sugar in a sauce pan, that our mothers would stir so ardently, trying not to burn the milk and land up with lumpy custard.

My mother made me custard often. It was a special little treat and the one way I could bear having milk. I’m not a dairy fan, I don’t digest it well. It’s funny to think that I didn’t like eggs either when I was younger, though custard is a winning combination of both.

Custard is part of most of our lives. Later I encountered créme anglaise, really just a thinner version of custard with a French snub to the English. It’s good, but is it Moir’s stirred into milk good?

Much like my trying to perfect my mother’s scone recipe which was told and never written, my darling older sister tried to get the Moir’s mix right like our mother did. Sometimes, there would be too much powder and it would be orange, thick gloop. On other occasions, it would come right, but she was always fiddling with it. Adding sugar after it was done, using a whisk to get the lumps out. Her custard came with a lot of fussing and frustrated cursing. My mother seemed to get it right on the first try.

Custard is part of the fabric of our family. My dad loves jelly and custard, now elevated to individual portions in glass bowls for fancy presentation at home.

My mother used to make me custard as my dessert when I was a kid and there is a comfort to it that I can’t express into words. I like my custard plain though. Much like my childhood preferences I still mostly prefer my food clean and not mixed.

Not too thick, not too runny, not too sweet nor too lumpy. These are a few of my favourite things when it comes to custard. Upon discovering that there is more to vanilla than vanilla essence and that extract is where vanilla is angled and from freshly scraped pods, my culinary education has deepened. It was the days of the newly launched BBC Food channel and Jamie Oliver was the young chef du jour. And he had that knife and vanilla pod at eye level as he scraped a vanilla pod to drop it into milk for some wonder he was creating.

In the age of making things from scratch that I’m in, I figured if I can make mayonnaise, I can most likely make custard.

I approached this with much trepidation, separating yolks does this to me. I turned to a Jamie Oliver recipe that I adjusted with less sugar and just one more egg yolk and the heat. This is really worth making at home from scratch, though with the price of eggs at the moment, I’d understand your hesitance.

Ingredients: Vanilla custard

1. 1 x Vanilla pod scraped (I have such things in my house, but 1 tsp of vanilla extract could work)
2. 550ml of organic full cream milk
3. 5 large free range egg yolks (I used the whites for an omelette the next day)
4. 5 tablespoons of castor sugar
5. 5 tablespoons of cornstarch

Method:

• Cut the pod in half and scrape the vanilla seeds out of the pod and drop both the seeds and pod into the milk in a saucepan on medium heat
• Bring the milk to when it just starts to bubble and boil
• Set aside to cool slightly
• Meanwhile whisk together the egg yolks, castor and cornstarch until well combined
• Slowly ladle in the milk into this mixture and whisk each ladle full until well combined
• Do this until all the milk is done
• Then return to a medium to just high enough heat (say 7.5/8 depending on your stove settings)
• Whisk this mixture until it starts to thicken and make you feel nostalgic for Sunday lunches at home.

Grab a spoon or two to taste and then spoon this custard into a bowl to enjoy or find your nearest malva and serve generously with custard. Or better yet layer it into a polarising SA trifle. You may change your thoughts on store bought after this. It’s worth the effort and you can give yourself kudos.