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| creme brulee from Le Cirque on Niew Amsterdam |
On the Nieuw Amsterdam cruise, I had creme brulee for dessert a couple times. One time was during a Le Cirque theme dinner. At this special restaurant night, one of the dining rooms got special decorations, a customized menu, and special plating from New York City's famed Le Cirque. I heard the story that Le Cirque invented creme brulee. Le Cirque likes to support this concept with their fancy creme brulee dish that contains their recipe. Sort of a cute idea.
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| creme brulee recipe in the dish |
After further research though, my conclusion is Le Cirque didn't invent creme brulee, but they may have popularized it.
http://www.saveur.com/article/Kitchen/Creme-Brulee-Origins
wikipedia on creme brulee
After arriving in Spain from the cruise, the natural thing for me to do was to search out some crema catalana. At one of the first restaurants we tried in Barcelona, Sta Maria del Mar restaurant, they had crema catalana and flan. At the time and in retrospect, that seemed like a superflous way to design a dessert menu, but it was a welcome design for my research purposes. It made it clear to me at least in one chef's eyes how two of the three custard desserts differed. The crema catalana was runnier and had a slight brulee crust on top whereas the flan was significantly stiffer and without a crust.
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| crema catalana from Sta Maria Del Mar Bar - Restaurant in Barcelona |
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| flan from Sta Maria Del Mar Bar - Restaurant in Barcelona |
My conclusion: creme brulee, crema catalana, and flan are all close enough to each other that they would almost always be interchangeable to me. Any egg custard dessert is probably going to be delicious!
Sta Maria Del Mar Bar was fantastic. That's the only restaurant we visited twice in Barcelona. It looked directly out onto the square facing the Santa Maria Cathedral, so we could watch all the tourists snapping pictures and the locals enjoying their afternoon drinks on the terrace. Also their black rice was fantastic.
ReplyDeleteYour picture makes crema catalana look delicious, but I don't think I would like it if it's runnier than flan. I personally dislike creme brulee but love flan because I don't care for the pure sugar crust and like a stiffer, eggy-er custard.
ReplyDeleteAnd why didn't you like your dish? I can't see the whole recipe!
Meant to type: why didn't you LICK your dish...?
DeleteHaha, this was a nicer restaurant (white tablecloths, sommelier) and I don't think I could have licked the dish without getting some on my nose :-)
DeleteI did try to scrape off the bottom with my spoon for better readability -- with limited success.
There was so much good food and dessert on the cruise that I didn't need the extra creme brulee that bad!
ReplyDeleteFirst of all the blog really should have been called "Timmy Eats World" but I digress.
ReplyDeleteAny other must-try restaurants in Madrid or Barcelona? We're going there in less than two weeks and we find ourselves kind of un-researched as far as food + drink.
Anyway, I'm jealous of your food adventures. You and Laura take care!
I will do several posts in the next day on Madrid and Barcelona. We went to all places that we thought were good, but there were several places that stood out!
ReplyDelete