Crème Bru-ology

In search of the perfect crème brûlée
By Jody Jaffe


Trying to find a flaw in a crème brûlée is like picking through the Miss Universe contestants for a spot of cellulite. You might find a dimple or two if you look close enough. But we're talking close. Close enough to get arrested.

Crème brûlée is a dessert that's as rich in rhapsodic descriptions as it is in calories. Consider these culled from cookbooks and restaurant reviews: "Succulent. " "Ethereal." "Silken." "Magnificent." "Elusive and magical." "Luxurious, seductive—some would say gastronomically orgasmic."

There's a reason why food writers and critics go adjective crazy over crème brûlée. "Cream, vanilla, sugar and eggs," says Susan Watterson, a chef/instructor at L'Academie de Cuisine, the professional cooking school in Gaithersburg, and a former chef at the recently closed Café Bethesda. "What's not to like?"

Exactly. Which made my mission—finding the best crème brûlée in the Bethesda area—daunting, in a delicious, artery-clogging kind of way.

According to a survey by Restaurants & Institutions magazine, 35 percent of fine dining restaurants offer crème brûlée. And on a scale from one to four, restaurant owners gave it a 3.4 on the sell-well category.

The only thing that beats it, in the treat category of desserts, is tiramisu. "The key is that tiramisu has chocolate in it," says editor Patricia Dailey. "People can't get enough of that."

But tiramisu doesn't have its own cookbook, at least not one listed on Amazon.com.

Crème brûlée has a book with a respectable rank (16,590 the day I checked), a Web site (www.cremebrulee.com) and a self-proclaimed "undisputed Queen of Crème Brûlée." She's Debbie Puente, author of Elegantly Easy Crème Brûlée, who says her book has sold more than 500,000 copies in seven years.

Because my only qualification to find the best brûlée was an oversized sweet tooth, I needed a professional palate to help me evaluate things. I called L'Academie de Cuisine's office in Bethesda, where it offers recreational cooking classes. Lydia Schlosser, the school's registrar and former pastry chef at Café Bethesda, not only agreed to go crème brûlée tasting with me, but also offered to teach me how to make it.

For most of our 12 tastings, she brought along her buddy, Susan Watterson, her first cooking teacher. The class was "Christmas Cookies" in 1996. Now they're like Click and Clack on NPR's "Car Talk." But instead of talking spark plugs, they toss food stories back and forth. Like the one about the tennis team that came into Café Bethesda and ordered one crème brûlée for eight people.

"Then they asked for separate checks!" Watterson says.

"Tell her about the time you left the crème brûlées in the oven," Schlosser says.

Schlosser, 49, is a petite woman with chin-length dark hair, cut to look casual, but styled. The mother of three (two in college, one a junior at Walter Johnson High School), she's got a master's degree from Cornell University in soil sciences. But after 10 years in the dirt business for the USDA, she started taking cooking classes. Now a pastry chef by profession—and, as it turns out, by nature—she's the more measured of the two, quieter, more careful with her words, her clothes.

Watterson, 39, does pastry, but she considers herself a savory chef. "Pastry chefs are anal, they don't have a lot of fun. They measure everything; they smell everything. They don't deal with fire and big knives. They're prissy."

Whereas savory chefs, she says, "are crude and funny. We have fun." She'll finish off her point with a story that involves using cut-off pheasant's feet ("if you pull their tendons, they move") as back scratchers.

But for now, we're sitting in the whispery-soft dining room of Jean-Michel, the French restaurant in the Wildwood Shopping Center, waiting for our crème brûlées.

When Schlosser mentions the story about the forgotten brûlées, Watterson starts laughing. She's got a big laugh and it bounces around the quiet room. Her face crunches until you can hardly see her pale blue-green eyes. She's come straight from cooking class (pulled pork), so she's still in her checks—restaurant-talk for the black and white checked pants chefs wear—and black clogs. Over her white chef's shirt, she's wearing a boxy fleece jacket that looks like a very old friend. Her auburn hair is pulled back into a pony-tail/bun, or at least as much of it as she can convince to stay there. But more about setting the unruly front wisps on fire with a crème brûlée torch later.

"It was my first year at the restaurant," she says. Her friend was getting married in Germany. Before she left, Watterson wanted to make sure Café Bethesda had enough crème brûlées for the weekend. "I was racing around trying to get everything done. I did a full batch of brûlées. I used up every dish we had—24."

She rushed to the airport, caught her flight, and settled in for the long ride. "I was literally over the ocean," she says, when she remembered where she left the crème brûlées—in the oven. Funnier still, she says, no one mentioned anything about the burnt brûlées when she got back.

The waitress at Jean-Michel brings us three crème brûlées. The presentation matches the restaurant—elegant and simple. No hysterical garnishes, no doilies, no dabs of pureed lichee paste or infused green tea extract. This crème brûlée is a purist's delight. The round, fluted brûlée dish sits on a plain white plate. The amber crackle crust leaves only a few coy glimpses of the butter-yellow custard beneath. A single mint leaf rests on the burnt sugar shell.

Schlosser and Watterson pick up the brûlée dishes and I get my first lesson in crème bru-ology.

"The bottom should be cold," Schlosser says.

"It's the contrast of the warm, crunchy crust and the cold cream that's part of the attraction to brûlée," Watterson adds.

They rub their fingers on the bottom of the dishes and I do the same. It's cold, a good sign. Making crème brûlée is time-consuming. It has to cook slowly, then be chilled thoroughly before the sugar top is torched. If it's not cold enough, the sugar will turn to mush, not crackle.

Still, some people think crème brûlée should be warm.

"It used to drive the waiters crazy," Watterson says, "when people would send it back because it was cold."

Next lesson: the burnt sugar crust. Schlosser and Watterson pick up their spoons and tap the top. A good crème brûlée, which is French for "burnt cream," should clink when tapped. Torching the sugar top into a crackly crust is the tricky part of the operation. I know, because I tried to do it and turned mine the color of freshly laid asphalt. "If you sprinkle too little sugar, you burn the custard," Watterson says, "and if you put too much sugar on, it doesn't melt fast enough and you have a sludgy mess on top."

Or if you lean down close to see what you're doing, you can torch your hair along with the sugar. That's what happened to Watterson when she was first starting out in the business. "I mean, it didn't go up in flames. It just kind of sizzled." And last July, a chef at a popular restaurant in Oxford, England, was seriously injured while making crème brûlées when the propane gas tank of his torch exploded.

Our crème brûlées clink perfectly. Both chefs pronounce the crust just right; thick enough to cover, but not so thick that you need a pickax to cut through it. Plus, there's no black line around the inside edge of the dish. That happens when the crème isn't filled to the rim and the sugar sticks to the inside edge of the dish, turning black when torched.

Now for the best part of the test: the taste. Schlosser and Watterson cut through the crust into the pillow of yellow underneath. They move it around with their spoons examining consistency—it should be creamy, not custardy, hence the name crème brûlée. If it sets up like a custard, the chef has used egg whites. A definite no-no in Watterson's and Schlosser's opinions.

"Ask Susan why that happens," Schlosser says. "She's got a degree in library science, she knows everything."

"Protein," Watterson pronounces. "Egg whites are almost all protein. You use it to firm anything up. It's like culinary cement."

They jiggle their spoons again, looking for other flaws. If the crème's broken—meaning it's clumpy—it's been cooked too fast. Watterson offers a lengthy explanation about protein threads and heat. The bottom line is, you've scrambled the eggs with too much heat. To be velvety smooth, the custard has to cook at a low temperature, in a water bath, slowly and quietly. Schlosser even covers the fan in the back of her oven so there's no air movement.

Finally, we slip a spoonful in our mouths. Ahhhh. I'm having an adjective rush. Luxurious. Ethereal. Silky. Magical. And yes, even adverbs start swirling around my brain: gastronomically orgasmic.

This is one fine crème brûlée.

The smoothness reassures me, the taste of flame and vanilla bean speaks of the jungle. It doesn't shout its flavor like my longtime love, chocolate; it whispers its sweet and creamy message.

But what do I know? I don't have a degree in taste. I look to Watterson, who has left the business end of the spoon pressed to her lips. Her eyes are closed. I can see her jaw moving, she's running her tongue over what's left of the crème in her mouth. She opens her eyes and smiles. "I'd say if you encounter another one as good as this, we'll be in good shape.

Schlosser agrees. They come up with a fork scale—one to five. This is a five-forker. While I'm shoveling in the rest of the crème and its crackly brûlée, Schlosser and Watterson are still playing with their food. Schlosser rubs the tip of the spoon against the bottom of the dish. "See all that 'dirt'?" she says, pointing to the black specks. "That's the vanilla bean. If it's not dirty, it's not a real crème brûlée."

"It's the quality of the ingredients," Watterson says. "Because if you try to cheap it out, you're not going to have a good crème brûlée."

Vanilla is the first place to cut corners. It's pricey stuff. Watterson last bought vanilla beans in February; 64 of them (8 ounces) for $124. That's $1.93 per bean. Both Schlosser and Watterson say using beans, not extract, is the way to go. Schlosser's crème brûlée recipe—the one she used at Café Bethesda—calls for two beans for eight servings or a quarter bean per serving. That 48 cents may not seem like a lot, but it's enough to make some restaurant owners go easy on the vanilla.

And it makes a big difference. After eating 12 of them in less than a week, I could tell when there wasn't enough. ("It's a little light in the loafers," Watterson says later of an almost speck-less crème brûlée at another restaurant.)

As Schlosser and Watterson are talking about Jean-Michel's crème brûlée, and I'm eating it, the chef, Olivier Destugues, comes to our table.

"What kind of sugar do you use?" I ask him. I've been educated enough to know that every chef has his or her favorite kind of sugar to use both in the crème and brûlée. He uses brown sugar in the crème. "A better taste," he says.

"What about the cream? Do you cut it with anything?" I continue.

"I use milk and cream. All cream would be too heavy," he says.

"How much of each?" I say.

He looks at me like I've just asked his bank pin number. Then his eyes dart to Watterson and Schlosser for help. They shake their heads, "No," to me.

Oops, my bad. Apparently asking a chef for measurements is a culinary blunder.

We compliment him on his delightful brûlée and all is forgiven. I notice my brûlée dish is empty, practically licked clean. Schlosser's and Watterson's are more than half-full. I've missed the concept. This is a crème brûlée tasting.

We still had another 11 brûlées to taste, begging the original question: Is it possible to spot a flaw in a sea of beauty queens?

Yes, but we had to look really hard. Anytime you mix cream, eggs, vanilla and sugar, it's going to taste good. Being elevated to sublime is another matter.

When forced to deconstruct the cremes, we found some that were a touch bland, others too sweet, some runny. Only one was an utter failure—an espresso brûlée that two of my coffee-lover tasters pronounced inedible.

In the end, it was Jean-Michel (10223 Old Georgetown Road, Bethesda) that won our silver-torch award for the best crème brûlée. It scored highest in the three categories that Schlosser and Watterson judged them by: crust, texture and flavor.

However, there were others that came close. They are:

Café Europa, 7820 Norfolk Ave., Bethesda. This was a close second to Jean-Michel. According to Watterson, this crème brûlée had a slight and pleasant tang. It was on the lighter side. It seems crème brûlées are a little like matzo balls. You've got your floaters—the looser ones. And the sinkers—the firmer ones. Café Europa's was a floater, whereas Jean-Michel's was a bit of a sinker.

Café Europa wins the award for best place to eat a crème brûlée, assuming you opt for the lounge. It's got a fireplace, huge leather chairs as soft as the crème brûlée and a jazz singer—Nicki Gonzalez—who performs every Friday night. And there's no cover charge.

Brasserie Monte Carlo, 7929 Norfolk Ave., Bethesda. This unorthodox crumbly-crust version comes served in a deep-dish ramekin as opposed to the traditionally shallow 1 1/8- to 1 1/4-inch brûlée dish. It's got a refreshing taste of Grand Marnier and it's not too sweet, a common flaw of several we'd tried. "We've had some real tooth-achers," Watterson says.

"This one's got a nice flavor," she continues. "I'm thinking it's hip, not really a crème brûlée, but more of a Grand Marnier custard. I'd be more likely to order this than the standard one."

Le Vieux Logis, 7925 Old Georgetown Road, Bethesda. If you want a party on the plate and you like your brûlée thick, this is the place to go. The crème brûlée is served on a colorful dish, adorned with a Matisse—like design of blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, dots of passion fruit—mango puree and large S-shaped cookies.

"It looks festive," Schlosser says. "I'd come here if I was celebrating something." As for my favorite brûlée, you can't buy it. It's the one Schlosser used to make for Café Bethesda, the one she taught me how to make at L'Academie de Cuisine. It's the most assertive of all the crème brûlées we tasted. Straight cream, no cuts with milk, and lots of vanilla.

It factors into Watterson's final story.

"The restaurant was really busy and this old woman starts to choke," Watterson says. "It was really scary, we had to call the paramedics. Everyone in the dining room was upset."

The paramedics dislodged the food and they wanted to take the woman to the hospital for observation. She wouldn't go with them.

"She wanted to stay for the crème brûlée," Watterson says.

Now I know why.

Jody Jaffe, author of the Nattie Gold mystery series, teaches journalism at Georgetown University.