Playing with fire

T embarked on a new cooking adventure today. He asked his co-workers what he should try next, and they had three suggestions: bread pudding (bleh), poppy seed poundcake (which works for me, as long as it's lemon and not almond), and creme brulee. It didn't take him long to select the last option. I immediately accused him of wanting an excuse to play with torches and light things on fire, and he didn't deny it. Not even a little.

So he made the custards before dinner, and then after dinner, while they were cooling, he decided to practice melting sugar. He pulled out his blowtorch from architecture school (something to do with smoothing the edges on plexiglass for models), which is bigger than your average kitchen torch and much more industrial looking, and lit it using a flint that looks exactly like what we used to light the bunsen burners in my high school chem lab. Then he shook some sugar onto small pieces of aluminum foil and got to melting. Although it was hard to get a even coating of sugar on the foil, he still managed to melt parts of it. Some sections were still to granulated, but others melted into the nice glassy surface you want on creme brulee, and the results were definitely tasty. In a couple of hours, we'll pull one of the pots of sugary, eggy goodness out of the fridge and see if we can get it to work on the real thing.