Pasulj and pumpkin flan

coryhansen78

Made a house-favorite cold weather soup and tested out a dessert formulation that I am working on for thanksgiving.

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wolfiegirl

Pumpkin flan recipe.....dibs!!

coryhansen78

Pumpkin Flan V1.0

350 g "Dewatered"* canned pumpkin

375 g Whole Milk

150 g Heavy Cream

185 g Egg Yolk (I was shooting for 200 g but ran out!)

200 g Egg Whites

200 g Sugar

100 g Nonfat Dry Milk Powder

2.5 g Salt

4 g Mexican Vanilla Extract

1 g Pumpkin Flavor (LorAnn Oils Brand)

0. *(I "dewatered" the pumpkin by spreading it out on several layers of paper towels on a half-sheet pan and placing several more layers on top and letting it soak through. The weight above is after this procedure. The canned pumpkin lost about 33% of its weight in moisture(!) by doing this... Pretty sure I stole this technique from a Cook's Illustrated recipe several years back.)

1. Make a dark caramel (I eyeballed the sugar for this, it's not included in the sugar weight above) and pour into several ramekins. The recipe above will make at least 6 large (8 oz ramekin) individual servings...

2. Combine everything in a blender (I would recommend a stick blender - I used a regular blender and had difficulties getting all of the entrained air out afterwards as you can see from the bubbles in the pic above).

3. Pass through a strainer into a wide, deep pan that will fit in a chamber vacuum. Vacuum to remove all the air. Probably do this in batches. May not have to do this with a stick blender?

4. Pour into ramekins, wrap the s*%& out of them in plastic wrap, with a rubber band for good measure and sous vide in a 180ºF bath until they reach 176ºF. This took at least a few hours for the large ramekins - should've timed it...

5. Refrigerate overnight and serve.

Turned out pretty well if I do say so myself. My wife would've liked the texture a little lighter (might increase egg white % a little more next time) and a little more "pumpkin spice". I didn't add any, but the pumpkin flavor and the vanilla extract had some spice to it, I thought...

wolfiegirl

Thank you for taking the time! I think I've got my Thanksgiving dessert now!

Your opinion on something....the pumpkin I have is the stuff I baked off and pureed so it's not canned. Do you suppose I should still 'dewater' it and is that 350 grams before or after the removal of the water? I think I would defiantly add those rich pumpkin spices as well.....cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and allspice would add a whole lot of flavor!

Again, please and thank you!!

coryhansen78

No prob. Kudos to you for using a real pumpkin rather than taking the lazy way out and opening a can like I did!

(TL:DR – I don’t think you need to remove any excess moisture from the puree. )

Here's the longer version:

The weight I indicated above is after I removed the excess moisture. I started with a 430 grams from one can of pumpkin and ended up with 290 g after the dewatering (I scaled down slightly for fewer servings).

In hindsight, the dewatering is an extra step that doesn’t really do much. The only reason I did it initially is that it allowed me to use more pumpkin in the recipe by keeping the overall moisture level in check (I was shooting for 37% solids in the final recipe). From my review, canned pumpkin is about 90% moisture while the fresh stuff is about 95% moisture (although that varies among different sources).

However, after looking at several flan recipes (including the CS one) and crunching some numbers, I found the moisture content of the custard really isn’t that important of a parameter (I saw a range of anywhere from 25% to 47%) in a flan (vs. a freezing like an ice cream). Even assuming you didn’t lose any moisture in the baking process (which is doubtful), using an equal weight of “wet” pumpkin puree to what I have indicated in the recipe would only drop the overall solids down to 35%, still well within the above range.

So, much ado about nothing. It may effect the overall pumpkin flavor, but I suspect it would be subtle, especially with adding some of the traditional spices to the recipe.