Hibiscus Tea Creme Brulee for Spring

Using Spring as inspiration: the flowers blooming, and Nature celebrating with bursts of life, I’ve been chasing the best Creme Brulee recipe to celebrate Spring. Meet the Hibiscus Tea Creme Brulee

I’m making this Creme Brulee recipe for Fairchild Botanical Garden’s Spring Garden Festival, this April 12 and 13, where approximately 120 people will try this dessert for the first time!

In the development of this recipe, I’ve gone through about 4 versions of Creme Brulee this week. Essentially, every night it’s been Creme Brulee night at home. But in those iterations, we landed on something truly amazing!

Designing the flavor

When we started working on the Hibiscus Tea Creme Brulee, we tried an all hibiscus creme brulee first. It was too tart, tasting more like sweet Greek yogurt than anything resembling a dessert anyone would want to eat. To make matters worse, it did not taste like hibiscus should, the fat from the cream masked many of the delicate floral notes that need to be present.

To return those delicate notes to the dessert, we experimented by adding White Tea to the mix. After imparting flavor through a cold infusion, the cream absorbed enough of the flavors to carry them through the cooking process.

Finally, by cooking it Sous Vide in a sealed environment, it ensured that the delicate flavor compounds (which often escape with heat) stayed within the dessert.

When you taste it, the smooth unctuous cream hits you first. Then the floral notes of the White Tea and finally, to counteract the creaminess, a clean finish from the Hibiscus.

How to cook with Hibiscus

You can find dried Hibiscus in most grocery stores. As an ingredient, it is very powerful and a little bit goes a long way. We used the dried leaves in a Vitamix, (though you can use a Spice Grinder as well) to make the powder.

You can use this powder in infusing creams, tea, dessert sauces, and syrups for cocktails. (Hibiscus Mojito anyone?). Just add straight to the liquid, simmer, and strain for small particles that you don’t want in the final product.

How to flavor creme brulee

Flavoring creme brulee is tricky depending on what you’re flavoring it with and at what stage of the process you should flavor it. These are the two things to keep in mind.

For most flavoring ingredients, you want to flavor the cream. The fat molecules in the cream will trap aromatic compounds and carry that flavor through the cooking process. Adding any flavor to a liquid is called infusion.

A helpful tip for any infusion you may do in the future: start with 1 or 2% flavoring ingredient to liquid. For the Hibiscus Tea Creme Brulee, we added 1% (3g) Hibiscus Powder and 1% (3g) White Tea Powder to 300g of Heavy Cream.

Infusion: Hot vs. Cold

Hot Infusion

Hot infusion refers to a liquid that’s been heated to boiling temperature and added a flavoring compound to impart flavor. This technique works best with robust flavors life Coffee, Earl Gray Tea, Cinnamon, and other Spices, that naturally release their flavor in a hot environment like scalded cream.

It’s a fast process that requires less than 10 minutes, but with reliable results. This is how coffee and tea impart their flavors into water btw.

Cold Infusion

Cold Infusion takes longer to work, between 12 and 24 hours depending on the liquid and your flavoring agent. The benefit is that it is far gentler or delicate compounds and allows you to carry that flavor to the dessert.

We added Hibiscus powder and White Tea bags to heavy cream and let them infuse overnight. When tasting it, the tea flavor was much stronger than with the hot infusion.

NOTE: Although White Tea is brewed with hot water, and you can taste all the flavors there, the thickness of cream does not allow for that same transference of delicate flavor compounds.

How to make Creme Brulee in the oven

To make the traditional version of Creme Brulee, you will need to scald the cream, so add an extra tea bag to the recipe to try to infuse as much tea flavor as possible into the cream.

With the scalded and infused cream, combine with egg yolks and cream and whisk together.

NOTE: If you add hot cream to egg yolks all at once, you’re going to make scrambled eggs. The process by which to safely do this is called tempering. Add the hot cream slowly and whisk to combine. Do it in batches if need be with a ladle. The egg yolks have to gently come up to temperature to avoid lumps.

If there are any lumps, strain them before putting the mixture in a ramekin.

With your oven at 300, put the ramekins in a baking dish and add water. Make sure the water does not fall into your cream. Cover 1/3 of the ramekins in water. This allows for steam to surround the cream and cook it gently, without this, the direct heat from the oven will turn the tops of your creme brulee into sweet frittatas.

No bueno.

Once an hour in the oven has gone by, take them out and let them sit until safe to touch. Cover them in plastic wrap and set them in the fridge until needed.

Pro tip: Poke a hole in the plastic wrap for steam to escape. Otherwise, you can find water collected on the tops of your creme brulees. The reason for the plastic wrap is to prevent the creme brulees to pick up any other flavors in the fridge. (like onions if you have them, speaking from experience here)

How to Make Sous Vide Creme Brulee

The benefit of making Creme Brulee in the Sous vide is that it gives you a fantastic control over the temperature. Cooking it in a water bath allows for a temperature stability that is not possible in conventional ovens.

You also get to skip the step about scalding the cream. With Sous vide, the heat is gentle enough to cook the egg and cream without worrying about making scrambled eggs and straining the mixture.

Since you don’t have to scald the cream, you can transfer the cold infused cream straight into the egg and sugar mixture. Keeping the delicate flavors away from high temperatures. And since cooking the cream sous vide means the mixture is sealed, none of the delicate compounds escape due to heat- preserving the flavor that much more.

To make the Hibiscus Tea Creme Brulee, combine sugar, eggs, salt, and the infused cream together. Whisk and pour into a canning jar, pour slowly to avoid bubbles.

Close the lids and set the Sous Vide temp. to 176. Submerge for 1 hr. After the hour, remove them from the water bath, keep at room temperature until ok to touch, and leave in the fridge until ready to use.

When ready, coat the top with a thin layer of white sugar and torch until caramelized.

How long does Creme Brulee keep in the fridge

You can keep creme brulee up to 5 days in the fridge. It does not freeze well so indulge now.

Variations you can try

You can use the same rules for infusing flavor to cream. Remember that 2% of the weight of the cream should be the flavoring agent.

• Lavender Creme Brulee
• Coffee Creme Brulee
• Jasmine Creme Brulee
• Matcha Creme Brulee

For now I’m signing off this already long treatise on my new favorite dessert! Hope it becomes yours too 🙂

-Maury

Love this dessert? Here’s more!

How to use a Sous Vide- Sous Vide 101

White Chocolate Panna Cotta

Key Lime Bread Pudding

Tools we used

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