Vegan Crème Brûlée
Easy and quick vegan crème brûlée made with simple pantry ingredients. No coconut, no blending and nut-free! It’s creamy, rich and delicious!
Ingredients
- 270 g plant based milk*, use something creamy like soy, oat or even barista milk
- ½-1 scraped vanilla bean, or 2 tsp vanilla bean paste or vanilla extract
- 14 g cornstarch
- 30 g white granulated sugar
- 10 g brown sugar
- 1 tsp nutritional yeast
- pinch of salt
- pinch of turmeric
- 30 g vegan butter
Instructions
- Have 2 4-oz ramekins ready. I like the ones that are shallow and wide for this recipe rather than the ones that are deeper because it gives you more surface area for the crunchy caramel top! But use whatever you have.
- Pour the milk and vanilla into a small saucepan. *Optional: if using a vanilla bean, scrape the seeds out and stir them into the milk along with the scraped bean. Bring to a simmer, turn off the heat, cover and let infuse for 30 minutes, then pull out the scraped bean and proceed with the recipe.
- In a small bowl, whisk together the cornstarch, sugars, nutritional yeast, salt and turmeric. Then whisk in about 1 tbsp of the milk until no lumps remain, and pour it all into the saucepan.
- Place over medium heat and stir constantly until it thickens. If you stop stirring for a few seconds it should bubble. Turn off the heat and whisk in the butter until completely melted and smooth. Then pour it into the ramekins.
- Cover the surface with cling film if you’re leaving them in longer than 4 hours to prevent a skin from forming, and place them in the fridge to set (at least 4 hours).
- Once the custards have set, evenly sprinkle about 1 tbsp of white sugar on each and use a blow torch to caramelize the sugar. Keep it moving to avoid scorching one spot.
- If you don’t have a blow torch, make a caramel in a saucepan.In a (very) small saucepan, combine some white sugar (a bit more than 1 tbsp per ramekin) and just enough water to cover it, place it on medium heat. Cook it until it’s a deep amber colour without stirring. Just swirl the pan occasionally if you see that it’s colouring unevenly. It’s a small quantity so it’ll happen fast, don’t walk away from it. And please be careful when working with caramel as it gets very hot.Once it’s a deep amber colour, take it off the heat immediately and pour about 1 tbsp worth of caramel over the custard, swirl immediately to coat the whole surface, and set aside to cool and harden.*To clean the saucepan, simply fill it with water and bring it to a boil to dissolve any bits of caramel left.
Notes
- I strongly suggest making recipes by weight, if you make them by cups I can’t guarantee that you’ll get the same results.
- *You can replace the milk with vegan heavy cream (30% fat at least) like Silk or Becel and leave out the vegan butter. That way the richness comes from the cream and will give you a rich and luscious crème brûlée.