Caramel Custard Recipe: Flan in a Pressure Cooker

At ten past eight on the Thursday before Easter I was handed a string bag and a list written on the back of an electricity bill. Eggs, it said first. Underneath, in smaller letters, someone had added lemons, cinnamon, bread for torrijas, and then, crossed out and written again, more eggs.

I had arrived two days earlier to stay with a friend's family for Semana Santa, Holy Week, in a house with tiled floors and walls so thick the afternoons stayed cool inside them. Her grandmother, whom everybody called Yaya, had announced over dinner that the flan for Easter Sunday would be made on Saturday, and that I would be in the kitchen when it happened. Nobody asked whether I could cook. I said I made caramel custard in a pressure cooker back home, and the table went quiet for a second and then laughed, kindly. Flan in an olla exprés was apparently the most ordinary thing in the world, and I was told I would be corrected.

El mercado (the market)

The market was already loud when we got there. Shutters were still rattling up at the far end and the fishmonger was hosing down his slab, so the front aisle smelled of cold water and ice with something salty underneath. My friend's mother walked at a speed that made the string bag swing like a pendulum. I followed with the list, saying sorry to people.

The egg stall belonged to a woman in a quilted waistcoat who sold from open trays, brown and cream and one pale greenish dozen she was plainly proud of. She asked how many were eating. Eight, said my friend's mother. Then you want twelve, said the woman, because the flan only takes four and the rest are for the torrijas, and she counted them into a paper cone and twisted the top shut with one hand.

Lemons came next. I learned that the ones you want for flan still have a leaf or two attached and a bit of dust on the skin, because the peel is going into the milk and nobody wants wax in the milk. Sugar was a plain white kilo in a paper bag. Milk was whole milk, leche entera, and there was no discussion about that at all. At the spice stall a man scooped cinnamon sticks into a bag, the thin curled kind that flake when you bend them, and weighed them on a scale whose numbers had gone soft under years of paint.

The bakery on the corner had a long shelf of loaves sold only in the weeks before Easter, plain and slightly dry, made for soaking in milk and frying. The smell of that shop followed us down the street. Somewhere over the rooftops a bell rang the quarter and a brass band in the next square lost its place and started again.

Viernes (orange blossom and wax)

Friday was the other face of Holy Week. In the evening we walked to the old part of town and wedged ourselves against a wall, three rows back, in a crowd that smelled of incense and warm candle wax and, from the trees along the street, of orange blossom. The Spanish call it azahar. It is a sweet white smell so heavy that it sits on your tongue. Children rolled the drips of wax into dark balls and compared sizes. A man beside me hummed along to a march he had obviously known since he was small, and the drum kept landing half a beat late, and nobody minded.

When the procession came around the corner the street went quiet the way a big crowd goes quiet, all at once and all the way down. I could hear the carriers' sandals on the stones. I could hear the wax hiss. Afterwards the cousins marched me into a bar and I stood eating a torrija still hot from the pan, cinnamon sugar all over my fingers, and decided the whole country smelled of oranges and burnt sugar and that nobody was going to make me leave.

Estar como un flan A Spanish saying for being a bundle of nerves, shaking like a pudding that has just been turned out

La cocina (laying out the deck)

Saturday began with furniture. The kitchen table was dragged six inches to the left so there would be room to walk around it, and a second cloth went over the oven door. I was given an apron washed so many times the strings had gone grey, and told it had belonged to Yaya's mother. From the top shelf, behind a stack of paper bags, came the flanera, a round metal mould the size of a small hatbox with a lid that clamped shut with a lever. It had a dent on one side. Three people scrubbed it, rinsed it and dried it before I was allowed to touch it.

Everything was laid out in the order we would need it. The small pan with the scorched wooden handle. A sieve with one bent wire. A big glass bowl and a jug. Four lemons on a saucer and a potato peeler, because peel for the milk has to come off in wide ribbons with none of the white pith, which is bitter. The radio was on low, a woman reading out traffic for roads that did not seem to be anywhere near us. The olla exprés came down off its own shelf, Yaya checked the rubber ring with her thumb and a long look, and a small pan of water was set to warm beside it.

I was put on lemon duty. The peeler made a soft zip as it came away, and that whole corner of the kitchen filled with the oil from the skin, sharp and bright. The cinnamon stick cracked in two when my friend's mother broke it over the milk pot, and both halves floated like a pair of small canoes.

El caramelo (the part I was told I would get wrong)

Yaya took the small pan, put in the sugar with a few spoons of water, set it on a low flame and said nothing. No stirring. I was holding a spoon out of habit and she looked at it until I put it down on the counter.

For a long time nothing happened. Then the water hissed and gave up, the sugar went clear, and a faint straw colour crept in from the edge of the pan. Yaya lifted it and swirled it, slowly, the way you swirl a glass of wine you do not think much of. The smell changed three times. First plain sweetness, like a sweet shop. Then something toasty, like bread under a grill. Then a darker, rounder smell with a slight bite at the end of it, and that was when she lifted the pan off the heat, with the sugar still ticking. I would have waited another ten seconds, and the caramel would have burnt while I waited.

She poured it into the flanera and tilted the mould so it climbed the sides. It was the colour of dark honey held up to a window. As it cooled it began to tink and crackle, small glassy sounds, the caramel setting and shrinking against the metal. My friend's grandfather, who had not said a word all morning, put his head round the door, listened to the mould like a doctor, nodded and went away.

La olla (milk, eggs and a whistling valve)

The milk went into a pot with the lemon ribbons, the cinnamon and the sugar, and I was told to watch it. Not to stir it. To watch it. The lemon went translucent at the edges. The smell was cinnamon first, then lemon, then warm milk coming up from underneath, a bakery and a cough sweet at the same time. When the surface began to shiver and small bubbles stitched themselves along the rim, the pot came off the heat and sat on a folded cloth for a good twenty minutes. Around about then the neighbours began to take an interest, but I will get to them.

Eggs were my job. Three whole and one yolk, cracked on the rim of the glass bowl with a tap and a small wet slap as they fell. I whisked the way I do at home, quickly, with the whole elbow, and Yaya reached over and put two fingers on my wrist. She moved my hand in a slow circle, as if stirring something asleep. Gently, she said in Spanish, and then in English for the benefit of the whole room, gently. Too much air makes holes, she explained, and a flan with holes is a flan with something to hide.

The warm milk went in as a thin stream, strained through the sieve so the cinnamon and peel stayed behind like a small catch of fish. Foam gathered on top and Yaya skimmed it off with a spoon, with a faint scraping sound. Then the whole bowl went through the sieve a second time into the flanera, over the caramel, poured from low so nothing splashed. The lid went on. The lever went down with a click I can still hear.

The olla had about four centimetres of water in the bottom and a metal rack sitting in it so the flanera would not touch the base. The flanera went on the rack. The lid of the olla was turned and locked, the valve dropped on top, the flame lit high, and we all stood around it the way people stand around a kettle, which means nobody could look at anything else. The rubber ring creaked. A thin hiss began under the valve, and then the valve started to rock and whistle, a cheerful sound, a train leaving a small station. The flame came down low. Yaya looked at the clock over the door and said ten minutes, and the whole kitchen stopped talking for ten minutes, more or less.

When the ten minutes were up the flame went off and the olla was left alone. The whistle faded to a rattle, the rattle to a slow sigh, and then to the tick of cooling metal, which took far longer than I wanted. Only when the pin dropped did the lid come off, with a cloth over Yaya's hand and her face turned away from the steam. The flanera came out wet and hot and was set on the windowsill under a tea towel, like a sleeping baby.

Los vecinos (the knock at the door)

The smell had been climbing the stairwell all morning. Caramel first, then lemon and cinnamon, and by noon a faint warm milk smell that goes through a building like gossip. At half past eleven the bell rang. It was the woman from the second floor, who needed to borrow a lemon. There was a saucer of lemons on our counter and, I felt sure, one on hers, but Yaya handed one over and the woman stayed fifteen minutes and looked at everything on the table. At one o'clock a man from the ground floor appeared with an empty cup, asking about sugar. At three a small girl was sent up by her mother to ask the time, though there was a clock in the hall outside their own door. Nobody said a word about any of it. Yaya gave each visitor a small spoon and something to taste, the milk, the caramel scraped off the pan, once the end of a torrija, and each of them went back downstairs looking thoroughly satisfied with their errand.

Domingo (the sobremesa)

Sunday lunch ran from two until nearly six. There were chickpeas and a great dish of rice coloured with saffron, bread torn rather than cut, red wine for the grown ups and fizzy orange for me. Torrijas appeared and vanished. Then my friend's mother cleared the cloth and Yaya brought out the flan, still in its flanera, cold from the fridge, and the table, which had been loud for four hours, went quiet.

She ran a thin knife around the edge. A rimmed plate went on top. One quick turn, and everybody at the table held their breath along with her, and the mould lifted. It let go with a soft sucking sound, the caramel sliding down the sides in slow sheets and pooling around the base, deep amber against the pale custard, and the flan swayed on the plate like a small slow dancer. My friend's grandfather told a nephew who had gone pale about an exam that he was estar como un flan, and the whole table laughed. The first spoon cracked through a skin of caramel and then met no resistance at all.

It tasted of milk first, then cinnamon, then lemon far at the back, and last a dark toasted sugar that stayed on my tongue through the coffee. For a few minutes the only sound was spoons on plates. Then the women began to correct my technique in detail, the men started on football, and the neighbour from the second floor appeared in the doorway with an empty plate, by pure coincidence, and was given a chair.

A good flan arrives at the table and the talking stops. From my notebook, Easter Sunday

Origen (what I asked, and what I looked up later)

On Saturday afternoon, with the flan chilling and the kitchen finally quiet, I sat on the back step with two of the cousins and asked where flan comes from. I got eleven answers, all delivered with total confidence. I went home and read, and this is what held up.

The word comes into Spanish through Old French from a Germanic word for a flat cake. Egg custards are old. The Roman cookery collection credited to Apicius has custard like dishes, some seasoned with pepper and fish sauce, some sweetened with honey, and the Romans kept hens in large numbers. The sweet, caramel topped custard we know is much younger and much more Spanish in its habits. In Jerez, sherry makers have long used egg whites to clear their wine, which left them with great quantities of yolks, and convents there are traditionally credited with turning those yolks into tocino de cielo, literally heaven's bacon, a dense golden yolk and syrup sweet with no milk in it at all. In the Philippines the same family of sweets became leche flan, cooked in an oval tin called a llanera, often with all yolks and a mixture of evaporated and condensed milk.

Lent explains something too. In older Catholic custom eggs and dairy were held back during the fasting weeks, so Easter was when they returned to the table. That may be why this season is so thick with egg sweets. In Catalonia and Valencia, godparents traditionally give their godchildren a sweet bread called a mona de Pascua on Easter Monday.

Flan also leads a double life. In Spain it is the great default dessert of the menú del día, the fixed price lunch that grew out of the tourist menu introduced in 1964. It had to be cheap, made of eggs, milk and sugar, and prepared the day before, and flan fitted perfectly. In Vietnam, bánh flan is served in a bowl with crushed ice and strong coffee poured over it. And in Spain itself, flan de huevo is quite a different dish from crema catalana, which is thickened on the stove with starch, served in a shallow clay dish, burnt on top with a hot iron, and tied in Catalonia to the feast of Saint Joseph on 19 March.

The pressure cooker has a Spanish chapter too. Denis Papin built his steam digester in 1679, but a Spanish inventor, José Alix Martínez, is commonly credited with patenting the household olla exprés in 1919. Flan in an olla is a regular home habit in Spain and Latin America, usually in a sealed, clamped flanera. The detail that surprised me is that the Spanish recipes I read mostly cook the flan under pressure, counting ten to twenty minutes from the first whistle of the valve, while many home cooks elsewhere steam it gently with the whistle off. Both give good flan. They need different moulds, and I explain which is which below.

La receta (what I make at home now)

I do not own a flanera. At home I use a steel mould, cover it tightly with foil, and steam it with the whistle off. It is slower than the Spanish way and much more forgiving, and it works with any tin that fits.

Ratio chart

I keep to roughly one egg for every 150 ml of milk for the firm, sliceable Spanish set. Go toward 180 ml per egg if you want it softer.

Timing chart for the whistle off method

Si sale mal, the troubleshooting table

Variations and other ways to cook it

A condensed and evaporated milk version gives a denser, fudgier custard and is the base of Latin American flan. For a jaggery version, melt grated jaggery with a spoon of water for the base and reduce the custard sugar. An egg free version made with agar agar or cornflour sets into a milk pudding, not a true custard, and it is best to expect a different dessert. Coffee and cardamom both work, replacing part of the milk or infusing into it. Without a pressure cooker, use a steamer, a kadai with a tight lid, an oven water bath, or an air fryer set low with the mould covered. Keep the finished flan covered in the fridge for 2 to 3 days. I do not freeze it, because the custard weeps once thawed.

Notas de viaje (if you go)