Description

Steven Raichlen thinks of everything when it comes to grilling, including dessert! In this clip from the Best of Barbecue team, Sarah shows you how to use Steven’s créme brûlée set. This is the way créme brûlée was meant to be made — you’ll never use a propane torch again!

Transcript

Steven Raichlen likes to think about the entire meal he’s cooking on the grill, and that includes desert. I’d like to show you his crème brûlée grill kit, that has everything you need to make crème brûlée on the grill at home and impress your guests. The most important part of the kit is the cast-iron salamander which is a cast-iron disk that’s going to be heated to a blazing hot temperature and caramelize the sugar on your crème brûlée almost instantaneously and adding this really authentic smokey flavor that you’ll never get from a propane torch. I’d love to show you how it works.

So the kit, as I said, comes with the cast-iron salamander that’s heating right now in the embers of my grill. I have two cast iron ramekins, and it comes at the recipe. Now I went ahead and made this recipe last night, so the custard itself is cold and firm and ready now for some sugar. We’re going to “brûlée” or caramelize our sugar with Steven’s dessert rub. This is a turbinado sugar that’s scented with some cinnamon so it’s extra rich and delicious and adds another dimension of flavor to the crème brûlée. This also works really well with grilling fruits on the grill, just so you know. All right, so I’m going to sprinkle pretty liberally onto the top of the custard; I got a little clove in there, don’t want that, so I’m going to go ahead and take that out. Go ahead and do that on the other one.

Going a little bit heavy there because you want that nice, crispy, crunchy caramelized sugar that’s the characteristic of a great creme brûlée.

So the cast iron salamander has been in the embers of the grill for about five minutes. If I wanted to do this on a gas grill I could; I’d need to be sure that that grill is blazing hot, pre-heated, needs to be on high, probably at least ten to fifteen minutes so you’re sure that your salamander is good and hot.

Now there’s no way to test for sure that it’s hot enough; as I said this has been on there for about five minutes you can see that it’s definitely hot! I’m just gonna hold it over the sugar and see what happens… There we go, that nice sizzle and pop there? That smells awesome. Wow, you see how quickly that happened?

It’s probably hot enough I can can go ahead and do the other one. Now if that doesn’t impress your guests, I’m not sure what will! Now to clean this off, I’m just going to go ahead return it back to the embers, and it’s going to burn the rest of that sugar off.

And there you have it; crème brûlée on the grill from Steven Raichlen. Enjoy.

For more tips and tricks, check out our other videos.

Daniel Replogle

Daniel does business development and marketing at The Companion Group. When he isn’t writing you can find him rock climbing or doing ceramic artwork.