I believe that every slashfoodie has a collection of seminal food moments, the ones that transform and open your world in a spoonful. That first taste of freshly-made ricotta; the mouth feel of a sublime red wine at its peak; learning the finer points of emulsification; eating fish-and-chips in a real English pub. One of my seminal food moments was the first time I tasted crème brûlée. It was my twentieth summer, and I was waiting tables at a French restaurant oddly located in a strip mall in Charlotte, NC. I was instantly in love, and I pestered and begged until the chef taught me how to make it. That perfect dessert, with its crunchy burnt-sugar crust and its cold creamy custard flecked with vanilla bean seeds, is now the way I judge a truly good restaurant (one disappointing steakhouse in Denver served up a crème brûlée made with whole eggs, a crime).
Now that I've tasted hundreds of versions of the dessert, from pumpkin to raspberry to lavendar-infused to the unfortunate Denver custard, I've decided that I'm not much for additives, although a bergamot-infused crème brûlée at Verbena in NYC nearly made me cry with happiness. Vanilla beans (and not extract) are a must. The custard dish should be a shallower, wider version, and unexplicably, most of the oval-shaped crème brûlées I've tasted have been sub-par. A good crème brûlée doesn't need almond cookies, or white-chocolate curls, or passionfruit coulis, or candied ginger accompanying it, although a few fresh berries are nice. Most importantly, crème brûlée should be kept in a cooler without the sugar topping until it's ordered, and should be served with the burnt-sugar crust warm, but the custard still cool.
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