- Hey, I'm John Kanell.
Today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making perfect canelé
with all my tips and tricks, so let's get started.
This recipe is by popular request, but let me tell you,
I've been working on it for over a year now.
It's taken so long.
It's actually officially the longest recipe
I've ever had in development.
Sometimes, it's perfect for this kind of mold
or this kind of mold or this kind of oven or whatever else,
but like I've had so many failures along the way.
Many of them delicious, but just not perfect.
And I'm so excited for this video so you can learn
from my many mistakes and make the perfect canelé.
So let's get into it.
First off, grab a medium pot and I'm gonna add two cups
or 480 milliliters of whole milk.
For this recipe, you can go extra special
and use a vanilla bean that you split,
or like two teaspoons of vanilla extract will be great.
You could also use two teaspoons of vanilla bean paste.
This is gonna infuse so much flavor into our canelé.
Quarter cup or 50 grams of granulated sugar.
Don't forget to add your vanilla bean pot in if you used it.
One bit of prep is a quarter cup of a European style butter.
European butter just has less water in it.
It's a higher butterfat.
Save this butter for later.
Now we're gonna place our milk over medium high heat,
stirring frequently and bringing it to a simmer.
I'm gonna get all the flavor out of those vanilla beans.
When I was developing this recipe
and it wasn't coming out perfect, I was like,
"Hmm, maybe the batter is the problem."
So I was tweaking the batter over and over again,
and then I was like, "No, this can't be right."
This batter seems fine to me, like it should be working.
So it went to the actual coating and baking,
and that's where the issue was.
Over bake them, and they're little charcoal briquettes.
Nobody wants it, listen to this.
Under bake them or get the coating just a little bit wrong,
and you get the dreaded white bottom.
This is where it's like under baked.
It's sunk in and soft on top.
And while this will still taste delicious,
it is not a perfect beautiful canelé.
This is the easy part.
It'll be just fine.
Just make sure you cover your batter
when it goes into the fridge,
and you're gonna give it a good stir afterwards
so it's nice and smooth.
The flour just needs the time to hydrate overnight,
so it becomes this wonderful like thicker cakey custard.
And like, by the way, if you haven't had a canelé,
it's like a custard that you bake.
So it's a baked custard, but on the inside,
it's like moist and custardy and spongy.
On the outside, it's crisp and dark golden,
and they're perfectly sweet
and just like amazing treats to eat.
They're delicious if you make them properly
and if they're fresh.
And if they're stale or made poorly, they're no.
Once it's come to a simmer, remove from heat,
and now we can take out this vanilla bean pod.
Add a quarter cup of butter,
and it's gonna melt fairly quickly.
Once your butter is melted,
we're gonna set this aside.
Grab a big bowl, and it's time to mix some eggs up.
So this recipe comes from Bordeaux.
This is sometimes called canelé bordelais, but basically,
in Bordeaux, it's a beautiful wine-making region,
and they use egg whites to clarify the wine.
However, they have all these leftover egg yolks,
so they would give them to nuns
to make food for like the poor and for children.
Save your whites for a meringue.
I want three yolks and one whole egg.
So these nuns took their egg yolks
and made simple, beautiful dishes.
Egg yolks lends themselves really well to custard.
So one of the recipes was a custard,
and that's kind of how this was born.
It comes from like the 14th or 15th century.
They've been around for quite a while,
and my only wish is that canelé
were more popular here in America,
because they're so delicious
and they're really easy to make.
If you season your little containers correctly
or use the nonstick ones,
one quarter teaspoon of salt
and three quarters of a cup of sugar.
150 grams.
Grab a whisk.
We're gonna whisk this up until it's nice and smooth.
And if you've ever made a custard before,
you probably know what's next.
We will be tempering this mixture,
because that milk is very hot and it could scramble the egg.
So to continue my story,
Bordeaux is a wonderful wine-making region.
Also has a great port.
So flavors were brought in like rum and vanilla,
and this helped form this amazing dessert.
It's so simple.
It's really just a few ingredients,
but there's a couple things you have to do correctly.
One, this gets chilled overnight.
Before we do that, let's measure out one cup
or 120 grams of all-purpose flour.
This will hold things together.
And the flour is gonna sop up a lot of the liquid.
One last stir.
And here's the deal.
Half of the milk will go in and we're gonna stir vigorously.
We let this sit for a bit so the milk is not too hot,
but you don't wanna curdle anything.
Now, we can whisk our flour in and whisk, whisk, whisk.
And make sure it's all completely absorbed with no mumps
before you add in the rest of the hot milk mixture.
There we go.
See how easy this batter is?
Like at this point, your batter is basically done.
If you use vanilla beans by the way,
make sure you use your spatula
and get all those delicious bits out.
One final whisk so it all comes together.
So I told you that we're gonna have some rum in here,
one quarter of a cup.
It's gonna give it a lovely flavor
and a really great aroma as well.
Oh, my gosh, it smells really good.
So I have the vanilla, I have the rum.
This is all set to chill right now.
Okay, so now, pour your mixture through a fine mesh sieve.
So no matter how good you are
at watching the temperature, at stirring,
you're gonna have little bits of schmutz, and that's fine.
But you wanna capture that
so that it doesn't go into the finished product.
Cover this up.
We're gonna refrigerate this overnight
and be back with the magic eye.
While our batter rests,
we need to have a talk about the molds.
You really have two very important choices
for the canelé mold.
And this is something that took me a while
to like just figure out,
because I bought a bunch of different kinds of these,
and there's two basic categories.
The heavy.
They'll probably have a tin coating on the inside.
But if you get the lightweight, cheaper kind,
they're not gonna conduct the heat as well,
and you're gonna have that dreaded
white bottom that sinks in in your canelé.
So that's really frustrating.
So you can find these online or at vintage stores too.
There's a lot of used ones.
If you wanna have the muffin tin style blend
these actually work really well.
They're very easy to find.
And the nice thing is there's a non-stick coating,
so your canelé will pop out.
With a traditional mold, they might stick.
With this, they never will.
But there's a difference.
If you're using this kind of individual mold,
you have to season it.
I'll show you how in just a moment.
But if you don't, your canelé will be stuck.
This one doesn't need to be seasoned.
This one needs to be pretty hot
when you put your coating on.
This one needs to be room temperature
when you put your coating on.
So this is part of why it took so long
to get this recipe just right,
because at home, different people have different tools,
but the recipe has to work for everybody.
If you're wondering why on earth
would you use this traditional mold
when they seem like a pain, and they are a pain,
but the nice thing is they're a tall, beautiful pane,
and most of the muffin tin style ones
are a little bit shorter.
And these guys are finicky.
They give you wonderful results, but there's a trick.
You have to season them.
And seasoning them is kind of similar
to seasoning a cast iron pan.
You're gonna grab your seasoning oil,
which is just like used vegetable oil that you, you know,
it's not gross vegetable oil, but it doesn't have to be new.
Fill it up just almost to the top.
Leave an eighth of an inch so it doesn't spill.
Plop that in there on a little baking sheet.
And you're gonna bake these
at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for about an hour.
Let them cool completely,
and then you will drain out all the oil.
And just like that, you have a seasoned mold,
so it has to be seasoned.
Otherwise, your canelé will stick.
They'll be stuck in the mold.
You'll be like trying to break them out
and it'll be a disaster.
And you don't have to season them every single time.
It's just, chances are, if you're watching this video
and you have some canelé molds,
you haven't used them recently,
so go ahead, fill 'em with oil, bake 'em off,
let them be seasoned and you'll be good to go.
Now, we'll be back with the magic of editing.
Once your batter is all chilled up and you're ready to go,
set your oven to 300 degrees so it's nice and warm.
And you are gonna grab some ingredients for the coating.
It's not just the batter.
It's the outside coating that gives you
that wonderful shiny finish
and really lets these canelé be themselves.
So you need two things if you're gonna do it the proper way,
which is a European style butter,
and the very best thing you could do
would be to clarify it so there's no water in it at all.
But I'm not doing that today.
So I want five tablespoons of butter,
and I'm putting this in a mason jar, just so you know.
And the secret ingredient,
think of that wonderful shine, is beeswax.
You can buy edible beeswax.
It's called like cosmetic grade edible beeswax.
And it comes in these little pellets.
You don't have to use beeswax.
Some recipes call for using just the clarified butter.
It won't be as shiny.
Some recipes call for using shortening
you're gonna brush the molds with,
but this is like the traditional way to do it.
Your mason jar goes into a small pot.
Gonna go to the sink now.
Fill this up with water just until the beeswax stops.
Taking this onto heat, medium low,
we wanna warm this up really gently and stir occasionally.
You're like, "Uh, butter and beeswax.
This does not sound delicious."
This is just coating,
like in the thinnest layer possible, all of your molds.
Love it.
Time for a stir.
The butter is already melting.
It's time to pop your forms right into the oven.
They need to be hot because if you add too much of this,
it's not good.
You don't wanna have a mouthful
of like this wax butter situation, just a paper thin layer.
And that'll only happen if you brush onto hot metal.
So these go into the oven for maybe five minutes,
pop 'em out and work quickly.
Also, if you see this bubbling away and it's almost melted,
just take it off heat.
The residual heat in the water will melt everything through.
After just a couple minutes, this copper is nice and hot.
So go ahead, and ooh, plop it onto your counter.
Don't forget your trivet.
So brush the inside of your canelé mold lightly.
You wanna get full coverage.
Plop it upside down to drain.
I'm using a wire rack with some portion and paper.
Repeat that process.
And if you wanna have fun,
you could use a blowtorch to heat these up too,
but I am not doing that today.
One thing to be careful of,
you do not wanna add too much wax here,
because if you do and it pulls at the bottom of your mold,
you will have that dreaded white bottom on your canelé.
It will not have that golden caramelized top.
So work quickly and let it drain.
These go into the freezer for 15 minutes.
In the meantime, get your oven nice and a hot.
500 degrees to be specific.
For the non-stick version,
it doesn't need to get heated.
If you heated it, it would all just beat up.
They're all brushed.
Right now, I'm gonna dump that out onto the wire rack.
And for both types of molds,
you're gonna have a baking sheet lined with foil.
This can get messy at high heat.
You don't wanna have this baked into your pan.
Cover that up, grab your ice cold molds,
and now it's time to get your very chilled relaxed batter.
Look at this, a symphony of vanilla on top,
but we're gonna mix it up.
You want your canelé to be nice and tall and proud,
but remember, don't overfill them.
So there's two ways to do this.
You can eyeball it and say,
"I want about three eights of an inch,
just a little bit less than half of an inch of clearance."
Or you can use a scale.
So if I'm using a scale, just zero it out each time.
And then I want to have 80 grams for this mold.
If you're using the muffin tin style, it's about 60 grams.
They tend to be smaller,
but they're actually all different sizes.
So really look that you're leaving
that three eighths of an inch
so it doesn't muffin top out of there
and lift the whole thing and steam heat on the bottom.
This one, I'm overfilling on purpose.
I hope it doesn't get too messy
'cause it's not fun to clean.
But I wanna show you what happens
when it muffin tops out and things go awry.
Your batter goes back into the fridge,
and your molds go in into the oven.
500 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 minutes,
then reduce to 400 and bake
for an additional 45 to 1 hour.
Just wanna see like a golden top on there.
You're gonna bake your canelé one tray at a time.
So either you're doing batches in that same oven,
or you have two ovens going.
They're not gonna bake evenly
if you try to do two racks at once.
You might have some leftover coating.
This can just get sealed up and refrigerated
then remelted when you're ready to make.
Some more canelé in the near future.
All righty, look at these beauties, blackened on top.
It's a wonderful custard.
But here's the deal, it has to come out immediately.
So have your trivet at the ready,
and we're gonna dump these out onto a wire rack.
Ah, look at that.
That is the caramelized top you wanna see.
If it doesn't look like this and they popped out,
you can bake them for a little bit longer.
They might just be underdone.
The two I overfilled
completely muffin topped out of there.
And you can see they're out about half of an inch,
and they're stuck, which means the bottom
is just floating over and steam heating.
So right now, you're gonna carefully just use
either a toothpick or like a little knife,
this is a pallet knife, and kind of nudge it back in.
Once you do that, pop them back into the oven,
and you can pull them out and check
to see what the bottom looks like.
Is it roughly the same color?
Is it completely white?
You might need to go in five minute increments
and just come back and check to see what they're like.
They're salvageable though, for the most part.
And even if it doesn't work, it'll still be delicious.
Just remember that.
Please go back into the oven.
If you're baking the canelé in a muffin tin,
chances are, it's a smaller well.
It's lighter metal, so go ahead and shave
five minutes off of the bake time.
You can always use a skewer or tweezers to pry one out.
Make sure it's done all the way through,
and then pop it back in if it's still white on the bottom.
Listen to this.
Crunchy on the outside, but on the inside,
a moist spongy custard.
It smells divine.
And just like that, they're ready to enjoy.
So silky and moist on the inside.
It's like the perfect sponge.
On the outside, crunchy caramel, notes of amazingness.
I hope you get a chance to make this recipe.
And if you like this video,
check out my French dessert playlist.