Epic Flan Failure.

Flan. I love flan. I went to Puerto Rico for spring break one year and it didn't matter if we were eating at a shack on the beach or a fine dining place, I ordered flan. Because I was doing a Mexican-ish theme for our bbq I figured what better time to try flan. Especially when Jo Anna's mom has a recipe for me...

Yolanda's Flan
Caramel Sauce:
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup water

Custard
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 can regular milk (use the condensed milk can as a measure)
4 eggs
2 tsp vanilla

For caramel, bring sugar and water to a boil, reduce heat and cook until it turns a golden brown. Pour into a deep pie dish.  Beat custard ingredients together and pour over caramel.

Holy crap step one nearly killed me. I get my sauce pan, measure out the water and then add the sugar. I stirred it up so that everything was mostly dissolved and then cranked up the heat. When I had a good boil going I turned it down and let it cook. Mistake number one of oh so many: constant stirring. I assumed sugar burns easily and you don't want that, so I whisked and whisked. Lesson learned: this results in a grainy sugar mess. I can't even tell you how long this stuff cooked. At about 15 minutes I finally text Jo Anna for help. She said don't stir and start over. I said OK. (turns out as soon as you take it off the heat the sugar hardens into an impenetrable rock. I had to boil water in the pan AGAIN just to dissolve the sugar so I could wash the damn thing...)

Caramel: Take 2.  I decided maybe I need a shallower pan for this, so I switched to a skillet, added water, sugar, turned up the heat. Jo Anna said don't touch it, so I stared at it. At this point I will mention my good friend Elliot was in the kitchen with me. He was rather amused by this whole process but now that we had such a challenge on our hands he became very invested. Our sugar water boiled, we turned down the heat and we stared. And stared. Jo said 5-10 minutes it should turn brown. 15 minutes later....

I think we made simple syrup. We got about as dark as champagne and nothing more. We lost a little faith in Jo Ann and turned to google...She had sent me an article on AllRecipes.com to help and I swear we followed everything correctly with the wet sugar method, soooo when Elliot found a YouTube video of Gordon Ramsay showing me how to make caramel in the dry style, we decided to go for it.

Caramel: Take 3. Back in the skillet. (That's what Gordon used...) 1 cup of sugar. High heat. Fancy swirl around the pan and wait. And wait. And wait until...ah ha! The sugar started to melt and turn brown finally. I think it cooked a little fast and there was a lot of yelling and rewinding Gordon's video and taking things off heat and putting it back on the heat but in the end we had a potentially slightly over done caramel. I dumped it in the pie dish and said 'Thank God.'

Mistake number 2: immediately pouring in the custard filling. As least I think this was a mistake as the caramel is like over 300 degrees and the custard clearly has eggs and stuff that will cook immediately. There was a lot of hissing and splashing and it looked like a marbled cheese cake...opps.

Mistake number 3: I TOTALLY forgot that the recipe says to put your pie dish in a water bath (a deep roasting pan works great) that covers the bottom half of the dish into a 350 degree oven for about 45 minutes. Truthfully, it was not until Thursday night when I was putting away some dishes and I saw my roasting pan that I dramatically gasped and said "SHIT! I forgot to bake the flan in a water bath!!" What can I say, the caramel really threw me off...

Mistake number 4: Forgetting you wanted to leave the flan in the oven for an extra 90 seconds after the timer went off. 4 minutes later...."SHIT! FLAN!!"  I think it got a little burny....

In the end it got eaten. It tasted a bit like burned sugar, but maybe in a good way like burnt marshmallow? I think the custard was also a bit overdone...probably has to do with the lack of a water bath and the trip into scorching caramel...

So, I learned a LOT of lessons here, and I'm getting ready to spend some time with Yolanda herself so maybe she can straighten me out...I will get this right. Forget pie. I want to conquer flan!!