1,545 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

The 3 secrets of Parisian flan

A flan Parisien, or boulanger, is a simple yet delicious cake. A cream, a mixture of milk, eggs and sugar, is poured into a raw pastry base and baked in the oven until the pastry and cream are cooked.

This is the simplest version of the recipe, probably the original one, but nowadays the cream has changed, and the flan has become a slightly more sophisticated cake, but still delicious, if well made.

Well, here are 3 important points to help you make a good flan.

16 K 4.7/5 (12 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Flan Pastry Bakery Parisian Dough Appliance Milk Cream Egg

Last modified on: July 21^th 2023

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

The 3 secrets of Parisian flan

I'll admit it, I'm passionate about flan - I love making it, eating it and talking about it :-).
And to try and get to the bottom of the flan recipe, we're going to look at 3 aspects of it: the dough, the cream to be poured into it (or apparatus), and the cooking.

1) The pastry

pâte du flan

The presence of a dough is what differentiates a french custard tart from a pastry flan, which has no dough at all. There are no hard and fast rules: you can use any of the following doughs: pâte brisée, sablée, feuilletée or even croissant dough.
Traditionally, shortcrust pastry is used, but nowadays we don't hesitate to use sweetcrust pastry (sweeter), puff pastry (crispier) or croissant pastry (crunchier and more delicious).
A flan needs to be thick, much thicker than a tart, and you leave it in the fridge while you work on the mixture.
If you choose puff pastry or croissant dough, I recommend sprinkling a little sugar (about 1 tablespoon) in the bottom of the mold before the dough, as it will caramelize during baking and further enhance the crispness of the pastry.

2) The mixture

appareil à flan

The milk, egg and sugar mixture of the beginning now gives way to more gourmet appliances: eggs, milk, cream and sugar, and above all cornflour, which thickens the flan to a creamy texture.
Proceed in much the same way as for a crème pâtissière: once all the ingredients have been mixed, put on a low heat, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens slightly to reduce baking time and avoid soaking the pastry base with a too-liquid mixture.
To finish, add a little butter and smooth with a mixer. You can find the recipe for the flan maker here.

The basic recipe is a classic vanilla flavor, but you can adapt the recipe to your taste: chocolate, pistachio, lemon, apple, sesame... among others.

3) Baking

pré-cuisson pâte 1 pré-cuisson pâte 2

Once you've darkened the mold and prepared the pastry, you might think that all you have to do is pour the pastry into the mold and bake it. This is the case, but there's a trick I strongly recommend: pre-bake the pastry base on its own, with a protective layer inside (lentils, marbles, etc.) to keep the base even, for 15-20 minutes.
A flan should always be placed low in the oven, so that the underside cooks more thoroughly.
If you've pre-cooked both the pastry and the appliance, the cooking time for the two together will be shorter, so keep an eye on the color of the pastry to know, and don't be overly influenced by the shaky texture of the appliance, which is already cooked and will solidify as it cools.

The flan and its aberrations

As you can see, it's not a very complicated recipe, but what a result! And above all, what a difference in taste and texture, compared with those poor-quality industrial flans that are unfortunately to be found just about everywhere.

Unfortunately, it's not uncommon to find frozen custards in poor bakeries and other shops, or custards prepared from "mix", i.e. a powder to which milk, or worse, water, is added, to obtain a mediocre mixture which will fill an equally mediocre dough, sometimes made from palm oil...
Of course, these flans are not expensive, which is always suspect, but what a pity for the taste and quality of the products.

To a lesser extent this time, some bakers tend to neglect, or botch up a little, their flan apparatus for economic reasons, and therefore rather top their pastry base with custard than with an apparatus. It's understandable (economically speaking), but it's a shame, because a good bakery should have a good flan.

In a nutshell

To make a good flan, you need :

The pastry of your choice (no obligation)
A round mold with high sides (mine is 20 cm long and 4.5 cm high)
A small amount of powdered sugar
Pre-bake the pastry on its own
Pre-bake apparatus
Bake at the bottom of the oven

It's up to you!

Lasts posts

Butter vs. grease

We often read in a recipe where a pastry is put into a mould that, just before pouring, the mould should be buttered or greased. But what's the difference between these 2 terms?
December 1^st 20251,6055

Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress. There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe. But is this really a good method?
November 24^th 20251,3045

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 20251,200

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20253,4695

The importance of sieving

In recipes that use a fine powder (flour, powdered sugar, etc.), you'll often see the advice to sift before using it. To sift is to pass the powder in question through a sieve (a very fine strainer) before incorporating it into your recipe. It's often advice, but is it really useful?
September 3^rd 20258,0293

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

Egg yolks and caster sugar

We often come across recipes where we need to mix egg yolks with caster sugar. This would appear to be a very ordinary and simple thing to do but, be warned, these two ingredients can behave oddly together.
February 15^th 201883 K 24.3

Is it really necessary to cream egg yolks?

Let’s try and answer a question that crops up in cookery and patisserie, even if it verges on the existential: do the egg yolks in a custard recipe really need to be beaten until pale, or not?
February 28^th 201844 K4.3

No need to boil gelatin

Gelatin is a magical ingredient for making light, creamy, structured desserts, yet it's often misused in the kitchen. A common mistake in some recipes is the idea that it needs to be boiled for it to work properly, but this is a mistake indeed: gelatin melts at a much lower temperature, around...
November 21^th 20248,5355

Foie gras without force-feeding: it can be done

I adore foie gras... I willingly admit it, I adore foie gras: the texture, the taste, the festive aspect – I enjoy all of it. I really love eating it, preparing it and, most of all, sharing what I have made with my family over Christmas and New Year. ...but then I begin to have doubts Of...
December 15^th 201450 K4.4

How to sprinkle well?

When in a recipe you need to sprinkle something, that is to say to spread a fine layer of powder (flour, sugar, etc.) on something, powdered sugar on a pie for example, you will probably use a fine strainer or a sieve, this is the best way to proceed. But is that all?
May 23^th 202310 K4.7