1,459 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.

8,843 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 Send to a friend User-friendly URL

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

Your oven in "proofer" mode

In the bakery, proofing is a crucial stage in the process of making light, plump breads and pastries. During proofing, the yeast ferments the sugars present in the dough, releasing carbon dioxide which forms bubbles. This process allows the dough to swell and aerate, guaranteeing a soft, light...
September 27^th 20243,1405

The right size of zucchini

When you buy zucchini at the market, you're often offered a wide variety of sizes, from very small to very large. But which ones to choose? Here are a few tips.
September 9^th 20243,4815

The (small) miracle of béchamel sauce

Making a béchamel sauce is going to confront you with a little miracle that happens every time: You pour milk over a roux, it's very liquid, you stir over a low heat, and then all of a sudden, miracle, the sauce sets, it thickens, you've got your béchamel. Let's see what happened.
August 27^th 20243,9414

Pastry doughs

To make a classic tart, you'll need a pastry of course, and if you don't use puff pastry (normally reserved for "fine", in french, tarts), you'll have a choice of shortcrust, shortbread, sweetcrust or "à foncer". Let's take a look at the differences between these four.
August 16^th 20244,0164.4

A few tips on homemade ice cream

If you make ice cream at home, which is a very, very good idea, you'll find a few tips and tricks in this article that should make your life easier. Combined with the site's ice cream recipes, they'll help you improve your production, to the delight of everyone around you, children first.
August 11^th 20244,0595

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

Sugar syrups

In cooking, and especially in pastry, we often use sugar syrups, a simple mixture of water and sugar in varying proportions. Here is a presentation of their differences. .
January 17^th 20237,4584.8

The "pith" of the cauliflower

When using cauliflower in a recipe, there is a lot of preparation work at the beginning: removing the leaves, taking the tops or florets, etc. It's a bit tedious, but in the end you're left with the best of the cauliflower, ready to be used in your recipe.
February 5^th 20229,4664.9

Divide and weigh dough into regular pieces

When you prepare dough for cupcakes in a pastry shop or bakery, at some point you're going to have to divide it, i.e. cut it into small pieces, which should all have the same weight. Sounds simple enough, but is it really that simple?
May 30^th 20236,2275

Tranché, dissociated, failed, in short... missed!

When preparing a sauce or a cream, there's always a (small) risk that the creamy preparation you're working on will suddenly separate into two parts of different textures: a liquid part, for example, and a more or less solid part, or even become lumpy. It's terribly frustrating, but we'll see...
June 19^th 20237,0045

Sausage broth

I've already talked to you about vegetable cooking water, which becomes a precious broth after cooking that would be a shame to throw away. Now let's look at the special case of meat cooking broth, and in particular sausages, which are often poached.
June 28^th 20236,5615