The Ships Cook Book

Recipes, Insight, Theory and Everyday Management for Students, Ships Cooks, and those with an interest in Marine Catering Operations. All Recipes have a fully adjustable servings feature, just change the number of servings and the ingredients recalculate automatically.

The Ships Cook Book

Baked Egg Custard Tart

This simple tart has variations around the world and is often called Egg Pie, the addition of flavour’s such as Vanilla or Nutmeg give interesting variations to the flavour of the finished product. You can control the slicing stability of this tart by adding more eggs to make a firmer custard, but you have to take care to balance the flavour of the egg vanilla and nutmeg you don’t want your tart to taste like an omelette. Cool the tart before slicing to get a nice clean slice.

NOTE;- Do not attempt to make these tarts in bad weather, if the ship rolls your egg custard will spill out over your oven.

 

Print Recipe
 Baked Egg Custard Tart
Servings
portions
Ingredients
Pastry
  • 2 kg Sweet Pastry See Sweet Pastry Recipe https://www.shipscookbook.com/recipe/sweet-pastry/
Egg Custard
  • 20 Eggs Medium Size at room temprature
  • 2 litres Whole Milk At room temprature
  • 350 grams Caster Sugar The sugar can be reduced or increased to suit your personal prefrance for sweetness.
  • 1 tsp Vanilla Essence (optional)
Garnish
Servings
portions
Ingredients
Pastry
  • 2 kg Sweet Pastry See Sweet Pastry Recipe https://www.shipscookbook.com/recipe/sweet-pastry/
Egg Custard
  • 20 Eggs Medium Size at room temprature
  • 2 litres Whole Milk At room temprature
  • 350 grams Caster Sugar The sugar can be reduced or increased to suit your personal prefrance for sweetness.
  • 1 tsp Vanilla Essence (optional)
Garnish
Instructions
  1. Take a suitable size ball of sweet pastry and roll out with adequate pastry to overhang the flan tin. Roll the pastry back over the rolling pin. Well grease the flan tins with white shortening making sure all the internal surface of the tin is well greased.
  2. Present the rolled pastry to the flan tin and carefully unroll the pastry over the tin, taking care to ensure the rolling pin does not come into contact with the edge of the tin, we don't want any cuts or holes in our pastry.
  3. Notice how the pastry is free from any holes rips or tears.
  4. Lift the outside edge of the pastry and carefully feed it into the outside bottom edge of your flan tin.
  5. Sweet pastry unlike short pastry lack structural integrity during baking as it melts and will break if unsupported,, so whatever type of flan tin you use crimp the top to hold it to the top of your flan tin.
  6. Place your lined flan tins on oven trays, and prepare to bake blind.
  7. Cut 4 circles of greaseproof paper and place on top of the flans.
  8. Fill the greaseproof paper with rice, dry beans or ceramic baking beans if you have them, on the ship I made these custard tarts I had a plastic bucket with rice I keep just for blind baking, you can see the rice is discoloured from previous baking.
  11. Bake the flans in a preheated oven set at 150°C for approximately 40 minutes to bake the pastry through to the base. How long this baking takes will depend on the type of oven you are using and the level of top and bottom heat adjustment you have available to you, I am using a combination fan oven on this occasion so I have no ability to control top and bottom heat.
  12. Here we can see the change in colour of the pastry.
  13. Place the baked flans on the bench and remove you blind baking material, I have returned the rice to the plastic storage bucket.
  14. We can now see our baked empty flan cases.
  15. Mix all the custard ingredients together and ensure it is fully mixed and strain to remove any unmixed egg. half fill each flan as we will need to carry the flans careful to the oven.
  16. Sprinkle with a pinch of nutmeg.
  17. As you place each flan into the oven use a small jug to top up the flans with custard as close as possible to the top of the flans without the custard running over the side.
  18. Bake at 150°C until the custard is set, there is no rule to how long this will takes and it depends on your oven and the temperature of the custard when it goes into the oven, but I would advise setting the timer for 30 minutes and then checking every 10 minutes after that until the custard in all your flans is set. it may be that some parts of your oven are hotter than other parts, your egg custard may not all be fully cooked and set at the same time, so check each flan.
  19. Place your egg custard tarts on cooling wires still in the flan tins and allow to cool for about 1 hour, the Custard will go firmer as the flans cool.
  20. The advantage of using loose bottom flan tins is the ease with which the flan can be removed, place an upside down bowl on the bench and place an egg custard tart on the top. the flan ring will just fall away.
  22. Return the flans to the cooling wires still on the tin base.
  23. When you are ready to cut tarts, side the tarts off the tins base.
  24. Using a sharp knife carefully cut into neat portions of 8 or 12 slices to suit.
  25. Arrange on a tray and serve.
Share this Recipe