Crème Brûlée Recipe (No Torch Needed)

Before you start: the short version

Crème brûlée is a baked custard of cream, egg yolks, sugar and vanilla, chilled, then finished with a thin sheet of caramelized sugar. You do not need a blowtorch: the broiler (the overhead grill) or a poured caramel gives the same crackable top. Step 9 covers the broiler, and the no-torch section after the plating ideas has every method.

The short version: steep 2 cups (480 ml) of cream with vanilla, whisk it into 5 yolks and ⅓ cup (67 g) of sugar, strain, and bake in six shallow ramekins in a water bath at 325°F (163°C) until the centers read 170 to 175°F (77 to 79°C). Chill, then sugar and caramelize just before serving.

Time: about 1 ¼ hours to steep, mix and bake, then about 1 hour to cool and at least 4 hours to chill, so make the custards the day before if you can. They keep 3 to 4 days before you caramelize them.

You need: six shallow 4-oz (120 ml) ramekins or crème brûlée dishes (porcelain or stoneware if you will use the broiler), a roasting pan, a kettle, a fine-mesh sieve and an instant-read thermometer. A torch is optional.

How to make crème brûlée without a torch (4 ways)

No torch? Use the broiler (the overhead grill), or pour on a thin layer of caramel. The crust is just caramelized sugar, so the heat source is negotiable: every method here gives the same glassy, crackable top.

The broiler. Move a rack so the sugar will sit 3 to 4 inches (8 to 10 cm) below the element and preheat the broiler on high for a full 10 minutes. Use porcelain or stoneware ramekins sold as broiler-safe, never glass. Take the custards straight from the fridge, blot them dry and cover each with a thin, even layer of granulated sugar. Stand them in a roasting pan and pour ice water around them to halfway up the sides, so only the sugar gets hot. Broil for 1 to 4 minutes, turning the pan once and watching every second, and pull them the moment the sugar is amber. For a thicker crust, do what Michel Roux Jr does and build it in thin coats: sugar and broil, then sugar and broil again. If the custard feels warm, chill it for 10 minutes before serving.

You may have read the freeze-first trick, 20 to 30 minutes in the freezer before broiling. The ice bath does the same job without the thermal shock. Only freeze first if your ramekins’ maker says they can go from the freezer to a hot oven; Le Creuset, for one, tells stoneware owners not to put a frozen dish in a preheated oven.

The caramel pour needs no broiler at all. Make one batch for all six: put ⅔ cup (130 g) sugar, ¼ cup (60 ml) water and 1 tsp light corn syrup or golden syrup in a small pan, stir just until the sugar is wet, then leave it alone over medium heat until it turns deep amber, about 340°F (170°C). Turn the heat to its lowest setting. Working one ramekin at a time, spoon about 2 teaspoons of caramel onto the cold custard and tilt the ramekin at once so it runs to the edges, then set the pan back on the low heat before the next one. Keep the layer about as thin as a coin: the caramel seizes on the cold surface in seconds, hardens fully in about 5 minutes and cracks cleanly, and the custard never feels any heat. Pour more and you get a hard-candy lid instead of a crust. A poured crust carries a little more sugar than a torched one, about 40 more calories per custard.

Caramel discs keep every bit of heat away from the custard. Cook the same amber caramel, spoon it into thin rounds a little smaller than your ramekins on a silicone mat or parchment, let them harden for about 5 minutes, and lay one on each custard just before serving.

The oldest way needs no gas at all: a hot iron. Massialot’s 1691 recipe browns the sugar with a fire shovel heated red-hot, and a salamander, a cast-iron disc on a long handle heated on a gas flame or burner and held just above the sugar, still does the job. For one custard, a large metal spoon heated in a gas flame and pressed onto the sugar for a few seconds works the same way. Hold either with an oven mitt, rest it on a heatproof surface and keep it well away from children.

Why this recipe works

Five yolks to 2 cups (480 ml) of cream sits squarely inside the range the most-tested recipes use. America’s Test Kitchen goes to 6 yolks per 2 cups, Mark Bittman’s New York Times recipe uses exactly 5, and the restaurant batch Gordon Ramsay published in The Caterer works out to just under 5. Guy Savoy’s, from his two-star Paris kitchen, is within a yolk of it. Sugar at ⅓ cup (67 g) matches America’s Test Kitchen and sits within a few grams of Savoy’s and Ramsay’s, so the custard reads as vanilla cream rather than pudding and the crust brings the rest of the sweetness.

Yolks alone set silkier than whole eggs, and a custard this rich is the forgiving kind: the cream’s fat and the sugar get between the egg proteins, so they bond slowly and set into a tender gel instead of tightening into curds.

Wide, shallow dishes matter more than any ingredient choice, and chefs say so in print. Michel Roux Jr picks large shallow ramekins “for a higher proportion of crunchy brûlée to rich cream,” Heston Blumenthal pours his custard ¾ inch (2 cm) deep, and Guy Savoy bakes in shallow porcelain egg dishes. Le Cirque’s former executive chef Raphael François warns that in a ramekin or deeper dish “the top will be overcooked and the bottom’s not going to be cooked.” Aim for ¾ to 1 inch (2 to 2.5 cm) of custard, in a dish about 4 ½ to 5 inches (11 to 13 cm) across: it bakes evenly and puts crust in every spoonful. Standard deeper ramekins work too; they just take longer, so trust the thermometer.

Pull it by temperature, not by looks. A finished crème brûlée looks underdone in the oven: set edges and a center that jiggles like set gelatin. An instant-read thermometer reading 170 to 175°F (77 to 79°C) in the middle is the one objective cue, and the custard firms the rest of the way as it cools.

If it goes wrong

Grainy or curdled: the custard went past the target, usually from too long a bake or a missing water bath. Next time, start checking 5 minutes early and pull it at 170 to 175°F (77 to 79°C).

Liquid in the center after chilling: it came out too early. The center should read at least 170°F (77°C) before it leaves the oven.

Bubbles or foam on top: the yolks were whisked hard and the surface was not skimmed. Skim the jug and pop the bubbles before baking.

Wet or weeping crust: condensation, or sugar left sitting too long. Blot the tops dry and caramelize right after sugaring.

Black spots from the broiler: the custards sat too close to the element or the pan was not turned. Move the rack down a notch and turn the pan every 30 seconds.

How Michelin-starred kitchens make it

Crème brûlée is one of the few desserts that starred kitchens still serve close to the classic, and several chefs have published exactly how they make it. For comparison, this recipe uses 5 yolks and ⅓ cup (67 g) of sugar per 2 cups (480 ml) of cream, baked at 325°F (163°C) in a water bath. Stars are as listed in the 2026 MICHELIN Guide.

Tom Kerridge, The Hand & Flowers, Marlow (two stars). Vanilla crème brûlée has been on the menu at his pub since it opened, and it never goes in the oven. He steeps the vanilla in the cream for 30 minutes, brings it back to the boil, pours it onto whisked eggs and sugar, then stirs the mix in the pan until it thickens and reaches 190°F (88°C). Strained and cooled, it sets in the fridge in about 3 hours. To finish, he wipes the edge of each dish, torches from the edges toward the center and takes the caramel to a dark brown, so its slight bitterness balances the rich custard. It rests about 5 minutes and goes out with no garnish.

Guy Savoy, Paris (two stars). His recipe bakes 9 yolks, about 3 cups (750 g) of 35% cream, close to the richness of US heavy cream, and ½ cup (100 g) of sugar at 194°F (90°C) for 50 minutes, in small pots or shallow porcelain egg dishes, with no water bath listed. The finish is a light layer of cassonade, France’s raw cane sugar, under the torch. Scaled to 2 cups of cream, that is within a yolk of our ratio and within a few grams of our sugar.

Alain Ducasse, Le Louis XV, Monaco (three stars). His bistro-style recipe is lighter: equal parts milk and light cream, about 2 cups (500 ml) of each, with four vanilla beans steeped off the heat for 30 minutes, 9 yolks, a 212°F (100°C) oven and a cassonade crust.

Heston Blumenthal, The Fat Duck, Bray (three stars). In his golden syrup crème brûlée he pours the custard ¾ inch (2 cm) deep into brûlée dishes, pops the last surface bubbles with a quick pass of the torch and bakes it at 284°F (140°C) in a water bath under foil. He chills it at least 6 hours, preferably overnight, keeps sprinkling sugar as he torches, and serves it at once, because the sugar starts drawing moisture from the custard and goes soft.

Michel Roux Jr, Le Gavroche, London (two stars until it closed in January 2024). He asks for large shallow ramekins “for a higher proportion of crunchy brûlée to rich cream,” bakes at 284°F (140°C) in a water bath, and builds the crust in several thin coats with a torch or a very hot grill. Demerara, he notes, gives the crunchiest top but does not stay that way for long. He serves it with warm almond puff-pastry twists.

Gordon Ramsay, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, London (three stars). The restaurant version he published in The Caterer in 2006 uses 12 yolks to about 4 cups (1 liter) of double cream and a scant cup (200 ml) of milk, baked at 230°F (110°C) in a water bath for 47 minutes, then turned out of its mold, caramelized and served with fresh Granny Smith apple juice.

Le Cirque, New York (never starred). The restaurant that made the modern crème brûlée famous never held a Michelin star, but its recipe is worth knowing. As its former executive chef Raphael François gave it to the MICHELIN Guide: 20 yolks, 8 cups (1.9 liters) of heavy cream and 2 cups (400 g) of sugar, about 4 oz (120 g) per wide, shallow dish, baked at 204°F (96°C) in a convection oven for 66 minutes with no water bath, then finished with muscovado sugar. “At lower temperature,” he says, “it doesn’t overcook.” Per 2 cups of cream, that is exactly our 5 yolks, with half again as much sugar.

What they share: a gentle oven or none at all, shallow dishes, and a crust made at the last minute, most often from a brown or raw cane sugar. Where they differ: all cream (Savoy, Le Cirque), British double cream let down with milk (Ramsay, Blumenthal, Roux Jr), which lands close to US heavy cream anyway, or a genuinely lighter half-milk custard (Ducasse). Oven settings run from 194°F (90°C) to 284°F (140°C). Ours is hotter because the water bath does the protecting, and it gets dessert into the fridge in about 35 minutes.

A note on names, because menus and recipe sites blur them. Guy Savoy held three stars from 2002 until 2023 and holds two today. Paul Bocuse’s restaurant near Lyon held three from 1965 until 2020 and also holds two. Le Gavroche closed in January 2024. Le Cirque in New York never held a star: Michelin’s first New York guide was the 2006 edition. Dieter Schorner, Le Cirque’s pastry chef in the 1980s, and Pierre Hermé, who says he first tasted the dessert there, are pastry chefs, not starred restaurants.

Three centuries without a blowtorch

The oldest printed recipe called crème brûlée is in François Massialot’s Le Cuisinier roïal et bourgeois (Paris, 1691). Massialot, who cooked for the Duke of Orléans, blended egg yolks with a pinch of flour and milk, flavored it with cinnamon and citrus peel and cooked it in the serving dish. Then he sugared the top and passed “la pèle du feu, bien rouge,” the fire shovel heated red-hot, over it until it took on “une belle couleur d’or,” a fine golden color. His menu for a grand May dinner lists “deux petites Crèmes brûlées,” and he notes that a similar meal was served at the Marquis de Seignelay’s château at Sceaux to the Dauphin and the court on May 14, 1690.

English cookbooks printed the dish as “burnt cream” from 1702, in a translation of Massialot, and English cooks kept the hot iron. Elizabeth Moxon’s English Housewifry (1764 edition) says to “heat a fire-shovel red-hot, and hold it over the top till the sugar be brown,” and later recipes switch to a salamander, a heavy iron disc heated in the fire. Trinity College, Cambridge, which has served its burnt cream since the later 19th century, keeps a branding iron in the shape of the college crest for the crust. In Catalonia, crema catalana is traditionally burnt with a red-hot iron paddle. The broiler and the kitchen torch are the newcomers.

Escoffier’s Guide to Modern Cookery (1907) has no recipe for it at all. The comeback started in New York, at Le Cirque. Sirio Maccioni, its owner, said he wanted the dessert after eating crema catalana in Spain during the 1982 World Cup, and credited his wife Egidiana and chef Alain Sailhac with developing it. Dieter Schorner, Le Cirque’s pastry chef at the time, told Saveur that he baked it in a shallow fluted dish under a thinner crust, and that Paul Bocuse, whose restaurant near Lyon then held three Michelin stars, “declared it the best dessert he had eaten that year.” Pastry chef Pierre Hermé has said he first tasted crème brûlée at Le Cirque, not in France.