Ovos Moles de Aveiro

It's said that the real recipe for this delicious, rich, Portuguese egg custard is a secret only know to a few in the town of Aveiro. I've poked around the web and compared the recipes I found until I was confident that I could make something close to the real thing. This recipe is simple in the sense that the list of ingredients is short, but this is all about technique.

Ingredients:

• 80 ml white rice (non-glutinous) + double the volume in water (or a little more)
  
• 200 ml water
• 300 ml white, refined sugar
• 10 yolks

Start by cooking your rice: mix it with water, bring it to a boil in high temperature, then lower to medium and allow to cook until the rice starts to fall apart. Yes, you really want to overcook this and very much so. If you notice that the water is disappearing fast, add a little more at a time, until it has nearly become gruel. Take off the heat and move it to a food processor. Puree the thing as much as you can, put it in a bowl and move on to the remaining steps.

As your rice "paste" is cooling, carefully separate your eggs. You will not be using the whites in this recipe; save them for "suspiro" or "pudim de claras". Try to not leave much of the whites in the yolks, which you should be placing in a bowl that can hold a volume of 0.5 l or more. Set them aside and go work on the syrup.

In a sauce pan, mix the sugar and the water and warm them up slowly, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Raise the heat and continue to stir until you reach 117 Celsius (not Farenheit, please). A digital thermometer will come in handy here. Remove from the heat immediately.

Mix the rice paste into the yolks; still vigorously until well blended. Start pouring in the syrup slowly, but in a continuous stream and always stirring fast. When the syrup is completely incorporated, move the mixture back into the sauce pan. Cook slowly, in medium to medium high heat until the custard thickens.

The question is "how thick is thick enough" and the answer is "it depends". If you want to serve the custard by itself, in a small cup with a faint dusting of powdered cinnamon, it doesn't need to be very thick. In that case, you could leave it a little runny (as long as the yolks had time to cook). It's delicious this way.

If you want to use the custard as a pastry filling (in "barriga de freira", "pastel de Santa Clara", or "pastel de Coimbra"), you want the custard to be quite thick, so that when it cools, it holds its shape when you take a spoon out of the bowl. In this case, you should cook it until you can see the bottom of the pan when you drag a spoon across.

One point to consider is that the rice is really here to be a filler and a thickener. (I've found recipes that suggest rice flour instead of cooked rice.) You could make this recipe with thrice the number of yolks and no rice at all. The result would be more true to the "real thing", but it would also be incredibly rich. I don't mind using the rice to stretch the yolks, because the neutral starch creates a more balanced result. Whether you do the real thing or the bastardized version is entirely your call.