Flan Experiments

 

Ingredients
Caramel
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup water
Custard
1 14-ounces can sweetened condensed milk
1 12-ounces can evaporated milk
113 grams Philadelphia cream cheese
3 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
Pinch of salt

Instructions
Oven preheated at 325. Baked 50 minutes. Then 20 minutes. The 20 minutes more. Then 20 and 20 more!  
Next time: bake at 325 for 1 hour and 30 minutes. Let's see what happens.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and boil hot water over the stove. You'll need hot water for the water bath.

Caramel
Heat up sugar in a stainless steel pot over medium heat. The sugar will turn into sugar crumbles after 4 minutes. After a minute, the sugar will begin to liquify. A minute later, the sugar will take on this deep caramel color. Turn off the stove. DO NOT TOUCH THE CARAMEL OR YOU CAN BURN YOURSELF. Pour the hot caramel into the baking dish and carefully swirl it all around. Set aside to cool down. 

Custard
Add the sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, eggs, vanilla extract, orange zest, and cardamom in a blender. Blend until well combined.

Strain in a fine-mesh strainer five times to reduce the bubbles. Pour the custard filling over the pan with the cold caramel.

Prepare the water bath (bain Marie). 

Carefully transfer the baking dish into a larger baking tray that you can easily fill up with water. In my case, I used my castiron skillet since I didn't have a larger baking dish. Pour boiling water into the LARGER BAKING TRAY so that it's at the halfway mark of the smaller baking dish. Place both items into the preheated oven.

Cover the flan with a foil. Bake for 60 minutes.

Cool, Refrigerate, & Flip

Flan is out of the oven. Remove the baking dish from the water bath, Set aside and let it cool for 1-2 hours. The flan may be slightly jiggly, that's OK.

Once flan is refrigerated and cooled, run a pairing knife around the edges of the baking dish. Take a serving plate and place it over the flan.

Flip. The flan should release onto the serving plate. Now scrape all the caramel off the original baking dish and top it over the flan.

Slice and serve!

Prepared one batch of the recipe in the blender. It yielded 3.5 cups of liquid. Divided this into two 1.75 cups through a strainer. 

Batch 1 - added the zest of 1 orange and 1/16 teaspoon of ground cardamom and blended. This mixture was not strained before adding it to the caramel-lined container. 

Batch 2 - added 110 grams of Philadelphia cream cheese. This yielded 2 cups of liquid which was strained before adding it to the caramel-lined container. 
A third batch resulted from batches 1 and 2 not fitting in the container. 

Batch 3 - Mixture of Batch 1 and 2. 

Batch 1 was not covered in aluminum foil but Batch 2 was. These batches were baked at 325 degrees Fahrenheit in a bain-marie environment until the custard was set but the center wiggly. About 40 minutes. 

Batch 3 didn't have caramel and was baked at 325 degrees, uncovered. 

Results before flans were cool: 
Batch 1 - Intense flavor, lots of "holes". Ryan liked the flavor, Wade didn't.
Batch 2 - Zero holes. Ryan thought it was bland, but Wade liked it. 
Batch 3 - No holes.
 
Perplexing:
Batch 1 and 2 were cooked in bain-marie, same temperature same time. The difference was that Batch 2 was uncovered during the process. Batch 1 had no holes and Batch 2 had lots! 
Batch 3 was cooked separately, in a bain-marie oven at also 325 degrees. It was not covered. It came out smooth and silky without holes. 
What's causing the holes?