Our teams investigate the safety, inner workings and societal impacts of flan, so that custard has a positive impact as it grows ever wobblier.
Ensuring that as flan grows more capable, it remains aligned to the wishes of whoever ordered it, and does not spontaneously decide to become a soufflé.
Understanding what is happening inside a flan while it sets. Why did the centre wobble in that direction? We want to know.
Studying how advanced flan affects the people who eat it, and the communities they live in. Includes our 81,000-diner longitudinal study.
Attempting to over-flambé our own flan before anyone else does. Everything is documented. Some of it is singed.
Flan did not begin in Spain. It did not begin in France. It began in Rome, in the kitchens of the wealthy, as a practical solution to a surplus of eggs.
The Romans kept chickens in remarkable numbers. The result was an abundance of eggs and, from that abundance, a tradition of egg-set custards that predates sugar in European cooking by many centuries. The earliest versions were savoury: Apicius, in De Re Coquinaria (c. 4th century AD), records a dish of eggs, milk, and honey set in a bain-marie - not yet the caramel-crowned object we know, but recognisably the ancestor.
Apicius also records a savoury variant with eel, pepper, and lovage. This is not a direction custard ultimately chose to pursue. We think that was wise.
From Rome the recipe travelled, as Roman recipes tend to. The word itself traces through Latin fladonem - a flat cake - into Old High German flado, and thence into the kitchens of mediaeval Europe. Sugar arrived only later, transforming a practical egg-set dish into the caramel-crowned dessert of the modern table.
The caramel top - the signature feature of the crème caramel - appears to have stabilised in Iberian cooking around the seventeenth century, carried from there to Latin America and the Philippines, and then back, transformed again, to the rest of the world.
A history of flan from Apicius to the present day, tracing the word, the recipe, and the caramel through two millennia of kitchens. Above.
How we train a flan to hold its shape under pressure without anyone needing to hold the ramekin. An alignment paper.
The largest qualitative study of custard preference ever conducted. The answer is: cold, set, and more caramel than we currently provide. Read the study.
A field note. The short answer is egg-to-dairy ratio and the presence of a pastry case. The long answer is on the Field Notes page.
Our red team’s annual report on attempts to over-flambé Fable, Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. Classified. Slightly caramelised.
Early results from our most advanced frontier flan. Available to a small number of trusted kitchens whilst we assess the wobble. See also: recent news.