Crème anglaise is a custard sauce made from milk, egg yolks, and sugar, flavoured with vanilla. It's easy to make and you can serve most desserts with crème anglaise or transform it into ice cream!
Set a medium metal bowl in a large bowl of ice water and have a fine sieve at the ready.
Combine the milk and half the sugar in a 3-quart saucepan. Set the pan over medium heat, stirring occasionally to encourage the sugar to dissolve. Heat the mixture through but do not allow it to boil (this is key to avoid making scrambled eggs!). Remove from the heat.
Put the egg yolks and salt in a small heatproof bowl and gently whisk to break up the yolks. Whisk in the remaining half of sugar and beat the mixture until the yolks become very pale and light. Gradually whisk in the warm sweet milk mixture. Pour the yolk mixture back into the saucepan, and whisk to combine.
Cook over medium-low heat (slow and steady), stirring constantly with a clean wooden spoon until the custard thickens enough to coat the back of the spoon and hold a line drawn through it with a finger, about 10 minutes. An instant-read thermometer should register around 85 ºC (185°F). Do not let the sauce overheat or boil because then you will probably curdle the mixture, making scrambled eggs. Immediately strain the sauce through the sieve into the bowl set in the ice-water bath.
Gently whisk in the vanilla bean paste (or vanilla extract). Stir the custard occasionally until cool, about 10 minutes. Transfer it to a large container. Cover and refrigerate for about 1 hour, until the custard sauce is velvety and thick.
Serve over summer berries, slices of cake, or you can add cream and churn it to make your vanilla bean ice cream.
Notes
This recipe makes about 3 cups of custard sauce. Remember that crème anglaise and custard sauces are not made with thickeners like flour. Flour and/or cornstarch are thickeners used to make pastry cream.
Vanilla: You can make this vanilla custard sauce with vanilla extract, paste, or beans, but you add them at different points in the recipe:
vanilla bean: add it to the milk at the beginning and heat them together to infuse the milk with the bean before tempering the eggs
vanilla extract: add it off the heat, whisking it into the hot custard sauce after cooking it
vanilla paste: add it off the heat, whisking it into the hot custard sauce after cooking it
Milk: a real crème anglaise is made with milk, not cream, either 2 % fat or even 3.25 % whole milk.
Orange flavour: add the zest of an orange to the milk when you heat it on the stove. This will lead to a lovely orange-flavoured custard sauce.
Custard sauce containing egg yolks must reach at least 71 °C (160 °F) to be safe to consume
Cool custard sauces down fast to make sure they don't linger in the danger zone between 4.5 °C and 60 °C (40 °F and 140 °F) for more than 2 hours. Use an ice bath to bring the temperature down as fast as possible, then refrigerate immediately.