What Is Flan?
Everything you need to know about this popular dessert, including how to make it at home.
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By Alice K. Thompson for Food Network Kitchen
Alice is a contributing writer and editor at Food Network.
Creamy, velvety flan is one of the world’s most popular desserts, and it’s easy to see why. Made from straightforward ingredients, it has a spoonable, rich texture and it bakes up with its own irresistible caramel sauce on top. Variations abound throughout Latin America and beyond, but almost all are deliciously recognizable. Here’s exactly what flan is and everything else you need to know about this crowd-pleasing custard.
What Is Flan?
Flan is a baked custard dessert with a layer of caramel on top.
To make flan, you first caramelize sugar, pour it into a round mold or individual baking cups, and then top it with custard made from eggs, milk or other dairy, sugar and flavorings. You bake flan in a water bath, cool and refrigerate it until set, and then flip it to serve so the caramel ends up on top. If it's baked in a large round mold, it’s typically sliced into wedges and served with some of the extra caramel sauce spooned over.
Flan and flan-like desserts are popular around the world, particularly in Latin America. Versions of this custard-and-caramel dessert are called Spanish flan, Mexican flan, Puerto Rican flan, Cuban flan and leche flan in the Philippines. The French version of the dessert is called creme caramel.
What Is Flan Made Of?
Flan is made from an egg custard. It can be based in whole cow's milk or cream, or canned evaporated or condensed milk. A popular variant named flan de queso is made with cream cheese. The custard is typically sweetened with sugar and may be flavored with vanilla, coconut, coffee, chocolate or citrus zest, and sometimes with ingredients like pumpkin and mango.
Unless you’ve made a flan yourself, you may be wondering where the delicious caramel sauce it’s bathed in comes from. It’s easy: Granulated sugar is heated on the stovetop until it melts and caramelizes, and then poured into the bottom of a flan pan as it cools. The custard is poured over the caramel and baked. When the flan is cooled and inverted, the caramel becomes a delicious sauce for the creamy custard.
What Is a Fruit Flan?
Unrelated to the custard dessert known as flan, a fruit flan has a pastry base filled with pastry cream or custard and topped with fresh fruit. A light, sponge-like base is popular in Germany and the United Kingdom, and the fruit toppings are usually colorful and elaborately arranged. The base is often baked in what is known as a “flan ring,” a bottomless metal ring that is set on a sheet pan before the pastry is added.
Flan Recipes
Caitlin Ochs
Flavored with vanilla bean, Rick Martinez’s flan is a classic Mexican version of the dessert. A combination of half cream and half milk makes the custard particularly rich, and a generous amount of caramel means there’s plenty to spoon up when the flan is unmolded.
Teri Lyn Fisher
This Filipino flan is rich and dense from a custard made with evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk and only egg yolks. Vanilla and lemon zest provide simple, classic flavors in this decadent dessert.
Con Poulos
Flavored flans are very popular, and this version gets complexity from the combination of cinnamon, espresso powder and vanilla, while the caramel is flecked with orange zest. The rich custard base is made from a combination of half-and-half and sweetened condensed milk.
This recipe calls for premade eggnog, meaning you can make a deliciously flavorful flan with just three ingredients. The instructions for making the caramel couldn’t be easier, too.
Ingrid Hoffmann's version of the cream-cheese-based flan de queso is made in individual ramekins, an excellent idea for entertaining and one you can use for just about any flan recipe if you adjust the baking time.
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