How to make vla / vla recept / vla recipe

Problem

You're Dutch, far away from home, and you miss vla.

Keywords

Vla recept, vla recipe.

Solution

Inspired by a recipe I found, you get:

• 1 liter (slightly more than 1 quart) of whole milk
• 1/4 liter (1 cup) of heavy cream (or less, down to 50ml or 1/4 cup)
• 70 grams (1/3 cup) of sugar
• 2 additional tablespoons of sugar
• 2 eggs
• 40 grams (slightly less than 1/3 cup) of cornstarch
• a half or whole vanilla bean (or plain old vanilla flavoring)
• optional: yellow food coloring

Add a few tablespoons of milk to the cornstarch and stir until the cornstarch dissolves and the liquid is uniform. Heat up the remaining milk in a large pan with a cut open vanilla bean in it.

In the meantime, use a (hand)mixer to beat the 70g of sugar with the eggs until foamy—this takes a few minutes. Keep an eye on the milk. When the milk starts to boil, lower the heat and dump in the cornstarch fluid and stir until somewhat gelatinous—this should take a minute or two, but don't worry if it doesn't get gelatinous. Keep it on a very, very gentle boil.

Slowly pour in the foamy egg/sugar mix into the gently boiling milk; keep it like that while gently stirring and beating the mix until the vla is uniform and somewhat gelatinous.

To cool it, pour the vla into a bowl and lower the bowl into a larger bowl filled with cold water. Stir the vla every few minutes and replace the lukewarm water with cold water. Store in fridge.

Before serving, beat the desired amount of heavy cream with 2 tablespoons of sugar until stiff and stir into the vla—use less cream to keep the vla lighter. If you want to make it look more like the real thing, add 10-15 drops of yellow food coloring and stir.

Optionally sprinkle some hagelslag on it for the full effect.

Enjoy the taste of home.