The Simple, No-Cook Sauce You Need To Try For Your Next Flan

The beauty of flan comes from the contrast between the cool, creamy, pale custard and the burnt, sticky sugar sweetness of an amber caramel. A traditional flan is a showstopping dessert, but it can also be slightly daunting. Making homemade caramel can quickly go wrong, especially when it's a dry caramel, using only sugar and no water or cream. That beautiful golden color can quickly turn burnt and bitter.

Luckily, there's another way: Not making a caramel at all. In James Beard Award-winning cookbook author Alice Medrich's 2012 cookbook, "Sinfully Easy Desserts," she comes up with an ingenious alternative. Before filling the flan dishes with custard mixture, she packs in a thick layer of muscovado sugar and a small amount of salt. By traditionally preparing the dessert, the sugar and salt melt together and liquefy, creating a time-saving, salty-sweet flan sauce that doesn't require any possible misadventures with burning sugar.

Using muscovado sugar for a time-saving flan sauce makes sense. Where traditional flan usually calls for a caramel that starts with white sugar, the muscovado replaces the dark, honeyed, sticky notes you typically get from caramelizing that sugar — without having to carmelize anything.

But muscovado isn't the only sugar you could use; a dark but softer brown sugar, or even a lighter one, will create a slightly different sauce with the same time-saving benefits. Then there's panela, or piloncillo, the unrefined cane sugar with a beautiful complexity, which is popular in countries like Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina; a perfect match for flan. 

Using uncooked sugar and salt as a base also offers the opportunity to infuse flavors into the sauce. Typically, when making a dry caramel, as you would for flan, it's made with no aromatics, and when flavoring caramel, herbs and spices are most commonly infused into the cream used in a dairy caramel. Here, there's no risk of them burning, so mixing in some orange or lemon zest, hard herbs like thyme or rosemary, or even very finely ground allspice, cinnamon, or ginger would give the sauce even more flavor. 

The caramel isn't the only intimidating step in making a flan. Its sweet, wobbly, custardy body is fragile and prone to splitting or seizing when mixed over the stove and in the oven to bake. What's more, baking the flan requires a bain marie (a water bath). Using a dry oven doesn't allow for the mild steam cooking and lower temperature needed to set the custard just so.

Adding marshmallows to the flan base is one great hack you could combine with your no-cook sauce. Thanks to the gelatin in the marshmallows, the resultant mix sets all by itself in the fridge, removing the complex baking step from the process and providing reliably pillowy, jiggly results without any worries about split custard. It's not quite a traditional flan — especially if combined with the no-cook caramel — but it's a surefire route to a delicious dessert.