Egg Pudding Vs Flan: What's The Difference?

Pale, wobbly desserts are pretty common around the world, with flan and egg pudding popular choices. Most custards and puddings are made from eggs and cream, which are not difficult ingredients to find. But if you're interested in making your own flan or egg pudding, you should know what you're working with. What it comes down to is this: Flan is a custard and egg pudding is usually a pudding — but not always. Caramel is also involved, but we'll get into that later.

Both custard and pudding are sweet, goopy desserts made mostly from cream and then cooked. However, custard (and therefore flan) is made with eggs and sweetened milk alongside the cream, and flan itself includes caramel. On the other hand, pudding is made with sugar and some kind of starch to thicken the mixture (usually flour or cornstarch). It gets tricky because egg pudding does include eggs too, but bear with us: In egg pudding, eggs are used only for flavoring and not as a thickening agent. In custards (and therefore flan), the egg itself is the thickening agent that provides the jelly-like texture.

But maybe you're not here for those smaller details — you'd like to know what to expect when they get served to you. Flan is a dessert made by taking eggs, milk, sugar, and sometimes vanilla and adding it into a base of caramelized sugar (which is really just a fancy term for burnt sugar). Then you bake the entire mixture in the oven and, when it's done, you flip the flan over so that the caramel ends up on the top.

Egg pudding has a few different versions depending on whether you're in China, Japan, or elsewhere. A common Chinese egg pudding involves steaming up eggs, sugar, and water or milk on the stove to create a silky dessert that's much less firm than flan. But they're not all that different in the end. In Japan, the most popular "egg pudding" is called purin. But despite being called pudding, it's technically custard, and it's a regional variant of flan.

However, it's all complicated: The term "créme caramel" is often used interchangeably with sweet flan, especially in the United States, but elsewhere they're slightly different. In some parts of the world, "flan" and "egg pudding" also get used interchangeably — this is just how language works over such a large scale. But what we commonly know of as flan and egg pudding, at least in the U.S., come from different continents.

Flan dates all the way back to the Roman Empire, where ancient Romans cooked it up while experimenting with eggs. The dish has traveled quite a bit over the centuries, eventually becoming popular in Latin America when it was brought over by Spanish colonists. Egg pudding was introduced to Japan in the 1800s (eventually leading to purin, meaning "pudding"), and several Chinese egg puddings rose up during the Qing dynasty. Cooked egg and cream desserts are still popular around much of the world today and they're not too difficult to whip up on your own.