Mom's Lemon Curd vs Sous Vide Lemon Curd
Mom finally taught me her lemon curd recipe when she was 90. We stood side-by-side at the stove, each stirring our double-boiler frantically. I watched her every move, but it was really frustrating, because she measured nothing.
"Start with four ounces of sugar." I went to get my fancy digital scale, but she pooh-pooed me, grabbed an enormous British tablespoon, and dumped four scoops into her bowl. I howled at the imprecision of it all, and asked her to measure out four scoops into my bowl. When she was done, the scale read 4.0 ounces. I buttoned my lip.
The rest was also purely winging it, but exactly the same amounts of every ingredient went into our double-boilers. Hers turned out markedly better, goshdurn it. (This was back when she was still working. She was a nurse, and described her job as "taking care of old people.")
But lemon curd (and all the other curds you can imagine, like try tracking down actual Seville oranges - the bitter type beloved by marmalade-makers) is trivial via sous vide. Here's the Anova recipe, which involves putting ingredients in a bag, giving them a squish, bathing them, and when they are finished, giving them another squish. It's as good as my Mom's.
From there, it's trivial to stiffen up the recipe a little for making of (say) Napoleons, though I can't imagine why anyone would want to do that:
RIP Mom: she lasted to age 98, living alone until the end.