Buffalo Bills party recipes: Maple Natilla Custard – Week 10 at Dolphins

Whether it’s tailgating or homegating, fans of the Buffalo Bills are known to be elite tier when it comes to food. Wingin’ It returns for it’s eighth season of Mad Hatter-esque recipes taking inspiration from the Buffalo Bills and their opponents.

There’s an argument to be made that if there’s one category of food I don’t do enough of for this series, it’s desserts. With AFC East teams you’d think I might have given up researching city-inspired, food but with Miami’s deep cultural ties to Cuba there’s still plenty to explore. When you combine both of those ideas you get Cuban desserts and one of those is natilla, a type of custard.

Custard or curd-based desserts can be intimidating, with poor temperature control leading to sweetened scrambled eggs, but I think I have some tips most recipe writers won’t add to help you avoid that. And oh yeah, I give the natilla a little Western New York spin.

Serves: about 4
Active Time: 30 minutes
Total Time: 3 hours

3 cups whole milk, divided (2 and 1)
3 Tbsp cornstarch
4 large egg yolks
5 Tbsp granulated maple sugar
1/4 tsp vanilla extract (or rum)
Ground cinnamon

You will need: Medium saucepan, mixing bowls, egg beater, rubber spatula, sieve (optional, see below), ramekins or small bowls for serving, patience

First and foremost, the most important thing about making custard is that when a recipe calls to “stir continuously” they mean actually continuously. Seriously, don’t stop stirring. If the mixture starts to bubble, it’s too hot and should be turned down. If you cook in a lump, get rid of it, it won’t integrate back into the mixture

You’ll get a pretty obvious thickening, which might seem to come out of nowhere. As noted, keep going for at least a few more minutes.

Recipes for natilla use cinnamon being cooked into the mixture, but this does mean a little different approach with a necessary straining step. It also leads to some juggling of pots and pans. My version should reduce steps and increase the likelihood of it setting correctly.

I mention incrementally increasing the heat. Remember my stove translates to a scale of 1-10. LOW in my case is about 2. The heat gets increased to about a MED or 4 on my stove.