Culinary Torch

I'm in the market for a culinary torch to make creme brulee.

Here are the candidates:
Bonjour® Professional Creme Brulee Torch
Creme Brulee Torch Set
Culinary Torch
Williams-Sonoma

Anyone out there w/experience or a favorite? Thanks!

In my experience all of these so called "Professional" torches are worthless due to the relatively small output. You'll spend minutes caramelizing each brulee.

I'd stick with the Benzomatic. Just make sure you're using it over a heat proof surface. I lay a sheet pan over our steel sink and brulee on it.

I also use the torch to char the skins of peppers to easily remove them.

Flip

Pucca,

If you want something more durable and built to take a licking, you might want to look at these, which are reliable enough to do hundreds at a time and do them quickly. We get them from Marlin Foodservice but Edward Don probably has them as well.

www.iwatani.com

Flip wrote:I'd stick with the Benzomatic.

Louisa Chu has an article at Chow that pretty much echoes Flip's sentiments.

I couldn't find any other threads and most of the links above are broken.

I'm looking for a torch for browning/crisping sous-vide cooked proteins. Any recommendations?

ziggy wrote:I couldn't find any other threads and most of the links above are broken.

I'm looking for a torch for browning/crisping sous-vide cooked proteins. Any recommendations?

Or, for something a little more suited to the home cook, the Bonjour torch works pretty well.

http://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/store/p ... 1013057451

I agree with the above sentiments, including that we use ours to char peppers. Get a torch kit intended for plumbers not home cooks. I had one of those wimpy "creme brulee" torches from Williams-Sonoma, and was instructed to fill it with a little gas thingy from the pipe section at Walgreen's. Yeah, great idea! It took an unbelievable amount of time to fill (the gaseous equivalent of drip by drip) and would barely make it through an entire dessert. After seeing professionals (I have a visual of the pastry chef at Red Light) using grown-up toys, I asked my then-boyfriend for a bigger and better model. I think he liked that I asked for a gift from a hardware store--been married 9 years and still hold that torch for him.

I totally agree with the others who suggested real blow torches. I went to my local Ace. They have fantastic service and the 2 guys who came up while I was checking out the torches were really impressed that I was planning on buying a torch to brulee.