Uruguayan · Dessert
Flan
About this recipe
Uruguayan cooking shares the Argentine reverence for beef and asado but adds its own gulf-coast traditions: chivito sandwiches, milanesas, the rich Italian-influenced pasta of Montevideo.
As a dessert, Flan is the part of cooking where ratio precision matters most: a five-percent miss on flour or sugar changes the texture in a way no savoury dish would notice. Weighing in grams beats measuring in cups every time.
Set your servings in the scaler above and every line of the recipe rewrites itself with smart fractions and unit promotion. Open Cook Mode to step through it hands-free with timers running.
Recipe data is sourced from TheMealDB's open community database; ScaleRecipe handles the curation, the scaling math, the editorial commentary, and the conversion utilities woven into each page.
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Method
- For the caramel place 100 grams of sugar in a frying pan without any fat and melt on medium heat. Try not to stir with a spoon, but swirl the pan itself. Let melt until you have an amber color and sugar is fully melted. Fill the bottom of four flan containers with it. Caramel will harden immediately, so you need to be fast. My containers yield about 120 milliliters each.
- 2
- Preheat oven to 150 degrees Celsius and look for a casserole or container all your four flan containers fit into.
- 3
- Heat milk with 45 grams of sugar and the cut and scraped out vanilla pod. The milk does not need to boil, just needs to be heated. Take out vanilla pod after a few minutes. Meanwhile stir the egg yolks and eggs gently, try not to incorporate any air in it. Them pour milk-mix into egg-mix and again only stir very gently. Pour into prepared flan containers and place these into your casserole or container. Boil water and pour the water into the large casserole. Be sure not to touch the flan mixture. Place on middle rack in the oven and let bake for about 35-40 minutes. An inserted toothpick should come out clean.
- 4
- Let cool inside the container for an hour before transferring to the fridge. Chill overnight. The next day gently release the rim and then turn upside down on a plate. Serve with some dulce de leche on the side.
Cooking notes
Baked goods are unforgiving with rounding — use weights rather than volumes whenever possible, and verify pan capacity if you scale up or down significantly.
For volume-to-weight conversions of any ingredient — flour, sugar, butter, salts — use the ingredient converter. To translate the recipe's oven temperature between °C, °F and gas mark, see the temperature converter.
When you scale this recipe up or down, remember that cooking time does not scale linearly. A doubled cake takes longer, but not twice as long; a doubled soup takes roughly twice as long. The cooking-time guide gives sensible starting estimates by dish geometry.
Scaling notes
Scaling Flan
Flan is written for around four servings as it stands on this page — scaling it up for a party or down for a meal-for-one is the small math problem most home cooks face every week. Here's how this particular dish responds to scaling, what changes linearly, and what doesn't.
Desserts are the most scaling-sensitive category, and Flan is no exception — the leavening, fat, and liquid ratios all interact. Doubling means a doubled pan AREA (not diameter), and bake time scales by the cube root of the volume change: a doubled cake takes about 26 % longer, not 100 %. Weigh ingredients in grams rather than measuring in cups for consistent results.
This recipe calls for eggs, which are the trickiest ingredient to scale to non-integer multiples. A US "large" egg weighs about 50 g; if a fractional scaling lands on, say, 1.5 eggs, beat one egg and weigh 25 g of the beaten mixture rather than guessing. The same goes for halving recipes — half an egg is 25 g of beaten egg, not a dramatic estimate.
Skip the math entirely — ScaleRecipe's scaler rewrites every ingredient line above with proper culinary fractions and smart unit promotion the moment you change the serving count. Open the scaler →
Beyond the recipe
Substitutions & make-ahead — Flan
Two things home cooks ask about most when they're outside the recipe's exact assumptions: what swaps work for which ingredients, and how the dish behaves when you make it ahead. Both depend on what Flan is doing structurally — here's the practical version.
Substitution ideas
Eggs
For binding (cookies, quick breads, meatballs): 1 large egg ≈ 1 tbsp ground flaxseed + 3 tbsp water, rested 5 minutes until gelled — structurally closest to a real egg. For moisture without structure (cakes, brownies): ¼ cup unsweetened applesauce or mashed banana per egg, accepting some loss of rise.
Dairy milk
Unsweetened soy milk substitutes 1:1 in custards and baked goods (the protein content matches). Oat milk gives a creamier mouthfeel for soups and coffee drinks. Almond milk works for lighter applications. Skip coconut milk in savoury recipes unless the dish calls for it — the flavour is unmistakable.
For weight-based swaps and arbitrary quantities, the ingredient density converter and the cup-to-grams chart cover most pantry staples.
Make-ahead and storage
Most desserts in Flan's family can be made one day ahead, but storage matters more than for savoury dishes. Cakes and breads go in an airtight container at room temperature — refrigeration stales them faster than room air. Custards, cream-based fillings, and any dessert with eggs as a structural ingredient must refrigerate. For freezer storage, unfrosted cake layers wrap tightly and keep 2 months; frosted versions ice-crystal within 3-4 weeks.
Recipe video
Flan
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Volume
Tablespoons, teaspoons, cups, ml, fluid ounces — every culinary volume unit, with US/metric/imperial cups handled distinctly.
OpenWeight
Grams, ounces, pounds, kilograms — exact for any ingredient, plus the volume-to-weight conversions for ~40 pantry staples.
OpenTemperature
Fahrenheit, Celsius, gas mark — translate any oven temperature, with notes on conventional vs convection.
OpenCooking time
The cube-root rule for scaling up, the differences between meat / cake / soup geometry, and sensible starting estimates.
OpenPan size
9-inch round vs 8-inch square vs 13×9. The math is surface area, not diameter — and the converter shows you both.
OpenLength
Inches and centimetres — for when a recipe says “cut into 1-inch pieces” and your ruler is metric.
OpenIngredient density
A cup of flour weighs 120 g; a cup of honey weighs 340. The full table of ~40 staples, with sources.
OpenOpen in main scaler
Edit the recipe text, scale by serving count, and copy the result. Same parser as the in-page scaler, more room to work.
OpenFrom the journal
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