ChefSteps is a team of chefs, writers, and food lovers who develop recipes, techniques, and guides to help people cook better at home.

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What is a custard? Well, it’s complicated!Technically speaking, a custard is a liquid that has been thickened or set via the coagulation of egg protein. And while the ingredient lists for different custards might look super similar, small differences in ingredient ratios and preparation can yield wildly different results. Mix eggs, dairy, and sugar together and heat them up gently, and you can make crème anglaise, a custard sauce that’s pourable even when chilled; increase the proportion of dairy and heat the mixture in a ramekin to about the same temperature, hit the surface with a kitchen torch, and you’ve got crème brûlée.These vast differences in results are due to the fact that the egg is a culinary miracle. With a little encouragement and by applying heat precisely, cooks can use eggs to thicken delicious liquids, as with crème anglaise; transform them into pipeable, heat-stabilized gels, as is the case with pastry cream; or make an otherwise impossible emulsion of way-too-much-butter in way-too-little-lemon (hollandaise!), a standard feature on brunch menus all over the world.All of which is to say, custards seemed like a perfect candidate for parametric analysis. We compared 10 of our custard recipes to explore just a little bit of the egg’s enormous potential. We whittled down the candidates from a long list, and we stuck with custards that most people would immediately acknowledge are custards. (Are scrambled eggs a custard? We didn’t want to get into it.)We tasked Matthew Woolen with making them all, and we converted all the ingredient lists into baker’s percentages, with the quantity of eggs as the 100 percent value, noting any unique or interesting additions to the custard base, like Velveeta, gelatin, or cornstarch, and then we plugged them all into a chart so we could compare cooking methods, cooking temperatures, and textures.