When it comes to desserts, I try my best to abide by the “treat treats as treats” rule. It’s for that reason, desserts are few and far between here on KetoGasm. This keto Chocolate Pots de Créme recipe is indeed a rare occasion.
I’m not against keto desserts. In fact, I think it’s pretty damn cool that people with ketogenic dietary restrictions can have low carb versions of sweets for special occasions. But desserts and sweets can be a slippery slope for many, myself included.
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If you’re anything like me, your insatiable sweet tooth may have been the primary contributing factor to starting keto in the first place. I’m just one of those people who have a hard time saying “when” once I get a taste of sugar, whether it’s the real deal or a low carb knockoff.
Store-bought keto candies and bars get me in trouble. If I want a treat, I make it at home and take full control of the ingredients and portion sizes. I also tend to make it an elaborate enough process that it’s not practical to do all the time, but still makes for a fun project.
As food writer and activist, Michael Pollan puts it, “There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion. Special occasion foods offer some of the great pleasures of life, so we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of them, but the sense of occasion needs to be restored.” I agree wholeheartedly.
These keto chocolate pots de créme are special occasion food. I made these for Valentine’s day this year! For me, the holiday is not quite the same without chocolate. Last year, I made these keto chocolates with macadamia nut and coconut oil!
I adapted the recipe from the Sous Vide at Home
cookbook by Lisa Q. Fetterman to take my favorite new kitchen gadget
where it’s never gone before: the sweet stuff. This cookbook isn’t technically a keto cookbook, but there’s a ton of keto recipes to be found in it (Eggs, Fish and Shellfish, Poultry, Meats, and Vegetables are the foundational chapters)! If you’re keto and diving into sous vide cooking techniques, I highly recommend it.
Use Lily's dark chocolate chips
and Swerve granular erythritol
in place of the chocolate and sugar. Erythritol is my sweetener of choice all around due to it’s low impact on blood sugar, superior taste, and kindness to my tummy. Many of the other low carb sweeteners have a terrible aftertaste, some still spike your blood sugar, and leave me with a killer stomach ache.
Other ingredients include heavy cream, vanilla extract, salt, and egg yolk.
Bring the heavy cream to a light simmer, and once the soft bubbles appear on the surface, whisk in everything but the egg yolks and remove from heat. Whisk in the yolks one at a time until everything looks like a smooth, creamy chocolate pudding. Divvy the mixture between six 4-ounce mason jars and screw on the lids fingertip tight to allow air bubbles to release once you submerge the jars in the water bath. Fingertip tight means don’t crank those tops on there! But don’t leave the lids loose enough that water pours in when you start cooking them. Fingertip tight.
Now to my favorite new gadget: the Anova Precision Cooker. I used it to create a consistently heated water bath in this recipe, but this handy tool has been pretty much rocking the proteins in my kitchen every day. Perfectly cooked steaks, poultry, and seafood for dinner every night by way of sous vide. By perfect, I mean precisely cooked. Nothing overcooked, nothing undercooked. The Anova Precision Cooker is fantastic and easily worth its weight in gold.
I knew if it took the guesswork out of tricky proteins, it would be killer for all the things I suck at baking! You could substitute a traditional water bath in the oven to bake these keto chocolate pots de créme, but the sous vide method was approximately 5000x easier. So there’s that.
Take your fingertip tight mason jars, place in the water bath, cook for an hour and chill for three. These keto chocolate pots de créme are decadent and an excellent choice for a special occasion! Enjoy!
Ingredients
- 12 oz Heavy Cream 180g
- 4 oz Lily's Dark Chocolate Baking Chips 113 g
- 3 tablespoons Erythritol 36g
- 1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
- Pinch Salt
- 4 Egg Yolks
Instructions
- Prepare a sous vide water bath set to 176 degrees F (80 degrees C).
- Bring heavy cream to a simmer.
- Whisk Lily's dark chocolate baking chips, erythritol, vanilla extract, and salt in with cream. Remove from heat.
- Whisk in egg yolk one at a time until mixture is smooth.
- Transfer mixture to a pourable measuring cup to easily divide mixture.
- Divide mixture into six 4-ounce mason jars.
- Screw on lids fingertip tight.
- Place sealed jars at the bottom of the water bath.
- Cook custards for 1 hour.
- Remove jars from the water bath using tongs. (They're hot! Watch out!)
- Place the jars in the fridge to cool and set for a minimum of 3 hours.
- Serve as is or topped with whipped cream and cinnamon.
Notes
Nutrition
Hi, I'm Tasha–nutritionist, recipe developer, and multi-published cookbook author.
Looks Delicious
I'll be trying this for sure ☺ I also have an Anova. Do you have other low carb sous vide recipes? I'd love to see them.
Thanks so much
Hey Beverly! I just recently posted a sous vide chicken roulade recipe you might enjoy!
I should definitely make more for the site. Chef Nicole Poirier does recipe development for Anova and she's actually on the keto diet herself; loads of her recipes are low carb/keto. Hope that helps!
I have a lot of large mason jars, would this recipe still work for that if i only filled them to the 4 ounce mark?
You definitely can use larger jars! Just make sure to close the lid "fingertip tight" and don't crank down so the air bubbles can escape. 🙂
So if I do a traditional water bath would I just leave the lids off?
11 net carbs lol
The label doesn't have an option for sugar alcohols, there's a note above it that explains the net carb count. 🙂
Hi! I have an egg allergy, have you tried it withou?
i'm hesitant to use lily's chocolate chips because they have stevia, and i don't like the taste of stevia. if i use unsweetened chocolate, i wonder how much monk fruit or erythritol i should be adding to the recipe?
ketogasm--badass babes--pretty damn cool--who are you trying to impress? This is not cool at all. If you are trying to get readers, cussing will lose a lot of us fat middle-aged ladies. Like me.
😭
These look delicious. I received the Anova sous vide for Christmas and have only tried egg bites so far. I’m not in to artificial sweeteners though. How about maple syrup or honey in this? Would I use a little less than the 3tbs of sweetener?
This recipe was a big hit. Very rich, dense texture. Found the 4 oz mason jars at Target. Topped it with sugar free whipped cream. The Anova sous vide method worked perfectly. So easy. Will definitely make this again.
I don't have a sous vide attachment and really don't want to invest in another kitchen tool (cupboards and drawers are full). I do have just about everything else (slow cookers, roaster, InstaPot, oven). Can these be cooked in an oven with a water bath like regular custard? If so, lid on or off?
Thanks in advance for your reply.
Yes, you can do a hot water bath bain marie style just like a regular custard. Bake with lid off and take care not to spill water into them--300 degrees Fahrenheit for about 30 minutes should do the trick!
Can you use Swerve in place of erythritol? Also can I use a different type of chocolate? I really want to try this. It looks so good.
Yes, you can use your sweetener of choice to taste. 🙂
Do you think coconut milk from the can would work? We have a dairy allergy?
Hi! This recipe looks great. I am just double checking, because on the heavy whipping cream the ounces and gram measurements don’t match. Which one is correct? 12 oz would be more like 340 g.
This is fabulous ! So rich and creamy! This is my top Keto dessert for when I'm entertaining guests that are on the Keto diet or not. You will love it!
Mine are coming out too dense and thick. Should I lower the egg yolks or cooking time for a softer consistency? They are delicious!
So I followed this recipe only I substituted the sweetener for splenda (that's all I had). I used one tablespoon instead of three, and I used organic 70% cacao baking chips. After letting them cook at 176 like the recipe suggested, they came out soupy. I checked Andrew Zimmerman's website and cooked them instead at 375 for 35 minutes. They came out perfectly!
Hi, this is a great recipe and I've made it a few times, but sometimes it's a disaster! It's because I use metric measurements, and they are hard-coded in the ingredients list, so they don't adjust for quantities. Eg for 6 servings, you list 12 oz of cream (180g) and 4 oz of chocolate (113g) but if I change the quantities to 4 servings, the oz amounts automatically adjust but the grams stay the same. Arrghh!! Really appreciate adding the grams but a recipe template that allows a selection between Imperial and Metric would be better.
Thanks.
Thank you for letting me know! It's definitely something wonky with my recipe plugin, it should automatically calculate the appropriate conversion from my input. It sounds like I'll need to investigate what input agrees/disagrees with the conversions to make it a seamless transition. I appreciate the heads up so I'm aware of the issue!
Thanks for the speedy response. Another question - when I make this and chill it, it's quite dense. Should it be light and custardy or sort of "set firm". I have a problem with fresh ingredients (all dairy products are UHT where I live) so I sometimes get unexpected results.