This post could begin in a number of different ways. I could write about my memories of my mother turning pate a choux dough into a fabulous Paris Brest to bring to dinner parties with her adult friends. Or I could write about the wonderfully crazy things written in the Book of Awesome that Bea and Company presented to me earlier in the month. Or I could write about my lifelong love of learning new things. Or I could even write about how I am a sucker for a good sale. But no matter how this post begins, it will end the same way: with me stuffing my face with homemade cream puffs and profiteroles.
The truth of what happened is that my friend from south of the Mason Dixon line (let’s call her Elle) and her boyfriend agreed to come up to New England for a foodie weekend: a dinner party at my house on Saturday night and a Parisian patisserie class at the local cooking school on Sunday morning. I thought I might have to cancel the whole thing because I wasn’t quite up to snuff Friday night; fortunately, it wasn’t anything that a good hard sleep and some DayQuil couldn’t fix.
It just so happened that my favorite chef instructor was teaching the class. Despite my fear of pate a choux dough, she assured me that it would be very easy: all we had to do was cook it, pipe it, and bake it.
Pate a choux dough actually begins with just butter and water in a pan over medium high heat. The butter will eventually melt, but nothing exciting happens until there is a thin rim of bubbles around the edge of the pan. When this ring appears, it’s time to add the salt and the flour. At first, the dough will look pretty funky. With some elbow grease, it can beaten into a smooth mass. This is all happening over the heat so that the flour flavor cooks out of the dough. When a thin film starts forming on the bottom of the pan, the dough is ready to come off the heat.
The dough goes straight from the pan into mixer fitted with a paddle to cool. Not that the dough just sits there and cools down; the mixer gets cranked up to a fairly high speed to beat the steam out of it - and help develop the gluten. Once the mixer bowl has reduced down to around body temperature, it is time to add the eggs. They are supposed to go in one at a time, but two at a time won’t do much harm. The dough gets all slimy looking when the egg is added at first, but then it smooths out when the egg is fully incorporated. That’s when the next egg should get added. As it turns out, choux dough is a bit temperamental and sensitive to heat and humidity. Therefore, not all the eggs should be added to the dough. We added four out of six eggs, and then we stopped the mixer to do a string test on the dough to see how well the gluten had developed. Basically, a string test requires taking a fair glob of dough between the thumb and forefinger, and then stretching the two fingers apart. If the dough forms a sturdy string about 1 1/2 to 2 inches long, the dough is good to go. If not, turn back on the mixer, add another egg, beat until smooth, and test again.
In class, each team made 1 1/2 recipes of choux dough so that we could divide it into thirds to make half of each pastry recipe. That’s right, we were making THREE different pastries! The first two pastries were made from naked choux dough, so we filled two piping bags each with one-third of the dough. The third pastry was a savory pastry. Into the remaining one-third of the dough we mixed thyme and other spices along with grated Gruyere cheese. It actually doesn’t have to be Gruyere; it can be any kind of drier harder cheese, like manchego, asiago, parmesan, and so forth. Just not things like mozzarella, cheddar, feta, and other wetter or oiler cheeses. Once the herbs, spices, and cheese was mixed into the dough, that too got loaded into a piping bag.
After all the piping bags were loaded, we snipped off the tips and started piping. One of the naked bags was for profiterole shells, which were about the same size as macarons, about two inches in diameter. In fact, we were able to use a macaron template to guide our piping efforts. The other naked bag was for cream puffs, which were larger and done freeform on the parchment paper. Finally, the savory piping bag was also piped using a macaron template underneath the parchment paper.
Piping the little puffs were easy: hold the bag almost 90 degrees to the baking tray (about a quarter inch away from the surface), then pipe until the dough fills the circle, and quickly swipe to one side to break contact. It can be very quick and efficient, or very slow and meditative. Piping the larger puffs were more challenging. That required spiraling a coil from the inside out, and then spiraling it into a pyramid, and then breaking contact. Fortunately, I stuck to the little puffs and Elle handled the larger ones.
Baking and Freezing Pate a Choux Pastries
Choux pastries bake for about an hour, but it isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it process. For the first twenty minutes, the pastries need to bake at 400F to puff up. The next twenty minutes is at 350F in order to cook the insides of the pastries. The final fifteen to twenty minutes is at 300F to dry out the insides. The oven must remain shut for the first forty minutes, but can be opened when the heat is reduced to 300F in order to rotate the trays. In fact, the initial blast of heat is so important to puffing the pastries that our chef instructor recommended starting the oven at 450F prior to putting in the trays with the piped pastries because the oven will lose heat when it is opened. Once the pastries are in, the oven should be turned down to 400F for its first twenty minutes of baking.
Our chef instructor even provided us with instructions for freezing baked choux pastries. The key is to allow the baked pastries to cool to room temperature before freezing. The fully cooled pastries then can go into a heavy duty ziploc bag, which should be labelled and dated because the pastries will only last in the freezer about three months without freezer burn or ice crystals. The pastries should go into the bag whole rather than split in halves. The pastries should never be frozen with fillings. The filled pastries in the supermarket freezer section are made with stabilizers to allow the fillings to be frozen without disintegrating the pastries themselves. Homemade fillings are all natural and will not be pretty when frozen. The frozen pastries should come out of the freezer the night before they are going to be served so that they can defrost overnight (or at least twelve hours) in the refrigerator. Actually, they can hang out in the refrigerator for a few days without any damage. When ready to serve, refresh the pastries in a 350F oven for five to seven minutes to toast and warm them, as well as dry out the insides a bit more. Of course, they should be allowed to cool before filling.
Making the Fillings
While our pastries were baking, we made two different types of fillings: a chocolate espresso whipped cream and a vanilla bean pastry cream.
The whipped cream was more of a demonstration by our chef instructor, but each of our teams got a bag of it to pipe with. Of course, our chef instructor shared a neat tip that I had never known. She said that if your whipped cream is heading toward butter because you’ve been overzealous with the whipping, you can add a bit more cold whipping cream and whip it slightly to bring it back to life. I didn’t know that!
The vanilla pastry cream was a revelation to me: I had never had very good luck making puddings or pastry cream. This one was made with cornstarch, which is an ingredient that has always frightened me because of its quick thickening power. But there were a few tricks to getting it right. First, the milk should be heated just to a simmer, but stay on the heat. The hot milk gets added one ladle at a time to the egg mixture in order to temper the eggs. Once about half the milk is added to the egg mixture, the egg mixture can get poured back into the simmering milk. After that, it’s all about the whisking! Vigorous whisking will keep the mixture smooth as it cooks. All you need is one good bubble - our chef instructor called it a “bloop” - to form, and then the pastry cream can be removed from the heat. If the egg mixture was properly tempered and fanatically whisked, then it should be so smooth that there is no need to run it through a sieve.
After the pastry cream and all the puffs had cooled, there was nothing left to do except slice open the naked puffs with a serrated knife and fill them with the whipped cream and/or the pastry cream. At some point in the class, a chocolate ganache happened, so we were able to use that to glaze our naked puffs. The savory puffs just got popped in our mouths like little bits of air.
Elle and her boyfriend really enjoyed the class, so I’ll be interested to learn whether they put their new skills to work in the kitchen this fall. Her favorite were the savory puffs, while mine were the little profiteroles. I had one with both types of cream and the chocolate ganache, and it was so good!
I would definitely take another class at the local cooking school with my favorite chef instructor. In fact, Little Z is coming to town a little later in the month, and I’m treating her to a croissant class. Although the website has yet to announce the chef instructor, I’ll bet it will be my favorite one again!
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