Day Twenty Four

Ok so this is what is going on. This week it is all about Choux paste. Choux paste, you don’t know what that is, or how to pronounce it, let me explain then.

Pâté à choux is a light pastry dough used to make profiteroles, croquembouches, éclairs, French crullers, beignets, St. Honoré cake, Indonesian kue sus, and gougères. It contains only butter, water, flour, and eggs. In lieu of a raising agent it employs high moisture content to create steam during cooking to puff the pastry.

Choux pastry is usually baked but for beignets it is fried. In Spain and Latin America churros are made of fried choux pastry, sugared and dipped in a thin chocolate blancmange for breakfast. In Austrian cuisine it is also boiled to make Marillenknödel, a sweet apricot dumpling; in that case it does not puff, but remains relatively dense. They are sometimes filled with cream and used to make cream puffs or eclairs

Thank you Wikipedia, and for it’s pronunciation as far as I can tell it’s pronounced like Shoe.

Today we made some which is kind of a cool process because it is dough that cooks twice. Water, salt sugar, and butter come to a boil in a pan. Wait, hold up, up above it says this dough only has butter, water, flour, and eggs, but I said salt and sugar. Well yea, it would taste like crap with out those. Besides that came from Wikipedia, what do they know anyways. So as soon as it boils you dump in your flour and stir it together so it becomes this thick mashed potatoy glob. With you rubber spatula you continue to move it around the pan for about five minutes. It’s good to employ a type of cutting scrape so that the dough can incorporate all the four and also let out some steam. You this is the first cooking stage for the dough, as it cooks in the pan the steam released represents moister, moister that can be put back in, in the form of eggs.

Now the eggs are what really puff up this dough so the more you can put in the puffier you get. But you only put eggs in till you get a specific consistency, so the more steam you let be released the more eggs you can put in. but the longer you cook it in the pan the higher chance you have of burning it. A real Sophie’s Choice.

So out of the pan and into a Kitchen Aid with a paddle attachment and beat away. Start adding eggs after a minute or so and stop when you reach you consistency. What you are looking for is a shiny sticky dough that looks like a thick cake batter, not runny, but will hold together between you fingers when you pull them apart. After that you can put it in a piping bag and do just about what ever you want with them. We spent about an hour or so practicing a few shapes. We would pipe them onto a piece of parchment paper and then scrape it back into our bowls, and back into out bags. Then we piped out the Choux shape, which is just a small round shape. We gave them some egg wash and cover the top in sugar pieces before tossing them in the oven.

Next we started on a Paris-Brest; a Paris-Brest is a choux paste wheel. You pipe a circle of choux paste using your Big Star Tip, and then another circle on it’s inside. Then a third circle is piped on to where the first two meet. This gets and egg wash and baked and when it comes out of the oven it’s a wheel. Eventually we will slice them laterally and fill them with hazelnut cream. Now the origin of the Paris-Brest goes back to a famous bike race that goes between Paris and Brest. Some baker along the rout made these because they are in the shape of a bike tire. Cool hu?