Week 3:Pate a Choux

After spending two weeks working on bread (that's 32+ hours), I was certainly ready to move on to more traditional pastries. This week we learned pate a choux, the dough used for cream puffs, eclairs, etc etc. I had made it once before in my recreational course, so I was excited to make something that I had actually done at least one before.

But, after getting last pick for this week's lab, I was left with the most complicated recipe. It turned out to be a great thing for me. After having the rug pulled out from under me at work earlier in the day, it took a project like this to get mind on anything other than work.

I was tasked with making the St. Honore (name for the patron saint of pastry chefs!). The dessert consists of several components, which is what makes it such a time consuming project.

First, I started by making puff pastry for the first time. Because this is only used for the base of the cake, we made a 'blitz puff' (insert joke here) which was less time consuming:

Puff pastry, rolled out after. After being chilled it's cut into rounds

Next up is the Pate a Choux itself. Its actually a surprisingly simple recipe. After boiling the water, butter and salt you add it to the flour in a mixer. The trickiest part is adding eggs one at a time until you get the desired consistency:

Pate a Choux

At this point you can pipe the pastry into a variety of shapes, such as eclairs.

You also have to option to add cheese (and other fine, savory items) to the dough and either bake them or fry them into blintzes. The blintzes were too delicious to be willing to put one down to take a photo-sorry folks:After cutting out the puff pastry rounds, you pipe the pate a choux in 2 stacks that trace the shape. The final baked product looks like this (I preferred the mini guys):

Next came the most petrifying moment of the night-making caramel. which only requires sugar, water, and corn syrup. But with temps at 220, dipping the cream puffs into the pot was a bit scary. That, and the dish you are left with.


 The final step is to fill the shell with a cream made of pastry cream, with gran marnier and whipped cream folded in (yum!): Here's the final product:

Here are some other pate a choux creations completed by my classmates:

Chocolate Filled Cream Puffs with Vanilla Fondant

Profiteroles with Ginger Ice Cream and Chocolate Ganache

Cream Puff Swan

Divorce: Two Cream puffs, one coffee & one chocolate, held together by buttercream. 

This is the Paris-Brest, name for a bicycle race from Paris to Brest (not cause it's shaped like a boob, which was my original thought). It's baked with almonds and was filled with a hazelnut praline cream that was truly scrumptious

Paris-Brest

Probably the best named dessert of the night is the Religieuse, named so because allegedly, it looks like a nun. Chef Delphin insisted that the top cream puff not be filled so that it was 'empty like a nun's head. Gotta love a fresh french man with my sense of humor:

Stay tuned for Classic Doughs!