Today on Sugar Spun Run, I'll be showing you how to make pastry cream.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers, Sam here! And today,
I am so excited to be sharing another carefully tested,
well researched, and perfected recipe.
Now when I say perfected, I really do mean perfected.
I actually, originally shared a pastry cream a few years ago.
It works great. You can still use that one,
it yields the same results, you're going to get today,
but it was a lot more complicated. It was made using the more
traditional way, in which you had to carefully
temper the eggs. And I, after a lot of experimenting,
I just realized there was a simpler way to do it.
And so today, I'm really excited to be sharing this much easier method with you,
so let's get to it. Now for today's recipe, you are going to need a cup of heavy cream,
which I have in this large measuring cup, and you are also going to need a cup of milk,
which I'm going to be adding to the large measuring cup.
Now you are also going to need five egg yolks,
so let's go ahead and separate these. Easiest way to do that is just crack the
egg and pass the yolk back
and forth until the white falls off. If you have any of those stringy proteins hanging on,
just use the other half of the shell to kind of break those off.
And add that yolk right in with our milk and our cream.
As for the egg whites, you can either discard them
or save them to make one of my recipes that use just egg whites,
like my meringue cookies. I'll link to a few of those below the printable recipe.
Now we want to make sure our egg yolks are nicely broken up
and completely incorporated with our milk and our cream,
so we're just going to whisk these together really well
until the yolks are all broken up and everything’s well combined.
We'll set this aside. Now let's head over to the stove top, where
you are going to need a medium sized saucepan.
In this saucepan, we’ll combine 2/3 cup of granulated sugar, with 3 tablespoons of cornstarch,
and just 1/4 teaspoon of salt. And use a clean, dry whisk to whisk these ingredients together.
This is going to break up any lumps that might be in your corn starch
and make sure that we have a nice smooth pastry cream.
All right, so now we're going to keep whisking this cornstarch mixture
and, while we are whisking, we're going to gradually pour in our egg
yolk mixture. Just do it slowly, that way
you're incorporating everything. Make sure you're getting the sides of your saucepan
while you're whisking.
Take a second, make sure this is nice and smooth.
This is also very important in ensuring that you don't have any lumps in your finished pastry cream.
All right, we'll get this all added. And once this is nice and smooth and well combined,
we're just going to turn our stove
top heat on to medium. Do not turn it up too high, or you're going to end up
cooking this mixture. You're going to have lumps in it.
It's going to be burnt, so just keep your heat on medium.
And we're also not going to leave it.
We are just going to keep whisking, just nice and steadily.
I do this pretty much constantly. And we're just going to do this until the mixture begins to thicken.
It does not need to come to a boil or simmer or anything like that.
We are just going to whisk it until it thickens. For me,
I would say this usually takes anywhere between 5 to 10 minutes.
So once your pastry cream has begun to thicken to a pudding like
consistency, we are going to need to move really fast.
I want to make sure you get a good look at this, though, so hopefully
you can see that my whisk is leaving trails,
we are achieving a pudding like consistency, and let me show you the spoon test real quickly,
where if you were to take a spoon, you can see the back of the spoon is
completely coated with the pastry cream.
And if you take your finger and run a line down it, that line stays.
It doesn't dissolve. The rest of the pastry cream on the sides
doesn't cover it back up. So that's how I know
this is done, so I want to get it off the heat right away.
Now, I want to pour this into a heatproof bowl,
but it's really important that I first pour it through a fine-mesh strainer.
Now, if any little bits of egg did happen
to get cooked, or if there are any tiny lumps in there,
this strainer is going to catch them. So for a smooth,
silky pastry cream, you do not want to skip this step.
You want to make sure you get it all through. And you can see in mine,
I have tiny, little bits of egg. These are actually—looks like
little bits of protein from the egg whites
that did cook a little bit in the pastry cream.
So long as your pastry cream beneath is smooth, like
mine is, that's all good. This is exactly why we use the strainer to catch these little bits,
it's not uncommon. So our pastry cream is almost finished,
but we want to make it a little bit richer, so you are going to need 4
tablespoons of unsalted butter. Mine's actually pretty
soft, and we are just going to add one tablespoon of butter at a time.
And whisk that into the pastry cream until each tablespoon is melted.
And then we'll add the next table spoon. Now once you've added all of your butter,
we're going to add one and a half teaspoons of vanilla extract.
This recipe is great if you want to use a vanilla bean instead.
And if you check out the printable recipe,
I will be sure to include notes in case you want to do that
instead of using vanilla extract. All right,
so the pastry cream is going to need to cool completely before you can use it for anything,
but before I move it over to the fridge
to start the chilling process, I like to let it sit at room temperature for about 20 minutes,
but make sure that you stir it with a whisk
periodically, to help keep a skin from forming on the top.
So this has had a little time to cool, but before I move it into the fridge,
first, I want to make sure I scrape the sides because you see the pastry cream
that's kind of been pushed up on the side of the bowl a little bit?
If I let that stay there, it's kind of going to harden.
It's not going to stay nice
and creamy, so I want to make sure that stays with the majority of the cream.
Another thing we want to do is we want to make sure we cover the cream,
but there is a certain way you want to do this. You want to use either plastic wrap,
like I'm using, or parchment paper or wax paper,
and we aren't just going to cover the top of the bowl,
we're going to press that directly against the surface of the pastry cream—
just lightly. But you do want to make sure it's touching the surface.
Otherwise, a skin is going to form on top of the cream.
You don't want that. So this pastry cream is going to need to chill
until it's nice and cold in the fridge.
This is going to take several hours or you can prepare it a day or two in advance to let it chill
completely, before you can really use it for anything.
Once it's chilled completely, you can see it has this beautiful, silky smooth,
creamy consistency. It's quite similar to a pudding
and it's perfect for using in cream puffs or eclairs or in so many other recipes—
I'm going to link to a whole bunch of them that I love to make this pastry cream
for. And that is really it.
I hope you guys enjoyed this simplified way of making pastry cream.
No egg tempering required.
If you try this one out, please let me know what you think.
I always love hearing from you. Thank you guys so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.
So you're really supposed to put this in eclairs
or something, but it's also really good by itself.