The Culinary Institute of America at Copia in collaboration with Butter of Europe
is pleased to bring you "Baking and Pastry Excellence,"
a free online educational series featuring the best in world baking and pastry.
Today, we'll visit the Michelin 3-star Atelier Crenn in San Francisco.
Pastry Chef Juan Contreras shows us the secrets in making his
Apple Pâte à Choux with Candied Pecans and Caramel.
Chef Contreras uses French Butter to make his classic Apple Pâte à Choux.
[Chef Juan Contreras] My name is Juan Contreras.
I'm the Pastry Chef at Atelier Crenn in San Francisco.
Today, we made the Apple Pâte à Choux.
Take a classic pastry which is the the Pâte à Choux,
which is your classic dough that you can bake and fill with, you know,
cheese or cream — like a cream puff or a Gougères.
In this case, we wanted to like make it look like an apple
and kinda have those reminiscent tonalities and flavor profiles of caramel apple as well.
To make the Pâte à Choux dough, we take water, milk, sea salt, oil, Butter from Europe....
Bring it up to temperature. Bring it up to a simmer.
We add the flour mixture and then keep mixing the flour, so that it gets absorbed into the liquid.
Keep stirring until we basically quote-unquote "dry out the dough,"
and you'll see that by, kind of, the flour — the dough mixture — sticking to the bottom of the pan,
you get some of that residual crust on it, a little bit of a crust.
As soon as you see that, you dump it into the stand mixer,
and cool it down just around 50 Celsius.
So, once it comes around 50 Celsius, we start to incorporate the eggs, uh....
The eggs here — we basically just buzz them with a hand immersion blender.
Makes it a little more streamlined to actually incorporate the eggs....
Until they're fully incorporated into the dough.
Put the dough into a piping bag, into.... We have half Demisphere Molds....
And we'll pipe the dough, until we use the entire batter.
Remove some of the dimples, the indentions, from the piping....
Just to kind of get it as flat as possible.
And then freeze the molds until the batter is frozen.
The crackling dough is also using the Butter of Europe.
It's a simple mixture of, uh, butter, flour and sugar.
Almost basically around equal parts, so a good amount of butter.
The dough is made and, uh — just mixing it together with a little bit of a green food coloring.
You freeze it and then punch it out.
Remove your frozen Pâte à Choux dough that's been molded in the half demisphere.
Put it on your sheet pan with a Silpain.
And then the round crackling dough, we put a little, uh, hat on top of it.
And then put it straight in the oven at 200 celsius.
And then after 15 minutes, we'll lower the oven to about 150 celsius,
for an extra 30 minutes, just to dry out.
So, once it's cool, uh, use a serrated knife
to cut them at a perfectly straight edge angle, so that you can expose the inside.
So, for the plating, we take the Pâte à Choux that's been cut.
We insert a tiny little apple stem that's made out of chocolate.
We put it on top.
And the inside of the cavity, we put a little bit of....
caramel — salted caramel — that we make. It's just a caramel sauce.
We put some apple compote, which is just a compote that we make with, uh....
Fuji apples and Granny Smith apples.
Raw apple dices in there.
And the raw apple is just an apple that's been peeled and diced,
and it's there for freshness and texture.
Pecan praline — we pipe that in there as well.
Pipe a little bit of the pecan ice cream.
And then we take the whipped ganache.
Pipe some of that around the perimeter of the shoe.
Finish it off with a little bit more, um....
pecan praline, some salt....
We also garnish the sides around with toasted pecans,
and some, uh, candied apple....
And top it off with its hat — the little top of the shoe and the stem.
What I like about the dish, is that it's very playful. It's....
And very nostalgic.
People — when they eat it — they recognize those flavors right away.
You know — nuts, caramel, apple.
And it's a visual cue, that it also tastes like what it looks like.
Watch more baking and pastry videos at ciaprochef.com/butter