Today on Sugar Spun Run, we will be making choux pastry.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers, Sam here!
And today, I am so excited to be sharing another carefully tested, well researched,
and perfected recipe.
You may have seen choux pastry or pate a choux elsewhere on my blog.
I've shared it with my eclair recipe
and my cream puffs, but I thought it deserved its own stand alone video.
Choux pastry has a reputation for being a little bit fussy,
but, honestly, I think it's very approachable
and this recipe is totally suitable for beginner bakers as well as advanced,
so let's go ahead and get started. I'll walk you through all of the steps.
The first thing you want to do is get your oven preheating to four hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
This pastry begins on the stovetop,
so here I have my—my stovetop burner as well as a medium sized sauce pan.
To this sauce pan, we are going to add one half cup or one stick of unsalted butter,
and I've cut this into eight pieces. That's just going to help it melt a little bit faster for me.
And I'm also going to add one cup of water.
Now for a little bit of flavor, I add a fourth teaspoon of salt,
and now we're going to bring this mixture to a rolling boil.
I'll turn my stove top heat to about medium high.
Knock this butter over because I want that butter melted before we get to our full boil.
We’re almost there. And what I'm looking for is a full, rolling boil. Of course,
I'll show you what it looks like,
but don't jump as soon as you see a few little bubbles coming to the surface.
Okay, so once you have a nice rolling boil,
we will add our flour. You need one cup of all purpose flour. Try not to splash yourself when you add it.
And once we've added it, we'll drop our heat down to medium
—actually, make that medium low, and we are going to stir this flour until it is completely absorbed.
Now, the flour has a tendency to clump. You could use a whisk for the step if you wanted,
but I prefer to use a spatula.
And once I see any lumps remaining, I am just going to press them against the
side of the pan in order to work out any lumps
because you don't want those in your pastry. It's going to look pretty messy at first don't panic,
just keep mixing everything. And the water is going to be evaporating.
The mixture is going to get a lot drier as we go through this process.
Well, it's not just evaporating, it's also being absorbed by the flour,
so it's a little bit of both. Keep scraping the bottom.
Make sure your heat is medium low because you don't wanna burn your pastry at this point.
And what we are looking for before we take this off our heat is
we want all of the flour to be absorbed,
so we don't want to see any white spots remaining,
like right there, I’m gonna smash that in.
And I want the mixture to be clumping to itself.
So when I'm mixing it, it should sort of be forming a ball
and be pulling away from the sides of the pot.
So you can see here it's clumping together very nicely.
I'm gonna go just a second further because I want it to be a little bit drier.
And this is another reason a whisk isn't ideal
for this process because it thickens pretty quickly and you could end up breaking your whisk.
Alright, this looks pretty good, so now I'm going to remove it from the stovetop.
And we are going to just stir this a little bit longer
because I want this to cool down a bit before we add our eggs.
If this is too hot, you could actually end up cooking your eggs,
which is obviously not ideal.
We want them to incorporate into our pastry batter.
So I'm going to give this just about a minute or two.
It doesn't need a lot of time. Slide this over and I'll start cracking our eggs.
You will need four large eggs for today's recipe and we'll just be adding them one at a time.
These are room temperature eggs. I don't recommend using them straight out of the fridge.
Go ahead and crack our first one. Give this a little bit more stirring.
It's only been sitting for two, maybe three minutes.
And now I'm going to start adding my eggs.
So we'll add the first one,
and I want to stir this very well, very quickly
until it is completely incorporated before I add the next egg.
Now, things again are going to look pretty messy.
The mixtures going to look like it's separating,
that's all okay. Just trust the process.
So I want to make sure I get all of that egg incorporated.
I don't want to see any bits of the yolk floating around. I want things to look pretty uniform.
And then we can crack and add our next egg.
This is actually a recipe closely adapted
from my grandmother's choux pastry recipe that she has always used to make cream puffs.
And see that separation? When I first started making shoe pastry,
I would see the batter starting to separate like like that and I would just panic.
I was like, “Oh no, I have to throw it out!”
Don't throw it out. Just keep on stirring. However,
it does require a fair bit of mixing. A sturdy spatula or a wooden spoon is your best bet here.
However, you could use an electric mixer.
We’ll add another egg. This is one of my pretty Welsummer eggs.
You see the speckles? I don't know if they're showing up on camera,
but I love ‘em. Our choux pastry batter is getting a little bit looser,
which is exactly what we want to see. When we're finished,
it will be completely smooth, uniform, and it will have a velvety appearance.
Let's crack our last egg. We’ll drop the last egg in.
And with each egg, it seems to get harder to incorporate it into the batter.
Again, just keep—just keep going with it.
It'll all be fine. I just think this step is where most people start to panic,
so I really want to emphasize: it's okay that it looks a little bit messy, just keep going.
And I am scraping the sides and bottom of the bowl as I'm going—or saucepan.
Okay, I'm very, very happy with how our pastry dough looks at this point.
It's smooth. It's cohesive. It's—oh! falling off of my trivet,
but it is well combined and, like I said,
velvety in appearance. Not curdled.
There's no bits of cooked egg in it. I'm very, very happy with this.
So now we can basically use it any way you'd like.
Some people like to add cheese and make gougeres.
Gougeres? I'm pronouncing it wrong, but like French cheese puffs,
which are delicious. I have a recipe for those on the blog as well.
But most often, these are used to make cream puffs or eclairs.
Today, I'm going to show you how to pipe them into little cabbage shapes.
But if you want to pipe them into long shapes for eclairs,
you could also certainly do that. And I have an eclair video you could check out.
Okay, so let's get this into a large piping bag.
Best way to do this, take your piping bag, put it in a large glass. Or if you have a friend,
just have them hold the bag open for you,
but, usually, I don't have an extra set of hands.
Then we'll just pour the batter right into this piping bag.
And I'm just going to scoop it in.
And again, you can now pipe this in any shape you'd like.
Let me grab my baking sheet.
And this is a large baking sheet
because this makes a fair bit of batter and I want to be able to bake it all in one go.
I'd rather not use two baking sheets.
And I've lined this baking sheet with parchment paper,
which is my preference. You could use a nice piping tip,
but I have found just snipping the end off the bag works perfectly well for choux pastry.
Alright, now let's pipe our pastry dough.
Typically, this dough is used to make cream puffs. Today,
I'm going to be using it to make profiteroles, which are similar to creme puffs,
but we'll be filling them with ice cream. And I like these to be a decent size,
so I am going to pipe about two and a half inch mounds.
I'll try to make all of my mounds the same size that way they bake evenly.
Now I'll just place this right on the baking sheet.
I'm going to try not to swirl it too much.
And it ends up kind of looking like a beehive.
These will spread in the oven, so I'm going to try to give them some space.
And of course, how many you get is going to depend on how large you pipe them.
I feel like typically when I make profiteroles, I get about ten
when I'm going about two and a quarter to two and a half inches in width.
A little bit more on top here.
Alright, that's gonna be my funky one, but I did get ten out of here.
Now, I don't wanna have these funky peaks on top,
so I'm just going to lightly dampen my hands with a little bit of water or my fingertips
with a little bit of water. And I'm just going to gently press those peaks down.
Now we'll take these over to our four hundred degree Fahrenheit preheated oven.
They're going to bake in the center rack. I usually start checking them at thirty minutes.
When they're finished baking, they should be a light,
golden brown color and they should appear dry.
Once your shoe pastry looks like it's finished baking,
turn off your oven and prop the door open
and let them continue to sit in the oven
for another ten minutes before you remove them to cool completely.
Alright, these look beautiful,
so we are going to let them cool completely on the baking sheet before we do anything with them.
And I do want to point out that the pate a choux that I piped straight down
with my piping bag came out in a beautiful shape.
Whereas the one where I kind of swirl the bag, it came out looking a lot more wonky.
So just keep that in mind when you're piping. Alright,
these have had some time to cool, so really you can do whatever you’d like with them:
fill them with pastry cream, drizzle them with chocolate,
slice them in half, and fill them with ice cream for profiteroles.
That's delicious as well. Let me go ahead
and cut into one of these so you can see what it looks like inside.
And I'm using a bread knife so I can saw delicately through the pastry. And look at that!
It's very, very airy and open inside.
It shouldn't appear wet. This is perfect for filling with cream,
ice cream, whatever you'd like. And that is how easy it is to make pate a choux at home.
I hope you guys enjoy today's recipe. And if you try this one out,
please leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
I always love hearing from you. Thank you so much for watching,
and I'll see you next time. Alright, normally
I eat this with filling, but let's just go for it.
It's really good, but it would be so much better with ice cream.