- This will be Homer Simpson's last lagniappe.
- Come on, you're gonna kill him with a pastry?
I've seen this man eat a bowl of change!
This eclair is over one million calories,
25 pounds of butter per square inch,
covered with chocolate so dark,
light cannot escape its surface.
No, no, no! This is just a picture.
- [Andrew] Hey, what's up guys?
Welcome back to Binging with Babish, where this week,
I forgot to film my walk-on shot,
so here's a little bit of table cleaning for you.
Squeaky clean, so now let's take a look
at that eclair from The Simpsons.
First up, we gotta make some choux pastry,
combining 180 grams of unsalted butter and 225 grams each
water and milk in a large saucepan over medium heat.
Then, in a separate bowl, we're combining 225 grams
of bread flour, one tablespoon of sugar,
and 12 grams of butter powder.
This is an attempt to pack even more butter per square inch
into our eclairs.
Go ahead and bring the butter, water, and milk mixture
up to a bare simmer.
As soon as you start to see some little bubs
around the outside of the pan, take it off the heat
and add the dry ingredients,
mixing together into a thick pasty dough.
Once all the flour's nice and hydrated
and no dry clumps remain, we're gonna place this guy
back over medium heat and we're gonna cook it
for anywhere from five to seven minutes.
And, joy of joys, we need to stir it constantly.
You know that it's ready to remove from the heat
when a thin layer of fond starts forming
on the bottom of the pot.
This indicates that your starches are gelatinized
or something, I dunno.
Kendall told me what it means and I forgot immediately.
Dump this into the bowl of your awaiting stand mixer
with the paddle attachment attached,
bust up and thoroughly beat together half a dozen eggs,
and then we're gonna slowly pour the eggs into the mixer
while it's running, maybe half a cup at a time,
letting it fully incorporate into the batter
before adding any more.
Our objective is to turn this from a pasty batter
into more of a gooey batter,
which you know it's done when it makes an hourglass
when stretched between two fingers,
or it makes the Dairy Queen, that's not quite right.
Let's try that again.
Or it makes the Dairy Queen, (beep) damn it.
Or when it makes the Dairy Queen curl, there it is,
when a finger dipped into the dough is inverted.
That means our dough is ready to pipe,
so we're gonna place it into a piping bag
and then line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper,
using nonstick spray to secure it in place.
Once you got that nice and laid out,
it's time to pipe out some pastry fingers.
You can expect them to just about double in size
in the oven, so bear that in mind when deciding
on length and girth, and then right at the end,
you want to stop squeezing the bag and sort of
flip the pastry back onto itself.
Then once everybody's all nice and piped out,
including the runty last one, because I ran out of dough,
you can flatten these little tails out
using a wetted finger.
Then these guys are headed for the oven,
where I learned a lesson about temperature.
I started off my first batch at 425 degrees Fahrenheit
for about 20, 25 minutes,
which unfortunately caused them to explode.
I did a little bit of research and turns out,
too high temperatures in the oven can cause choux explosion.
Good news is that these guys were still hollow,
which means that our pastry's good.
We just got to try cranking things down a little bit.
So for the next batch, I went with 375,
plus slightly smaller fingers just to see what would happen.
These guys came out much more even, much smoother,
and no blowouts.
But as you may have predicted, they're way too small
to kill anyone, much less Homer Simpson.
So slightly bigger fingers, 375 Fahrenheit
for 30 to 35 minutes, and I cranked on my oven's
convection function towards the last 10 minutes of cooking
for perfectly puffed choux with nice even browning.
Now, while these guys cool completely,
we got a bunch of other stuff to make.
First up, some pastry cream.
We're measuring out 150 grams of eggs.
Go ahead and beat those up a little bit in a heatproof bowl
and set them aside.
Then, in a separate bowl, we need to make a slurry
out of 40 grams of corn starch, 25 grams of sugar
that we're gonna whisk in there to act as dispersant,
and 50 grams of whole milk.
Go ahead and tiny whisk that together to combine,
and bear in mind, you're gonna need to whisk it again
before you use it.
Last thing before we head over to the stovetop,
we're gonna slice and scrape one vanilla pod.
Now, in our large saucepan,
we're combining 400 grams of whole milk, 50 grams of sugar,
and our sliced and scraped vanilla bean.
Whisk to combine, and then, over medium heat,
we're gonna bring this guy just shy of a simmer.
We just want it getting a little steamy.
Then we're gonna go do the custard thing with our eggs.
We're gonna start by whisking 50 final grams of sugar
into our eggs.
Sorry, tiny whisk, I think this job for your bigger brother,
because in order to temper the eggs with our steamy
milk mixture, we need to keep it moving constantly.
Now here you can see me blissfully unaware that I'm spilling
milk everywhere because it's right out of my eyeline.
I'm just living my life, having a grand old time.
So you might want to do what I normally do when I make
custard on the show, which is slowly ladle it into the eggs.
But I think I got enough in there,
so I'm gonna dump the eggs back into the steaming milk,
once again whisking constantly and thoroughly
to make sure that we don't scramble anybody.
Then this guy's headed back over to the stovetop,
where we're gonna bring him up to a bare simmer
over medium heat.
And of course, story of my life, while whisking constantly.
Once it just starts to bubble, now's the time
that we're gonna add our cornstarch slurry.
This stuff starts to thicken as soon as it hits the heat,
so you want to pour it in slowly and,
you guessed it, whisk constantly.
We're gonna cook this for about one minute,
whisking constantly, until the corn starch
is fully activated and we have a nice thick custard.
Kill the heat, and then all we have to do
is add 45 grams of unsalted butter from its container
that it really doesn't want to leave.
Whisk that in until it's fully melted and incorporated,
retrieved the vanilla pod, and there you have it,
a classic vanilla pastry cream,
which now needs to be fully chilled,
and the fastest way to do that is to spread it out
on a rimmed baking sheet lined with plastic wrap.
This stuff starts to form a skin very quickly,
so we want to immediately wrap it in said plastic wrap,
making sure that there are no air bubbles
and that it's all directly in contact
with the surface of the custard.
Then this guy's headed into the fridge for at least an hour.
Last up, the chocolate glaze, which was described as so dark
that light could not escape its surface.
So I got 250 grams of finely chopped
very very dark chocolate, that is, 100% chocolate,
which I'm gonna start to melt in a double boiler.
About halfway through, I'm adding 125 grams
of unsalted butter cut into cubes
and about 15 grams of extra Dutch cocoa powder,
the darkest cocoa powder I could find.
Also, since dark chocolate is very, very bitter,
we're gonna bring some sweetness by virtue
of 75 grams of corn syrup.
Go ahead and melt that completely in the double boiler,
mixing constantly, of course,
until it's smooth and glassy ready for dipping.
But first we must fill our eclairs.
The traditional way to do this is to cut little Xs
at three points in the bottom of each choux pastry
and use those as entry points
for the nozzle of a piping bag.
Pipe just about as much as you can in there,
because you want to fill the cavity of the eclair
as best you can.
Then these guys are going for an upside down dip
in the chocolate bath.
I found it helpful to hold the eclair vertically
and let chocolate drip off one side,
so that way you end up with nice clean chocolatey edges.
Once those guys are all coated in the chocolate glaze,
we're gonna let that set for about 15 minutes,
before attempting to decorate with Chantilly cream.
For that, we've got one and a half cups of cold heavy cream,
a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and about three tablespoons
of powdered sugar, which we're gonna beat together
into what you might think is called whipped cream,
but it's not, it's Chantilly cream.
It sounds fancier.
Also, Chantilly cream is, by definition,
about twice as sweet as whipped cream,
which we need with all that bitter dark chocolate.
Now all we have to do is pipe some exquisite decorations
onto our eclairs, which, as you can see,
I'm struggling with, but practice makes perfect,
and by the fifth or sixth one,
I was actually making 'em look pretty nice.
And there you have it, a batch of extra buttery,
extra dark chocolatey eclairs.
Of varying decorative quality, so here's my favorite one,
and sure, it looks pretty enough, but how's it taste?
And the answer is, pretty tasty,
just like an eclair, with maybe slightly darker chocolate,
but it's definitely not one million calories,
and it's definitely not gonna kill anybody anytime soon.
For that, we need to step up our form factor a little bit,
so let's make some big ol' choux pastry puffs.
I'm baking these at 350 for about 40 minutes
to make sure that they don't burn
and so that they're cooked all the way through.
There we go.
That's looking a little bit more like La Bombe.
And Kendall had a fun idea for how to make it deadly.
As you may or may not know,
I may or may not be allergic to bananas.
Not really sure.
Last time I ate a banana, I went into anaphylactic shock.
So a few healthy glugs of banana extract,
and maybe a slightly more sinister tool for filling it up.
There we go, that looks every bit as scary
as I hoped it would,
so now let's use it to fill up our La Bombe.
This will be Binging with Babish's last,
I can't do a French accent, I guess.
Make sure it's filled to the brim with banana pastry cream,
give it a dip, let it drip horizontally to keep those nice
crisp chocolatey edges, let that sit for about 15 minutes,
and then the Chantilly cream on The Simpsons
was kind of this big gnarled stripe.
So there that is, and here we go.
Nice knowing you guys. I had a good run.
Oop! Thank you, Kendall Lisa.
(jazzy music)