- Hey, I'm John Kanell, and today on Preppy Kitchen,
we're making a rich silky pastry cream.
So let's get started.
First off, I'm adding two cups of milk
into a medium-sized pot and I wanna tell you,
this is whole milk I'm using.
Pastry cream should be rich and delicious.
And this is a heavy-bottomed pot.
If you use a thin-walled pot, if you hear that,
it's like a tinny sound, your pastry cream
could easily scorch and it makes your job so much harder.
So grab a thicker pot, it really distributes
the heat evenly.
If you wanted, you could have used a 2%,
but let's use whole milk for this.
It should be so rich, silky, and luscious.
Today I'm going all out and using a vanilla bean.
These guys are quite the luxury,
but I had one in my pantry that was begging to be used.
If you want, you could also use vanilla bean paste,
which is basically vanilla beans mixed up
with a sugar water solution.
Or you could use vanilla extract.
Everything's gonna be delicious.
Use a sharp knife to open the pod up
and you're gonna see thousands
of little tiny seeds busting outta there.
The flavor is in those guys.
Now, you're gonna use your knife to scrape this pod open.
Don't worry if you don't get all the seeds out
because we're gonna add the whole pod right into our pot.
Just like that.
Wow, that is black gold for bakers.
Carefully, collect your very valuable seeds.
We're gonna pop that right into our pot
along with the pod itself.
Set that over medium heat and let it come to a simmer.
But keep an eye on it because
we do not want that milk to boil over.
(words beep)
I am so excited to make this Creme Patissiere,
or pastry cream recipe, for you.
It is one of my all time favorite things to eat
and it's great in everything
from chocolate eclairs, Boston cream pie, mille-feuille,
various kinds of filled tarts,
or just straight into your mouth, it is that good.
I have six room temperature eggs.
I need to separate them.
We are using the yolks today.
The whites, you can reserve
for something amazing like little meringue kisses.
Look how cute that is.
They're so delicious, just egg whites
and sugar with vanilla and something else.
Six egg yolks, please.
The whites go in the small bowl, the yolks go in the big.
Normally it's the other way around.
It doesn't matter if you get some yolk in your whites,
unless you're using it to make a meringue later on.
Six, there we go.
Right now, I need a kiss of sweetness
from 2/3 of a cup of granulated sugar.
That's 135 grams.
Come here, take a look.
My milk is simmering right now
so we're gonna take it off heat and let that infuse.
You want all of that vanilla flavor
to really seep into the milk.
If you're using vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste,
just take it off heat and you're good to go.
But if you're using a vanilla,
give it 15 minutes just to spread the vanilla love.
Grab a whisk, and today you can see
I'm using a French whisk.
It's actually a narrow risk.
People from France have told me that in France
they don't call it a French whisk, but here we do,
as opposed to a balloon whisk.
A balloon whisk is so wide
you can't get the corners of your pot,
which will come in really handy later.
My scale's done for a moment.
We're gonna whisk this up.
I'm gonna do it by hand.
Right away, the sugar's incorporated, that's easy.
But we wanna whisk this up a bit more
until it thickens slightly
and I have a lighter, lemony color.
Pastry cream is an amazing custard.
It's delicious, it's silky,
but it's actually surprisingly easy to make.
It's easier than a lot of other custards
where things can go left
because we're gonna add a magical ingredient
that is so great for all different types of baking.
That ingredient is corn starch.
I have to explain this to you 'cause it's so interesting.
These egg yolks, of course, they have protein in them.
The protein, when you heat it up, does some special things.
Actually it does the opposite of a special thing
because proteins work by having a specific shape,
they're all twisted up and knotty
and they fit into each other like this,
does special jobs, helps us live, et cetera.
But when you cook the proteins, they unfold,
it's called denaturing, and they're like this.
That's why when you cook an egg,
it just becomes hard and rubbery, right?
We want that, but kind of.
We wanna unfold the proteins
so they can coagulate or become thicker,
but we don't wanna cook them so they're hard and chewy.
That'd be gross, right?
We're gonna use the egg yolks,
but to make this easier on us, we're adding
that magical ingredient of corn starch.
The starch is gonna help stabilize the protein
and let things go smoothly.
They become very silky.
It's kind of like a protective measure, too,
because even if you use a little bit too much heat,
the corn starch is there to help you out.
(bell rings)
Now I'm gonna add a quarter-cup,
or 37 grams, of this corn starch right into my eggs.
My scale is done.
Now we're gonna whip this up.
I just need there to be no lumps in my corn starch.
It looks so beautiful though
with the white and this light lemony color.
I do see some lumps though,
so we are gonna whisk them through.
My hot milk mixture has had time to infuse.
I'm pulling out my bean.
You could save this and actually use it
to make more vanilla milk for your kids
or for you to enjoy for your coffee.
One-quarter cup of this hot mixture.
I don't wanna scramble any of these eggs.
So extreme heat will cause the eggs to curdle a bit.
It's a whole protein denaturing thing.
So what we're gonna do is slowly drizzle in
a quarter-cup to temper the mixture.
Tempering just means you're taking something hot
in a small quantity and adding it to something cold
to warm that cold thing up so it's not shocked by the heat.
And I love seeing these vanilla beans.
It makes me so happy.
Now we're gonna add the rest of the milk in.
Don't worry about all this junk you see here,
'cause there's a lot of vanilla pod nonsense happening.
So we're just gonna add that in.
And to be honest, if you let your mixture
cool for 15 minutes while the vanilla was infusing,
it's not that hot, so it really probably
wouldn't have burnt your eggs.
Our delicious mixture is ready to go back into the pot,
so grab a strainer, preferably a fine-meshed one.
Those vanilla pods have a lot
of stringy, fibrous nonsense.
We're gonna pour this right back in.
Look at those beautiful vanilla beans.
Don't waste any of them.
I am just gonna use my little quarter-cup
to push through some of the last vanilla beans.
I wanna save them all.
And by the way, I feel like I've been saying
vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, vanilla.
But you don't have to use vanilla to flavor this.
So skip it and you could add other things towards the end.
So I've made a passion fruit pastry cream.
That's actually part of the book.
It's a book recipe.
I've made chocolate pastry cream.
There's so many different varieties
of flavors you can use for this custard.
Once again, we need our narrow whisk.
A regular whisk will work, too,
but it's gonna be a little bit more problematic.
And we're gonna take this onto medium-high heat
and you're gonna watch it like a hawk
'cause it can go from perfect to burnt in a second,
so just be careful.
I'll show you how to do it.
Two things are happening here.
One, you're heating up those egg yolks
so those proteins are unfolding
so they can lock together and thicken your sauce
so it's gonna be amazing,
and the egg yolks have amylase in them.
It's an enzyme that breaks down starch.
You have it in your saliva, too,
that's how you can eat bread.
But the egg yolks' amylase would break down
the corn starch we added and it wouldn't have
that nice silky texture.
So we need to heat that up to destroy the amylase.
(words beep)
So we don't wanna step away from this
because nothing happens, nothing happens, it's done.
It happens very quickly.
So whisk, whisk, whisk.
You're not gonna be here that long.
You're gonna notice a change in consistency.
It'll become thicker.
That's when we know it's done.
And I wanted to have this narrow whisk
because it can get all the way into the corner of my pot
because that corner is a place where burnt stuff
can happen really easily with a big balloon whisk.
So look, right now, it's already thickening up.
And you can see it's jumping away from the pan,
you see the little burps?
That means it is done.
Look at that, oh my gosh.
Do you see this amazing concoction?
And you'll also notice it's not lumpy, it's silky smooth.
For added richness, I'm plopping in a tablespoon of butter.
We're just gonna whisk that in until it's melted
and it helps thicken things up
and changes the consistency to be really silky.
I didn't spend all this time
and waste all these ingredients to have any lumps,
so we're gonna pull that sieve back out.
I just rinsed it out.
And this gets poured right back in.
Chances are, it's probably fine.
So you could consider this an optional step.
This consistency is really nice, by the way.
A lot of times people don't tell you
that you can cook your pastry cream for a little bit
after it thickens up just to help give it some strength,
which is great when you're doing something
like Boston cream pie,
literally anything where it has to hold its shape
because if it's too runny and thin,
it's just go push bleh.
Push that through your sieve.
I'm using my spatula.
And the goal here is just to capture any bits of egg
that hardened up a little bit too much,
which can happen so easily, especially
if this is your first time making pastry cream.
So go ahead and consider this a mostly non-optional step.
This Creme Patissiere looks so beautiful.
Really, you could just eat us by the spoonful right now
and be completely content.
So if I was filling up a pastry tart
or something like that right now,
I would just let this come to room temperature
and I would cover it with plastic just like this
so there's no skin formed.
You want the plastic to make really good contact
and not have any exposed bits
because those can get a little bit hard.
If you don't wanna use plastic, just let the skin form,
cover it on top with something else.
You can eat the skin later, it's delicious.
Your pastry cream can be made 24 hours in advance,
just let it sit in the fridge.
I'm gonna chill this so you can see
how to wake it back up because it's a little bit upsetting
when you take it outta the fridge
and it stumps a lot of people.
So into the fridge you go.
If you wanna lighten up this luscious concoction of milk,
eggs, and sugar, go ahead and whip up some heavy cream
until stiff peaks form,
then fold that into your pastry cream.
I recommend adding about a cup for this batch
and that'll still let you maintain
the structure of the pastry cream, it won't get too loose.
You can add a little bit more and it'll still be good
for filling things like cream puffs and eclairs.
It's really lovely
and it's called diplomat cream.
Once your Creme Patissiere is nice and chilled,
it's ready to use, so let's grab it from the fridge.
What is this?
It looks like it's hardened too much.
Should you be worried?
No, that's just what happens when you chill it.
It's actually a good thing.
Grab a whisk, just give it a quick mix,
and you're gonna see all those lumps are gonna disappear
and you'll be left with a thick, luscious pipable mixture
just like that.
I'm actually gonna use this to fill some eclairs tomorrow
as a special weekend treat,
but I have to show you how this pipes.
You can use pastry cream
for all sorts of decorative flourishes
and it is gorgeous.
I love seeing it swimming with all those vanilla seeds.
And if you were making a mille-feuille,
you actually want to see the pastry cream
and it has to be a bit thicker.
Look at that.
So pretty, I'm in love.
Just the best thing ever.
Man, you taste the milk in the most lovely, delicate way
with that vanilla and the mouth feel.
It is so beautiful.
I hope you get a chance to make this recipe,
and if you like this video, check out my French playlist.