Monday, 24 November 2014

Choux Pastry

This week DC 9 Group 5 was making choux pastry with Chef Jean Michel!

Choux pastry is a light pastry dough used to make profiteroles, croquembouches, éclairs, French crullers, beignets, St. Honoré cake, and gougères. It contains only butter, water, flour, and eggs. Like Yorkshire Pudding or David Eyre's pancake, instead of a raising agent it employs high moisture content to create steam during cooking to puff the pastry.
Choux pastry is usually baked but for beignets it is fried. In Spain and Latin America, churros are made of fried choux pastry, sugared and dipped in a thin chocolate blancmange for breakfast. In Austrian cuisine, it is also boiled to make Marillenknödel, a sweet apricot dumpling; in that case it does not puff, but remains relatively dense. They are sometimes filled with cream and used to make cream puffs or éclairs.

Now, lets start making pastry!


First things that you need to make the choux dough are prepare water, butter, sugar, salt, strong flour, and eggs. 


Melt the butter into simmering water, add a bit of salt.




And then remove from heat add in strong flour and mix it using wooden spoon until it forms into a dough.



Leave it cool for about 10 minutes before put in the eggs to avoid the eggs become cooked.



Transfer dough into bowl and add in eggs one by one, or two by two in our case because we made twice as much dough




Mix it until it gets just the right consistency, or like chef jean-michel said,
"until it hangs off the spoon like a tear"





Grab a piping bag and fill it with the choux dough, pipe it to tray that was covered with parchment paper.






Before baking, apply egg wash.



Make the filling and topping.
*top left: chantilly, top right: pastry cream, bottom: chocolate ganache*


Bake for 30 minutes at 200 degrees celcius. DO NOT OPEN THE OVEN UNTIL YOUR CHOUX IS DONE BAKING! OR IT WILL NOT RISE!





  

After baking, fill the choux with the filling and top it with almond flakes or ganache.

Well, that’s all you have to do for making the choux pastry! Enjoy and have a good day :) 










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