Day 11: Choux pastry (experiment day)

Hello fork musketeers!

So yesterday we had a free day to practice recipes. So I decided to take this opportunity and try something with choux pastry.

In preparation for Monday, I made kaya on Sunday; otherwise known as coconut jam. It's a Malaysian breakfast condiment usually spread on toast. It has a really creamy texture and it has a caramel/coconut taste to it. I thought it would go really well with choux pastry and a little something I really liked.

Home made kaya jam. Delicious!

While we did do choux pastry at an earlier date, I didn't have very detailed pictures. This time I took some pictures, so I decided to write about choux pastry on this entry.

The basics

Choux pastry, Chef C told us, is like bread. While the recipe will always have a certain volume/grams of ingredients, you might have to tweak it depending on the weather that day.

You'll heat up your liquids - water/milk/butter - until it begins to boil. You can sift your sugar/salt/flour in the mean time and mix well. When it boils, take your pot off the heat and dump your dry ingredients in and mix until the flour has absorbed everything. Then back onto the heat and mix mix mix! Mix with a spatula or a wooden spoon until it starts to coat the bottom. Then off the heat again and transfer the dough into a bowl/mixing bowl to slightly cool.

While it cools, crack all of your eggs into a separate container and lightly beat them. In fact, if your dough is still a little too warm, go ahead and get a small container of water. I'll explain this later.

Chef C told us that choux pastry is a very simple recipe to learn but hard to master. Everyone has their own version and, while it's important to understand what you're doing, it's equally important to understand the recipe itself. This is because choux pastry is like making bread - you can't expect to blindly dump all of your eggs in and expect it to be the same each and every time. What you're looking for a certain consistency, not the fact that it has X eggs.

So what's the consistency? Well, take a big dollop of dough onto your spatula/wooden spoon...

.... and let the bass it drop.

When the bass dough drops, this V shape is exactly what you're looking for. If you don't have a V shape, it means your dough is still too dry. Keep adding your eggs!

If you add all of your eggs and you still don't have the V shape, do not add any more eggs. Instead of adding eggs, now you'll be adding water. The reason why you don't add anymore eggs is because eggs will toughen up the outside; the entire reason why choux pastry expands is because of the steam. If the skin/crust is too tough, the steam won't be able to push the pastry and gloriously expand and you'll be super upset. And so would I, on your behalf.

When your dough is done, you can continue in one of two ways. You can either go old-school and use a spoon to shape your pastry or use a pastry bag. It's really up to you. Obviously the advantage of using a pastry bag is your choux pastries are super consistent. Just remember to oil your tray (oil spray); parchment paper or a silicon mat.

The consistent shapes are strong in this one

If you wanted to do éclairs, I highly recommend a pastry bag or a zipbloc bag with the tip cut. They have a very specific shape that's not as forgiving with a spoon and you'll probably be very frustrated and disappointed.

Protips: If you have circular metal rings, dip them in flour and form templates on your tray. This way, if you're looking for consistency, you know exactly how much to put on. If you're making éclairs, take a metal rack and place it upside-down on your tray (so flat surface on the tray). Then grab some flour and dust the surface with flour. When you take off your rack, it'll leave a bunch of horizontal and vertical lines. Use these lines to make your éclairs all the same length.

Whatever method you choose, you'll want to brush some egg wash on these puppies. If you have any undesirable pointy details, you can use your brush to fix those. Just be careful not to get egg wash on the bottom; Chef C said it prevents the pastry from rising, although I think mine all came out pretty good despite egg wash getting on the tray.

Dat egg wash totally touching the tray

The 2nd and 3rd to the left had egg wash on the bottom.
Notice how they still rose but their shape is flatter on the bottom

You be the judge

When you're baking your choux pastry, resist the urge to peek and open the door. No, you're not allowed to open the door to rotate either. You want to keep the steam in. You can only open the oven after the crust has browned.

Now we get to the exciting part: filling it!

You can either cut them in half or pipe in the filling. Since I'm in pastry school, I piped in the kaya. If you want to pipe it in, it's a lot easier to pierce it with something sharp first than muscling your piping tip into the pastry. 

So far it's looking like normal cream puffs... but wait! There's more! My experiment wasn't only trying the coconut jam - it was also glazing them with caramel.

So shiny...

I got this idea from the croquembouche we helped Chef assemble two weeks ago. I really liked the textural difference between the crunchy caramel and the soft, creamy filling in the choux pastry and just had to try it with kaya.

I forgot to put shredded coconut on them, so here they are as they should be:

Perfection

The left is the batch I forgot; the right is one where I dipped the choux pastry into a container of shredded coconut after the caramel dip; and the bottom is one where I tried to sprinkle the coconut on top. Let's just say I'm going to be dipping them from now on.

For this filling in particular, I did notice it couldn't help but slowly leak out from the bottom. So I ended up sealing the hole with a bit of caramel.

Hopefully your filling shouldn't be leaking out, but as long as you're using something a little thick like pastry cream or whipped cream you should be OK. Kaya, while thick, doesn't have that same consistency as pastry cream.

I also noticed that my caramel, despite being solid, was still tacky to the touch. This is because it didn't have glucose. So if you want to have a caramel glaze like this, you'll want to add some glucose to make the caramel dry to the touch and not tacky like mine.

Anyway, I hope this was interesting. For the rest of the week we'll be covering cupcakes, so I'm expecting a lot of piping tips on how to do cool designs.

Also: don't be shy and leave a comment down below. I fixed the comment settings so it isn't exclusively for Google users. I'd like to know what you guys think. I'll see you next time!