Making éclairs may be a dream for some but more of a
complicated task for others. Willing initially to take a class on how to make Saint-Honoré, the grandiose French dessert dedicated to
the Saint with the same name who is the patron of bakers, I signed up for the éclairs and Saint-Honoré cooking class at the Paris Eastside School.
After being
welcomed by our instructor and school owner Muriel, we put on our aprons;
Muriel didn’t delay the three-hour process of pâte à choux –puffs in English -and éclair making. First is
the dough of course, which can be tricky. Depending on the humidity, flour
responds in different ways.
Tip 1: Stick
to the basic, all-purpose flour and don’t blend leftovers from one brand or
type of flour with another. You don’t know what results you will get and this
is not good news.
To make the
dough, put the butter, the sugar, the salt and the water in a pan, melt them
together and put them to boil. When you actually see the rolling broil, dump
the flour -set aside in a bowl- and combine them together. Make sure that there
are no lumps of flour leftover and then put the entire mix back to the saucepan
to dry it out for less than a minute. Then add the eggs, one by one, by
stirring them with a wooden spoon. OK, I said, so far so good.
Tip 2: Buy
good butter. Don’t be too stingy as good quality butter makes a
difference
Tip 3: Don’t
over stir the eggs because the mix becomes too sticky and you don’t want that.
Tip 4: If you think that you need more consistency in the mix, you add one additional egg. However, you don’t want to overdo it with the eggs as the dough may become too egg-y.
Then you put
the dough in a pastry bag with a 16mm tip and pipe it on a sheet of parchment
paper; for the puffs, you create rounds, the éclair should be 1.5
inches long (see the photo to get an idea). This is much trickier
than you think. Make sure you leave some space between them as they will rise
after baking and you don’t want to touch each other. Let them bake for 20
minutes in the oven.
The pastry
cream or crème pâtissière is another creative thus challenging process
but it is tends to be a good exercise for your arms.
You put the
milk, sugar and salt with the flavor you want –vanilla in our case- together to
boil.
In another
bowl put the egg yolks mixed with equal parts of flour and corn starch; whisk
well together without leaving any lumps out, then pour the boiling milk over
the mix. Put the mix back to the saucepan and whisk well for some time until it
thickens (for the chocolate éclair you also add the grated chocolate at this
stage). Then let mix to cool.
Once the
puffs and the éclairs are cooled off
as well as the pastry cream, you literary inject the pastry cream in each of
them with the tip of the pastry bag.
Tip 5: To
make éclairs the French way, you
have to match the filling (the pastry cream) with the topping –so for chocolate éclairs you need a chocolate ganache or
chocolate icing topping and not something else.
For the
Saint-Honoré you follow the same
process really. You need three puffs (each has caramel on top) added together
on a pastry puff base, and then you add whipped cream. The photo on top witnesses the
grandiose element of the dessert. It is for the Saint-Honoré after all. It is a big dessert that
obviously needs to be shared with others.
For the base
of Saint-Honoré: Place circles of puff
pastry between two sheets of parchment paper, weight with another cookie pan
and cook for 20 minutes.
The éclairs and the puffs ended up being soft,
fresh and tasty - wonderful for a Saturday lunch that came together with a
glass of champagne. I liked both the vanilla cream filled puffs and the
chocolate éclairs, each for
different reasons. The chocolate has a bold character, the vanilla is softer.
Tip 6. The puff is also used to make profiteroles, beignets
and gougère among others. So you really learn something useful that is also
versatile.
I am glad
that I experimented with French pastry making. Now time to practice at home.
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