French Choux Pastry Recipe for Puffs and Eclairs

Hello food lovers and welcome back to the French Cooking Academy. Today we're looking at a very important chapter which is learning how to make choux pastry. It's an amazingly versatile product. It's easy to make, it's delicious, you can make profiteroles, you can make eclairs, you can make religieuses, there's a million recipes that you can use with that pastry. So it is very very important. So today we're going to look at how to make the real French choux pastry step by step. Okay so let's make or let's start our choux pastry. Very very easy recipe. I'm using the same rounded sauté pan. I put my heat on small to medium and the first thing you're gonna do is simply put your water with your sugar, a pinch of salt as I said before but really be careful don't put much salt because you don't want a salty flavor. And you take then your butter and you put everything in. It's that simple. Once the mix is in we're gonna virtually wait until it boils to make sure that we have an emulsion of all the ingredients so mainly the butter mixed with the sugar and salt and water to make a nice blended mix. A few minutes later as you can see my mix is starting to boil and this is how it should look like. You can see you get a kind of a yellowish watery mix. At this stage what you want to do is to leave it to boil for just a few minutes. Let's say you can do like two or three minutes. Let's be precise and don't leave it 10 minutes to boil, just a few minutes. Okay as I just said it's been boiling for about two or three minutes so what I'm doing I'm putting my heat totally off. At this stage I'm just gonna stir a little bit and the next step is extremely simple. You take your flour and you put everything in. I mean there's nothing more simple than that. So there's no heat under the pan remember this. Use always a wooden spatula and as you can see here immediately your mix is gonna thicken and you have your base. How easy is this? You see? Magical. Look at this beauty. Okay this is what you should have. Let me try to get close to the camera so it's nice it's not liquid you can see the consistency it's like a nice paste a bit like a creme patissiere but a bit like a dough. And there is a last step in that preparation we need to do is to dry the mix. So you put your fire back on or your heat. You put your pan on and this is a very short and quick process. So we're just gonna roll our dough in our pan until we lose all the watery aspects or kind of that kind of humidity, that stickiness. That's what you want to get rid of. You want to get rid of that stickiness. You don't want to burn anything. You don't want to color anything. You just want to remove some of the excess of water that's contained into your dough. And as you can see when you do this because there is butter inside you start to get a very very clean mix and that's it. Step number one is finished. How easy is that? Now if you want to do things properly your last step as per our schoolbook usually when the mix is done you put it in another cold container to make sure the temperature in your mix goes down a little bit so that when we add the egg yolks it's not gonna cook the egg yolks. Okay. All right people we're all set for our second and last step of our choux pastry making. You see how amazing this is. So as you can see I've got all my setup here. I've got my food processor as I explained in a previous video. Now our last step consists of mixing the eggs into our choux pastry base. Extremely simple. If you want to do it by hand you can. You have to know that it's a bit strenuous because it gets very very tough when you turn and also to get the right consistency can be a bit of a tough challenge. So let's see this into practice. Very first step I'm taking my mix I'm putting everything in there. Very simple. I'll make sure it's everywhere and I'm starting with my two eggs. Very simple. I'm gonna cover my processor. I'm using a pulse function and I start gently by doing a few pulse. What I'm gonna do I'm gonna take this egg and I'm gonna beat it. Because I'm not gonna add the whole egg at once because if there's too much liquid then it's gonna fail. I'm gonna add a little bit like half of the egg to start with and give it a whisk. Okay now as you can see here it's nice and firm and when you take it in your fingers like that this is what you want to have. You see it's gonna separate and you see this both of the points are staying straight up. They're not falling. It means it lacks a bit of moisture. Taking the rest of my egg and as you can see it doesn't look like much but trust me that can be the difference between success and failure. All right let's check again. Second test. Take a little bit of dough. You can do it on your spoon. It doesn't have to be totally totally perfect but you see the point is falling meaning it's done. At this stage your mix is done and we're gonna take it out and put it in a piping bag. Okay guys so ready for our third and final step which is putting our mix into a piping bag. So I've reserved my mix. I've got a reusable piping bag with a plastic end. The diameter you should be using for choux and eclairs should be anything from one centimeter up to maximum two centimeters in diameter. So don't use a tiny end. You can use non-reusable plastic ones if you want. It doesn't matter. How to use a piping bag? Well we had it on our book. It says you should put your hand on there and the cover should kind of cover your hand to avoid that you make a mess. I'm not an expert at this. I don't do it very often so don't blame me if things go wrong but basically it's just a matter of taking some of the paste and put it as deep as you can into the bag. Okay you repeat the process over and over again until you're okay. I'm done with the bag. I'm gonna try to go ahead and lay down the choux. So you squeeze here. You turn a little bit and as you can see the pastry goes and you try to make some decent sized choux. Okay I'm hoping it's pretty much in front of the camera. So not too big not too small and I've got my markers so I know what I'm doing. Okay and I'm gonna try to make some eclairs which would be the elongated pastry and I don't think I will have too much space for more. Before you put your choux and eclair in the oven you take a fork, a little bit of water on your fork and you're gonna make just a little shape like this like a square on top of your choux to control the top and make sure they don't end up like pointy like a little little tower. Next we're gonna apply some egg on top to make it nice and shiny, nice and golden in the oven. You take a paintbrush with a full egg that you mix and you don't put too much. So remove the excess and you only go, it's like making a painting, be careful. Same thing for the eclair. One little brush, don't overdo it. Make sure it's covering the egg. Okay done and it's ready to go in the oven. Okay I forgot to mention but before you lay down your choux, preheat your oven at 200 degrees Celsius. All right and we're gonna leave these for approximately maybe 15 minutes. And that's it guys, well done. If you follow that video we've completed how to make choux pastry and we've created some eclairs as you can see here of different sizes. We've got the bigger one, the smaller one and some really near perfect kind of choux that you can use for profiteroles, you can use it and fill them with cream, you can fill them with crème pâtissière and you can add some icing on top. Now this will be another subject on another video. For this video you need to concentrate on how to get this right and how to make these choux because they're the building block of a lot of French dessert. That's it for today guys, if you liked the video please comment, like or subscribe to my channel and I'll see you soon in another video. Bye bye