Easy Choux Pastry Recipe

Hi, and welcome to Bold Baking Basics. This is where we get stuck into the fundamentals of baking. These videos will get you baking with confidence, anytime, anywhere. In this episode, I'm going to show you how you can make a choux pastry. This is used to make cream puffs, profiteroles, and eclairs. The recipe, as always, can be found on BiggerBolderBaking.com, along with all of my other recipes. Okay, let's get started in a nice heavy-bottomed saucepan. Add in your milk, cold cubed butter, and a little bit of salt. Then turn the heat on to medium-low and let the butter melt. So now once your butter melts, you want this mix to come to almost a boil. It's called scalding. And you want it to get really hot, but not actually have it boil, and then we're going to add in our flour. Once you add in your flour, go straight away in with a wooden spoon, and then mix it together until it forms a ball. You want to do this nice and quick. You'll see it all come together, this is exactly what we want. It's clearing the sides of the pan. So now what you want to do is just cook this for around 2 minutes on a low heat. Continue moving it as it cooks. So there we go, this is ready. Now our next ingredient is eggs. Now it's really important that these are at room temperature because we're going to add them into something hot. You want to make sure that they're not cold from the fridge. So let them sit out for a few hours. And then with your wooden spoon again, and your eggs in hand, go ahead and add a little bit in at a time, and then keep on mixing until it forms a dough. Add a little bit more eggs, and keep on mixing. Now I'm very well aware that this is a little bit of a messy job. It doesn't look like it's going to form a dough, but just keep adding a little bit of egg, and just keep on mixing. So it'll take a few minutes, but once your dough comes together and all your eggs are in there, your dough will look like this. Now it's not too runny. If it's too runny, you might have a bit of an issue. It's supposed to be just this texture. Perfect. Okay, so from here, I'm going to get this into my piping bag. Go ahead and fill a piping bag 3 quarters of the way full. So I have this guy fitted with a round nozzle, but you can also use a star nozzle. Okay, this guy is ready to be piped. So now here's my tray lined with parchment paper, but here's a sneaky little trick that only professional chefs know about. You want to take your choux pastry, and just dot it under each corner of the paper. And what this will do is it will hold down the paper while it's baking, because they're so light and delicate, they can blow around a little bit, and this will make sure they stay put. Then all you want to do is take your piping bag, and pipe a nice big circle. A little bit of a dollop. Now make sure you give them enough space in between because they do puff up when they bake. Now this will make roughly around 18 to like maybe 23, 24, depending on how big you make them. Nobody ever complained about getting too big of a profiterole, that's for sure. Okay, lovely, these are looking great. Now, as you can see, they all have little peaks on them, now here's my other little trick. This is a great one, we have a little bowl of water right here, what you're going to do is dip your fingers in there, and then just pat down that little bit that's sticking up. And I'll tell you why we do that. That can have a tendency to burn in the oven because he's sticking up all by himself, you don't want that to happen, so just go ahead and boop on his head, give him a little boop, and down he goes. Lovely. So now lastly, just before we put it into a really hot oven, you want to sprinkle a little bit of water on the tray. Now the reason that we do this is because when it gets into the oven, it will create steam and the steam will help your choux pastry to rise and get lovely and big. You want to bake these guys off at 425°F or 210°C for 20 minutes. So once your choux pastry comes out of the oven, it will be all lovely and golden brown just like this. Now let me show you what they look like on the inside. So once you rip it open, they should look like this on the inside. They shouldn't be wet at all. This is perfect. So a really common thing that happens to choux pastry is that it can get kind of flat and fall once it comes out of the oven. Now I'm going to give you a really easy solution for this. Once your 20 minutes are up, turn off the oven, leave the door closed, and leave them in there for around 10 minutes. What this will do, it will dry them out a little bit, keep them nice and crisp, and they won't fall. So some people say that when they make choux pastry, it can be very eggy tasting. Now that shouldn't happen, but if you follow my baking directions, I guarantee you it won't happen to you. And that's how you make a classic choux pastry. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Head over to my website for lots more Bold Baking Basics, and I'll see you back here really soon.