Mon Cher Éclair

By Charity Ferreira and Joseph De Leo

Recipes that show you how to turn the classic French dough into modern-day pastries bursting with bold new flavors and bright colors—plus savory delights.

Taking the love of French pastries into the kitchen, Mon Cher Éclair shows how rewarding it is to make these delectable treats at home. Using just a couple of simple techniques, home cooks can easily master the basic recipe for pâte à choux dough and use it to make beautiful éclairs with modern flavor combinations such as butterscotch-bourbon or Meyer lemon cream. The dough is also the base for an array of profiteroles and cream puffs, which make great appetizers and desserts. With more than forty recipes ranging from traditional to trendy, savory to sweet, rustic to artistic, this small cookbook will make home cooks look like a very big deal.

“Food writer Charity Ferreira’s collection of éclair recipes was influenced by desserts around the world that all translate splendidly into the custard-filled pastry we all know and love. Ever wish your éclair was filled with Nutella instead of plain old regular delicious pastry cream? Now’s the time!” —Food Republic

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781452150727

Book preview

introduction

If you’ve never tried making éclairs or haven’t made them in years, it’s time! The éclairs you remember have been nudged into the twenty-first century and are now bursting with bold new flavors and bright colors.

Éclairs and their cousins—profiteroles, cream puffs, and savory gougères—are made from pâte à choux, a dough that is the basis of many French pastries. When baked, it has a crisp yet tender exterior and an airy, slightly eggy interior that is made to hold rich, creamy filling. While pâte à choux–based pastries look elegant, they’re not at all difficult to make at home.

The formula for successful pâte à choux reminds me of that old-fashioned American recipe for 1-2-3 pound cake that was so called because it was so easy to remember: 1 cup of butter, 2 cups of sugar, and 3 cups of flour. Pâte à choux has just a few ingredients, and the basic proportions are so easy to remember that if you make it a few times, you’ll know it by heart. If you’re the kind of baker who loves exploring kitchen science, there are more than a dozen small variables that can affect how your choux pastry will come out, from the moisture in the air to the hot spots in your oven. And if you just want to make éclairs without bothering about the details, the good news is that, if you follow a few simple guidelines, you’ll be able to make successful éclairs on your very first attempt.

tools

To make pâte à choux, you’ll need a heavy-bottomed medium saucepan and a sturdy wooden spoon. A flexible, heatproof spatula is also handy for scraping every last bit of the batter from the pan.

If you have a kitchen scale, use one when you’re making pâte à choux to check that your 1 cup plus 2 Tbsp of flour weighs 140 grams. And if you don’t have a kitchen scale, you’ll do just fine if you stir up your flour a bit first, spoon lightly packed flour into the measuring cup, and level off the top.

You may have seen choux recipes that call for an electric stand mixer, but I prefer to simply mix by hand. It’s one less bowl to wash afterward, and the choux really doesn’t require the heavy beating that makes a mixer necessary.

I use a pastry bag with a ³/4-in [2-cm] round tip for piping out éclairs and profiteroles and for filling them with cream. You can buy single-use plastic pastry bags that work well for this purpose at kitchen-supply stores. You could also spoon the choux or the filling into a zip-top plastic bag and snip off a corner.

For baking your creations, you’ll need a couple of heavy-duty baking sheets and baking parchment to line them. Choux pastries left to cool on a baking sheet turn out just fine, but, if you prefer, you can transfer the baked pastries to a wire-mesh cooling rack.

When it comes to making silky smooth pastry creams, citrus curds, and fruit sauces, you’ll want a fine-mesh strainer with a handle for straining your finished product. You can buy this kind of strainer at cooking-supply stores, and you’ll be surprised at what an indispensable tool it becomes! I reach for mine often, whether I’m draining cooked pasta or fishing blanched veggies out of boiling water.

mixing

The process for mixing pâte à choux is simple. Bring water and butter to a boil, remove it from the heat, and stir in your flour, sugar, and salt with a wooden spoon until it comes together in a smooth mass. At this point you’ll return the pan to the heat and cook the mixture for 1 to 2 minutes to cook off some of the moisture. Then you’ll remove the mixture from the heat and let it cool for 5 minutes before adding your eggs.

Beating in the eggs is where many cooks are deterred, because when you add the first egg and start stirring, the mixture will look like a separated, curdled mess. It’s not ruined! Keep stirring the mixture vigorously with the wooden spoon, and you’ll see that the egg will incorporate smoothly. Do this for all four eggs, one at a time, and by the end you will have a smooth, glossy mixture that’s somewhere between a thick batter and a very soft dough. Give the mixture a good vigorous stirring for a few seconds after the fourth egg is incorporated. The amount you beat the pâte à choux at this stage affects how much your pastries will puff up in the oven. Beating the mixture extensively after the eggs are incorporated will give you éclairs that are puffier than the long, slender baton-shaped éclairs sold in French pastry shops. Not beating the choux enough will result in éclairs that do not change much from the shape in which you piped them, and they will have a dense interior. Beating the mixture vigorously for a few seconds will result in éclairs that are airy and lofty with a slender, defined shape—in the words of Goldilocks: Just right.

Note that if you’re making éclairs for a crowd, it’s best to mix up each batch of choux separately, rather than doubling the recipe. The bigger the batch, the harder it is to incorporate the eggs by hand and get consistent results.

shaping

In this book you’ll find recipes for éclairs, mini éclairs, profiteroles, cream puffs, and gougères. A medium piping bag fitted with a plain ³/4-in [2-cm] tip is the easiest way to make consistently shaped pastries. If you don’t have a pastry bag, a 1-gl [27-by-27-cm] plastic zip-top bag makes a fine makeshift piping bag, used either with or without a metal pastry tip.

To fill a pastry bag with choux, snip off the pointed end of the bag and slide in the metal pastry tip. Fold down the edge of the bag over your hand, like a collar, and use your other hand to spoon in the choux. Unfold the edge of the bag and twist the bag closed from the top, squeezing the choux down to the tip of the bag. If you’re using a zip-top bag, spoon in the choux in a similar fashion. Twist the bag closed from the top and then use scissors to snip about ¹/2 in [12 mm] off one bottom corner. You want an opening that is around ³/4 in [2 cm]. Begin piping out your choux by squeezing from the top as you twist the top of the bag further, forcing the choux down and out the opening.

To pipe éclairs: Hold the tip at a 45-degree angle to the baking sheet and pipe out batons that are about ³/4 in [2 cm] thick and 4 in [10 cm] long. It will likely take you a few tries to get the hang of piping perfectly uniform éclairs, but remember that once they’re filled and glazed, every éclair is beautiful!

To pipe profiteroles and gougères: Hold the tip at a 90-degree angle to the baking sheet and pipe round mounds. Use a finger dipped in water to press down any point or peak at the top for a smooth, rounded puff. Pumpkin Chouquettes (page 85), at 1 in [2.5 cm] in diameter, are the smallest puffs in this book. Profiteroles are piped in mounds that are about 1¹/2 in [4 cm] in diameter, and gougères are a little bigger at about 2 in [5 cm]. Finally, desserts that consist of a single cream puff, like Summer-Pudding Puffs (page 79) or Caramel–Banana Split Puffs (page 81), are piped in mounds that are about 2¹/2 in [6 cm] across.

baking

Start your choux shells in a hot, 400°F [200°C] oven and bake for 15 minutes. Lower the oven temperature to 375°F [190°C] and bake them for another 15 minutes. Remove the shells from the oven and give them a few pricks with a sharp paring knife along their bottom edge and return them to the oven for about 10 minutes to dry out the eggy insides of the choux.

filling and glazing

I've paired my favorite combinations of fillings and glazes in the recipes, but feel free to mix and match to your heart's content. It’s easiest to finish your éclairs in a single step. Gather what you’ll need to fill and glaze your éclairs while the pastries are cooling, slice the shells (see following), and you’re ready to go.

Éclairs can be glazed with shiny dark chocolate or with colorful powdered-sugar glazes that mimic the bright, glossy fondant glazes in French pastry shops. Your glaze should be warm and fluid but thick enough to coat the top of the pastry with a thin, opaque layer. For chocolate glaze, if it’s too thin, let it stand a few minutes to cool; if it’s too thick, reheat it in the microwave or over a pan of simmering water and stir well. For powdered-sugar glaze, if it’s too thin, add a little more powdered sugar; if it’s too thick, stir in a few drops of hot water. The éclairs here are dipped into the glaze,