Pate à Choux– the gate to French Paradise

I made Gateau St. Honoré yesterday for Gianna’s birthday. To make it I had to unearth skills I had not used in years or even decades. No part of the job is very difficult, but unless you do some of them all the time, your result, like mine, will not look like a pro’s work. I am not a pastry chef and generally leave pastries to people like Shuna Lydon and David Lebowitz. Birthdays, however, bring out the sugar baker in me. Whether it is a layer cake filled with lemon curd and frosted with marshmallowy frosting and flaked coconut, or a chocolate sponge with raspberry sauce and chocolate ganache, or even nine pumpkin pies, if it is your birthday, you can count on me to make a “cake”.

This particular cake requires what Americans call cream puffs and Italians call beignets, which are made of pate choux. The recipe I chose made so much pate à choux that I ended up making cream puffs and éclairs for the neighbors as well as the cake for Gianna. It’s pretty darned easy to make pate à choux, not so darned easy to pipe it out evenly so it puffs up into predictable balls like those you can buy by the bag n the supermarket. My newest philosophy is quickly developing to be “If it looks sort of crazy and resembles farmyard animals more than pastry, it’s bound to be good.” As you can see many of my puffs resemble chicks more than Peeps do.

What the heck! I know from experience that most people have never had the real thing. Most people have only had this gateau made with ice cream as a frozen dessert or plopped together from a bakery that uses pastry cream from a barrel, stabilizer in the cream and the pate à choux comes in 50 pound sacks and you “just add oil and water”. The real thing takes four hours of steady work if you have one oven.

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I don’t expect most of you or perhaps any of you to make the real thing, but you could. I promise you, it is just a series of easy things that then get assembled to become a rather complicated thing. What I do want you to know is how to make and bake pate à choux because it is one of the most useful easy things in the world of cookery. Make them big and stuff them with chicken salad, or shrimp, ham or vegetable and cheese salad. Make them big and use them as shells for a creamed chicken with sherry and mushrooms. Turn them into the éclairs and cream puffs of your daydreams, so much better than bakery ones that you’ll weep for lost years. The bagged beignets from the supermarket do not belong on the same page as these you can so easily make. They are also lovely filled with ice cream and sauced with chocolate, butterscotch or a berry sauce.

Pate à Choux

Preheat oven to 200°C or 400°F

17 ounces or 500 ml of water
4 ounces or 115 g butter
a good pinch of salt

2 cups or 260 g regular flour or farina 00

4 eggs plus 2 egg yolks

Heat the water, salt and butter until the butter melts and then turn the heat up to bring it to a boil. Remove it from the heat and dump in all the flour at once, stirring it vigorously until it forms a thick, smooth and sticky dough. Using an electric mixer, beat the eggs and yolks in one by one until the dough becomes very smooth and shiny.

Put parchment or baking paper on a baking sheet or placca and then, if you want the easy way, pipe the dough from a pastry bag in the shapes you want. Longish bars make éclairs, round mounds make cream puffs. You do not have to leave a lot of space around your shapes because most of their growth is up, and if they do touch as they grow, they are easily separated.

If you want to do it the hard way, use two spoons to form the shapes. The first time I ever made pate à choux as a young wife I had neither electric mixer nor pastry bag. By the time I finished them I was convinced I would never bother again. With those two inexpensive helpers, it’s almost child’s play. Almost.

Put one baking sheet into the oven on a middle rack and bake for 15 minutes, then lower the temperature to 190°C or 375°F and cook for 10 t0 15 minutes more. They should be puffed up, dry and firm on the outside. Using a skewer or a sharp knife, pierce each pastry to allow steam to escape. You’ll need to turn the oven up again for the next batch.

As soon as they are out of the oven and have been pierced, cool them on a cooling rack. If they seem too delicate they may be a bit undercooked. Bite into one and see. They can be put back into the oven and cooked a few more minutes with no penalty at all.

This recipe will make about three baking batches. The only time consuming thing is putting them in, taking them out. They mix up easier and faster than brownie mix.

As you can see from the picture above, part of mine had to be piped on to form a border on the base of the gateau. I needed a further 20 medium sized puffs to be glued on with caramel to that border, and then a bunch of little bitty ones to cover the pastry cream center. All of those puffs are stuffed with whipped cream using my trusty pastry bag with an elongated feed that came with it.

Now you all know how to make cream puffs, éclairs, and fancy shapes of choux pastry, all of which have a lovely cavity to be filled at whimsy. If anyone really wants to know how to make the pastry cream and glue this whole thing together, let me know and I’ll oblige. I think everyone ought to have the real thing once in a lifetime, but there’s always Paris, you know. Meanwhile, here it is finished and in a big copper pot about to be hauled off to Gianna’s house.

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