Day 3: Time to Debut the Choux

 Today I decided to take it back to a classic French pastry. But before I get into that, let’s talk about shoes. Actually that may be a little misleading. I’m going to talk about choux (which I’m pretty sure is pronounced the same). This extremely popular dough is used in a multitude of French pastries. It can be used for sweets such as profiteroles, eclairs, croquembouche, or beignets as well as savory hors d'oeuvres. It’s unique because it is baked, but before that also cooked on the stove. 

The origin of Choux pastry, Pâte à choux in French, is believed to have come from a chef by the name of Pantenelli. He had been the head chef for Catherine de Medicci of Florence, but after moving to France in 1540 he created this thick, paste-like dough. It was called Choux (the french word for cabbage) because it spread quickly across France and took on the look of cabbage after baking. 

Although it is used diversely, it is not necessarily what you would expect from a pastry. Instead of a flaky puff pastry like dough, it is crisp on the outside and hollow on the inside. It uses only eggs, butter, water, milk and flour, which may strike you as strange because there is no raising agent. This is where the stovetop cooking comes into play, because the moisture is used to help the dough rise. 

There are an abundance of French recipes that use Pâte à choux, but as it spread around the world it was reimagined in many different ways. In the Netherlands a popular pastry is the bossche bol, also known as the reuzenbol, which is similar to a profiterole except significantly larger and covered in chocolate. The U.S. also has its own profiterole copycat, most commonly known as a puff pastry, which is dusted with powdered sugar and has a custard or whipped cream filling. In Poland the choux pastry is used for karpatka, which uses both choux and shortcrust to create a cake resembling the Carpathian mountains. Another well known use for the choux pastry are churros, which were first seen in Spain or Portugal, where instead of baked the dough is fried. 

To attempt to master this dough, I chose to create the Paris-Brest. Although perhaps not as widely known to people outside of France as the macaron or croissant, it can be found in bakeries all over France and is gaining popularity across the U.S. The Paris-Brest is rings of choux pastry, filled with a praline flavored cream and covered with almonds and powdered sugar. This pastry was created to commemorate a 1200 km bicycle race from Paris to the city of Brest and back to Paris. The pastry was created in 1910 by Louis Durand who had a shop along the route. He made it circular to resemble a bicycle wheel out of choux rings, covered it with flaked almonds, then baked it. After baking he sliced it and filled it with a praline cream. Almonds gained popularity in French baking from Italy and could be used as a flour instead of other more coarsely ground grains. Today you will often find French recipes that call for almond flour, or a least a garnish of almonds on the pastry 

After learning all this fascinating history, it was time to try to create my very own Paris-Brest! I started by making the Choux pastry dough that I had learned so much about. Combining all the ingredients was simple and I think it turned out quite nicely. After piping it onto my handmade stencil I sprinkled almonds on top and put it in the oven. At first I was a little concerned about how it would turn out. I wanted to find a traditional recipe, but many of them were from Americans, so using those didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I ended up using a combination of many recipes, but one of the major differentiations between all of the recipes was the bake time! Depending on the size of the pastry, or how many you are making, the bake time and temperature varied a lot, so I had to keep a close eye on the oven to make sure I didn’t burn my pastry. After it had sufficiently browned and raised I removed it from the oven and was very happy with the result. 

Unfortunately…

My pastry deflated! 

I did some research on why this could be, and the most common answer seemed to be taking it out of the oven too early. If the dough does not have time to bake properly, the moisture trapped inside can cause the pastry to deflate when it's removed from the oven. (I’m pretty sure this is what happened to me). 

After letting my pastry cool, I solidified this theory when it was time to cut it in half. 

The layers were very delicate and I was concerned about breaking them when I was trying to get them separated. They were not quite as crispy as I had assumed they would be, which makes me quite certain it was slightly underbaked. Even though it was delicate, I was able to successfully separate the two halves, and make my cream filling. 

For the filling I combined leftover pastry cream from my tart with praline paste, then whipped some heavy cream and added that. The filling is another part many recipes disagree on. It seems the American bakers tend to use just a whipped cream and make it more like a giant cream puff, while the other recipes use the praline paste, or sometimes a buttercream with praline, or even a merengue. I decided to go with the praline paste cream filling, since it is supposed to be a praline dessert. Having leftover cream from my tart came in very handy, although it may have contributed to the runny consistency of the filling. My heavy cream also wasn’t whipped quite enough so when I piped the cream onto the pastry it didn’t hold its shape like I had hoped. 

Even with all these small setbacks, the final pastry was delicious. It wasn’t too sweet, which is mostly due to the choux pastry, but the praline flavor from the cream came through to compliment the almonds. Even though it didn’t look quite as tall and elegant as I was pictured, I am still proud of the way it ended up, and especially the way it tasted. I can’t wait to try to make this again, and hopefully fix all of these details and make it a real showstopper!