Transcription
Hey guys, I'm Nikki. Welcome to my channel. This week, I have the mother of recipes. I'm gonna be showing you how I make a choux pastry dough, or a pâte à choux.
And this dough is really controversial because some people think it should be a relatively easy to make dough, but others disagree and say it's quite technically challenging. So, I'm kind of cutting between these two mindsets because I feel like there are instructions to be followed properly, and if you don't, then it won't work in the end. But today, I'm going to be walking you through all the various steps of getting to that end pâte à choux that's silky but firm dough that you can easily pipe into éclairs or profiteroles, etc. So, let's get started.
So, in this video, I tried to simplify the instructions into four stages. So, stage number one involves combining the water, the milk, the butter, and the sugar and salt into a pot and bring that to a very gentle boil over medium heat. This will melt the butter and really bring all the ingredients to the same temperature. You don't want to boil this for too long because then some of the liquid will evaporate, and you will miss that in the overall choux dough.
So, the second stage involves combining my dry ingredients into the wet mixture. And for my dry ingredient, I have flour. And in my case, I went for something very close to bread flour. And this is because I want my éclairs to be structurally stable. And if you use something softer like pastry flour or all-purpose, then your éclairs might get a little bit soft as time goes on. And to ensure that you can easily incorporate the flour into the wet ingredients, I recommend that you pass it through a sieve.
So, so far, nothing complicated. But here comes the third step. For the third step, you want to cook this dough over heat. And this is where it's really interesting because this causes some chemical reaction when the flour is exposed to moisture. And therefore, you have to cook it for a specific amount of time, and you want the dough to reach a specific texture/consistency. Now, what I can recommend is you can use a thermometer to check that your dough reaches a certain temperature, or you can set your timer to three minutes and just beat it as you're cooking it, and don't stop beating that dough. Now, once that's done, once the three minutes have elapsed, once you've reached a certain temperature, then the dough comes off the heat and keep stirring because now you want to cool it down because next up, we have to add the last ingredient.
Three guys. Now, before you add the eggs, you need to make sure that the dough is not too hot. If the dough is too hot, you risk either cooking the eggs before they're fully incorporated into the dough, or having a very runny dough, which you really don't want. And because texture is key when it comes to piping, there are various ways that you can tell if the dough is ready or not. The first is using a thermometer, checking the temperature of the dough. The second option is touching the dough and getting a feel of how hot you think it is, but this requires a lot of experience, so I wouldn't really suggest that if this is the first time that you do a choux pastry. And third option is the simplest. You can just set your timer to five minutes. I'll take five minutes and stir that dough. You can use an electric mixer for this job, or you can just do it by hand.
And the last step is adding the eggs into this dough. And the eggs are really a huge component to this recipe. This is what will give you that poof, that hollow center in these pastries. So, you want to get this right. Now, my recipe calls for four eggs, but of course, this varies from place to place. You have humidity factors, you have different flour in various countries. So, get a feel of the dough and how it looks like, and just check out the video and see how it's pulling from the spoon. The texture is really everything. But I have to say, you do want to add enough eggs so that you get that nice poof effect. So, just make sure that you're not dumping all the eggs at once because this is not foolproof. I'm sorry, it just isn't.
So, for this video, I also wanted to show you the versatility of the dough. So, I decided to make éclairs and choux. And I really think that if you follow these tricks when it comes to making this choux pastry, then you'll end up with a really nice dough. So, the baking again depends on your oven. It's hard to say. I'm using the same temperature throughout the entire baking process, and I'm just keeping an eye out after 15 minutes to check whether something is kind of browning a little too fast. If that's the case, then bump it down 10 degrees Celsius and just keep going. If you have hot patches, rotate. You can rotate after 15 minutes.
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