How to make Choux pastry

Okay good morning, today began we’re going to be making a basic Choux pastry. So we’re going to take 135 grams of strong flour, take 250 grams of water, 250 mills of milk, 250 grams of butter, 10 grams of sugar, 5 grams of salt and about 9 eggs depending on the size we go by weight so it's 460 grams.

To start off what we do is take our pan, take 250 mills of water, 250 mills of milk and 250 mills of butter and what we’re going to do is just heat that through, bring it to a slow boil just to get an emulsion, to start to make an emulsion, so once this is brought to the boil what we do is we just turn it down to a gentle simmer and we start to add our strong flour, we need strong flour so that the gluten will hold and hold the case in shape, otherwise it will just collapse when it’s cooked, start working that quite quickly, because you want to work out any lumps bringing it all together, it’s basically a large rue, so I’m just going to cook it out and cook out the flour and at this stage you start working it quite firmly so that you start to generate or create the electricity within the gluten itself, should cook this about 3-4 minutes depending on how hard you’ve got it, don’t let it rest in the pan because what will happen is it will catch and burned. 

So what we're going to do is obviously cook it out the rue slightly, place that then into our bowl ready to put onto our machine. So in the pan here now we have our rue or our Choux base and we’re just going to place that onto the machine, let’s get that mixing slightly so it cools down a little bit before we add our eggs, so they don’t start to cook as soon as we add them, just ensure that the machine is on speed 1, turn it on slightly and we’ll let that run for a few minutes just to cool ever so slightly, not too much before we start adding our eggs and when we add our eggs we add by egg weight rather than egg number because eggs vary in weight, what we have here is around 9 eggs or 460 grams depending on how much we may or may not use I will or won’t add all of it to start off with.

You can start slowly adding your eggs because what you want to do is make sure that it's incorporated into the mix rather than just sitting there split, add a little bit at a time, let it come together and then at the rest okay, but again essentially don’t add all of it same with making bread just add a little bit to start off with, leave one or two maybe in the bowl and then check the consistency by doing a test in the oven before you proceed with your piping, so when all the eggs are incorporated, if you’ve just saved a little bit left in the bowl here, you can take it off the machine what we're looking for is dropping consistency and when I say dropping consistency I mean that the Choux paste will fall off the paddle under it’s own weight, I’m not throwing it down, I'm not pushing anyway it’s just gently falling not too fast not too slow, this will ensure when we cook it doesn't blow, it doesn’t spread when we pipe it.

So in order then just to keep this ready and good to use, scrape it down making sure you get as much as you can off the paddle, place that on your paper so it stays nice and clean, scrape down the bowl and you can pipe the Choux now and place it in the freezer ready piped, ready to go or you can hold in the fridge, just Clingfilm to touch and it’s ready to pipe the next day or later that day. There we have the finished Choux pastry ready for the fridge and can be pre-piped frozen and used for éclair’s, profiteroles or religious.

Find your next job as a Pastry Chef here.