Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Recipe for Pate a Choux (specially for Dotz!)

This recipe is taken from the book On Baking (A Textbook on Baking and Pastry Fundamentals), page 412.
The recipes in this book are meant for restaurant or hotel kitchens which means the portions are large.  Here is the halved recipe and my tweaked version:
Milk                   120ml (if you want a crisper version replace milk with water)
Water                120 ml
Salted butter      105gm
Plain flour           150gm
Sugar                 2 teaspoons (can omit but I prefer it with a bit of sugar)
Eggs                   5 with 1 tsp vanilla extract

Turn on oven to 180deg C.

1.  Place milk, water and butter in a pot.  Bring to boil.  Make sure the butter is full melted.
2.  Remove from heat and immediately add in all the flour.  Vigorously beat trhe dough by hand.  Put the pan back on the heat and continue beating the dough until it comes away from the sides of the pan.  The dough should look relatively dry.
(N.B.  I used a non-stick pot so cut down the process quite a bit).
3.  Transfer the dough to your mixer and beat at medium speed for a few seconds.  Begin to add the eggs one at a time
4.  Continue beating to add the eggs one by one until the mixture is shiny and silky but firm.
(N.B. This step is very important because beating adequately will incorporate enough air for the puff to rise).
5.  Put the dough into a pastry bag fitted with a plain tip and pipe onto non-stick sheet pans.
6.  Bake at 180deg C (varies with different ovens but it doesn need to be hot initially to rise properly) until pastries are dry and crisp, or golden brown, about 20-25 minutes.
7.  Let pastries cool on a rack before filling.

Enjoy!

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ooh thank you!!