Day 22: Switching Up Chefs

I arrived early and noticed that Chef wasn't in the kitchen. Chef is usually there ahead of us to set up so that we know what tools we would be using for the day. Everyone noticed that another Chef was setting up and so we found that we were going to be taught today's class by the Chef that is currently teaching the advance class. Today we are making profiteroles filled with vanilla pastry cream a chocolate drizzled on top.

All was good and Chef started us all off with gathering the ingredients to make a pastry cream. The ingredients consisted of sugar and milk in a sauce pot, egg yolk, whole egg, cornstarch, and sugar in a bowl, butter in a bowl, set aside and vanilla. Chef gave us a demonstration of the steps that we need to follow to create a vanilla pastry cream. We started off by bring the sugar and milk to a boil. Then tempered the egg yolk, whole egg, cornstarch and sugar mixture with the hot sugar and milk. Once the mixture had tempered, I added the remaining hot milk and sugar stirring to combine thoroughly. The mixture was returned to the stove to thicken and butter and vanilla were stirred in well afterwards. The cream was covered with saran wrap and then taken to cool in the refrigerator to be used later. There are many variations for this pastry cream such as adding chocolate or coffee in place of (or addition to) the vanilla.



Vanilla Pastry Cream
Filled Profiteroles Drizzled
With Dark Chocolate

With the vanilla pastry cream completed we moved on to making the pate a choux (eclair paste) or as the Chefs like to call it, shoe (choux) paste. We decided that with the pate a choux that we would make profiteroles. How classic is that for a French pastry? I had my first profiterole in 1979 and I can still remember how good it tasted!

Making the pate a choux was even easier than making the pastry cream. Simple ingredients that we all typically have in our pantry were used ~ water, butter, salt, bread flour, and eggs. The water and butter were heated to a boil ensuring that the butter was completely melted. Once this occurred it was taken off the heat and the bread flour was added and stirred quickly. The pot was then returned to the stove and stirred vigorously until the dough formed a ball and pulled away from the sides of the pot. I transferred the dough to a bowl and worked it around every so often to cool so it was no longer hot to the touch.

To make the profiteroles, I fitted a pastry bag with a large star tube (a large tube is typically used) and filled it with the pate a choux. I then piped round mounds of the dough on to a parchment lined baking pan ~ 24 to be exact. I placed them in to the oven to bake at 425 F turning the temperature down to 375 F after 10 minutes. The profiteroles were taken out of the oven when they became browned and very crisp.

While the profiteroles cooled off we made churros with the left over pate a choux. A churro is the Mexican version of the doughnut. The dough was piped in a straight three inch log on parchment paper. The churros (I had enough dough for three) where slid in to the hot oil to cook. After turning a lovely dark brown they were taken out and drained of excess oil and tossed in a cinnamon and sugar mixture. These were absolutely wonderful. Fried food cannot get any better than these. The texture of the churro on the outside was crisp while the inside was creamy.


Practicing my plating skills
with some pulled sugar.

The profiteroles now cooled were ready for the pastry cream. I filled a pastry bag with the vanilla cream mixture and piped it in to the profiteroles. I made enough cream for a dozen profiterole, the remaining will be frozen to be used later this week. The vanilla pastry cream filled profiteroles were finished off with a drizzle of dark chocolate.

As an added bonus Chef showed us some sugar work and how it's done. I got to try it out and used my first try at sugar work in platting my profiteroles to show off the pastries I baked today.

Homework tonight is to share the goodies with my family, neighbours and friends who live nearby.