lesson 9: pâte à choux

According to Chef H, baking pate choux needs patience. He was telling us last Friday on our demo class that previous semester, there was one student baking pate choux for her final exam and she failed because she was too impatient, turned the tray of baking choux too fast. He makes sure that we did not make the same mistake in class.
Once pate choux is placed inside the oven, the oven must not be open for at least 18-20 minutes until the choux rise and color is golden brown. Then, we will have to turned the tray and lower down the heat and bake it for another 2 minutes.

Everybody in my class were so afraid about this practical class, not because of the pate choux but we're going to cook fondant to the right temperature to glaze our eclairs and religieuses. We will be handling more fondant when we're in superior class.

There are 4 steps need to be done to make pate choux.
1. Making the choux itself.
2. The filling which is pastry cream.
3. Chantilly cream for the swan's filling.
4. Buttercream -- we didn't have to do this in class, it's provided by the chef.

We were given 1 hour on baking the choux and 1h 30m to make pastry cream, chantilly, and fondant. We used commercial fondant, and just have to cook it to the right consistency. Need to remind you that since we're in basic we are not allowed to use any electric mixer, so we have to whisk the Chantilly cream by hand. Well it's not so bad considering we have done this on the first day of our practical class, which is to whisk egg whites etc for sponge cake and ladyfingers.

I honestly didn't find it hard to make the batter for pate choux, the piping though is a pain because I'm so bad with piping. Especially for this lesson, the chef wants the eclairs to be the same size and even. Also the religieuses to be an exact size of what he scored on our greased baking tray. As predicted, everybody got different sizes of religieuses including mine but eclairs turned out to be good. Surprisingly, I didn't screw up my pate choux. I cooked the fondant to the right temperature but I messed up the glazing. You'll understand why when you see the eclairs.

Swans