Choux pastry and éclair

Sounds tasty and scary at the same time, right? :D

It's one of the recipes people usually fear to try... but let me show how easy you can understand all the tricks and hacks about it.

On this recipe, we will be doing the choux and the eclair with a nice craquelin on top, if you are wondering what the craquelin is, it's a thin dough that will give crunchiness to our choux and èclair.

The choux pastry it's a light pastry dough made without a raising agent, it employs high moisture content to create steam during cooking to puff the pastry. They remain almost empty inside so you can refill them with your favourite filling, I'm using a vanilla pastry cream following this easy recipe (click here)

Now, let's get started, you can either watch the video here or follow the steps below.

INGREDIENTS

Craquelin:

75 gr butter

90gr flour

90gr light brown sugar

Choux:

188gr water

62gr milk

7,5gr sugar

250gr egg

150gr flour

2,5gr salt

100gr butter

STEP by STEP

1. First things first. Let's start with the craquelin mixing the butter, sugar and flour by hand until it forms a paste.

2. Spread the dough between 2 sheets of parchment paper, thick as a grain of sugar.

3. Leave them in the freezer while we prepare the choux dough.

4. Time for the patè a choux, let's start warming up the water, milk, sugar, salt and butter. Be careful! Warm them up until the butter it's melted, but not boiling.

5. When the mix it's warm remove from the fire and add the flour, mix well and put back on the stone, and finish to cook.

6. TIP How do you know when it's cooked? The dough will be ready when it's gonna leave a layer or "skin" on the bottom of our pan.

7. Now it's time to mix it in the mixing machine with the paddle. You will see steam coming out. You have to keep mixing until all the steam has gone.

8. Last but not least, add the eggs, but be careful! Add them 1 by 1... this is really important as depending on your flour or eggs, you dough may need lees eggs and if you add all of them it may become too liquid. So go slow, add 1 by 1 and check the consistency at all times. An easy way to know that you have the right consistency is to take it out with your spatula and the dough will fell down leaving a ribbon. (If that sounds confusing, check out the vide :)).

1. Now your dough it's ready, take your piping back and start forming your choux and ècalirs on top of your oven trays with some parchment paper on it.

2. When they are ready, take the craquelin from the freezer and cut it the right size of your ècalirs and choux, and put them on top, pressing very gently.

3. Bake at 180ºC for 20 minutes with the fan.

4. When they are ready you can refill and enjoy! :)

Let me know in the comments if you like the recipe or have any questions.

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