Patisserie 4: Pâte à choux/Choux Pastry/Cream puff tartlets

 You would think that my track record with The Book would have me a little more humble in my approach by now. A few months ago, while I was still reading up on how to begin my patisserie journey, I stumbled upon the blog Patisserie Makes Perfect, which was the final inspiration for my method. But very early on, the author has extreme difficulty with this recipe for Cream Puff Tartlets, and mentions that they have much difficulty with choux pastry in the past. Now, I've made choux pastry to varying success before, but as described in my very first post, I have no idea why or why not some of my attempts worked. So I assumed that, if I followed the recipe by The Book, everything would at least turn out on par to the blogger's attempt. 

I was half-right: I didn't have to really worry about the choux pastry itself. But everything else that could go wrong in this "intermediate" recipe went wrong in some way. 

According to Wikipedia, the name for pâte à choux is mistakenly attributed to its literal meaning and appearance (choux=cauliflower in french), when instead, it stems from pâte à chaud, or "hot pastry," due to its being cooked butter, flour, and water, to allow the flour to absorb more moisture. This moisture is in turn released during the baking process, creating steam which leavens the pastry dough, usually creating a hollow center and a browned but tender crust. This is the pastry dough that becomes both profiteroles (cream puffs) and eclairs (long cream puffs), as well as paris-brest and religieuses (which are just a profiterole with a smaller profiterole on top), and unfilled versions like chouquettes (small unfilled puffs) and gougeres (savory cheese puffs). 

 The recipe begins with making the tart shells from pate sucree cannele from earlier in The Book, which is the same as the recipe for pate sucree (sweet pastry) with the addition of an orange's worth of zest and a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, meant for eight 3" tartlets. The softened butter is creamed with confectioner's sugar, and then the remaining ingredients are added (almond flour, flour, an egg, salt, cinnamon, orange zest). 

Tart crust ingredients ready to blend together

At this point, we were looking pretty similar to the photos in the book, though I had reservations about how sticky my dough was when I tried to form it into a round on plastic wrap.

It looks like it does in the pictures! I promise!

But shaping it into a disk within the plastic wrap did the trick, and I set it in the fridge to chill for a few hours while I prepared the rest of the recipe.

Disc of tart dough in some familiar plastic wrap. I wonder how many times I can use this before it gives up its transparent ghost

As mentioned before, choux pastry is distinct from other pastry doughs because the ingredients are cooked together into a dry paste before adding eggs and baking. I measured the butter, equal parts milk and water, and salt into a saucepan, and I measured the flour into a bowl, setting up some mise en place so I could have everything ready to go as soon as the liquid mixture was simmering.

Butter/milk/water/salt, and flour staged, ready to be assembled and cooked into the choux base

As soon as all the butter was melted, the mixture was just below a simmer. I dumped in the prepared flour, pulled the pan from the heat, and stirred with a wooden spoon until the entire thing came together into a ball, and then returned it to heat for 30 seconds, smearing it around the pan and back into a ball to cook the flour slightly and fully dry out the dough. It was fairly firm by this point, as it had been in my previous choux experience, and I scooped it out into a bowl to stop cooking.

Cooked choux dough ball

I began adding the four eggs one at a time, beating between each addition, until the batter was fairly liquid and lustrous. However, the book called for "very shiny and just fall from the spoon," and, against my better judgement, I added half of the fifth egg. I believe this made my batter a little too runny, but not unsalvageable at this point, so I carried on, reserving the unused half of an egg for egg wash later.

4.5 eggs beaten into the batter, which is now smooth and shiny and falls from the spoon slowly when lifted

The easiest way to fill a piping bag is to insert the tip, press some of the piping bag material into the wider part of the tip using a thumb to stuff it in, and then set it into a tall container, wrapping the excess over the edges. This holds the piping bag straight for you to fill it, and lets you scrape your spatula cleanly over the edge of the container, with plenty of room to cleanly twist the top closed. I scraped the choux dough into this 18" piping bag fitted with a 10mm plain tip (which, in retrospect, could have been smaller).

My roommate was very confused how the nutribullet was going to be used on the pastry piping tube, until I explained I was only using it to hold up the tube while filling

And here my troubles began. I used cooking spray instead of butter on my half-sheet, which I believe caused the already-runny dough to spread even more. Additionally, each of the puffs was already wider than the regulation one inch diameter called for in the recipe, but I found that I had enough batter to pipe over fifty puffs, far more than the "at least 35" in the recipe. Concerning.  

While applying the egg wash, the silicone tines of the brush tended to stick on the surface of the piped pastries, and the egg wash was a little messy, causing crispy egg skirts to appear on the final product. In the future, I would like to try adding a tiny bit of water to loosen up the egg wash, and use a bristle brush, despite the concerns of errant bristles dropping, to try and prevent this from happening. But this is mostly aesthetic and did not seem to change functionality of the dough membrane.

First sheet of choux puffs piped. I got slightly better at piping as I went along, but way worse at spacing.

Choux pastry has another unique point according to The Book: it is not cooked on convection heat like other pastries, which would cause them to deflate. Similarly, opening the oven door during baking is absolutely forbidden, as it too will collapse the pastries before they have a chance to set in their inflated state. I baked the first tray for about 4 more minutes longer than the recipe called for, waiting for them to be truly golden brown before pulling the tray out.

While none of these first batch deflated, they also never quite acquired a "foot" in their rising, turning into just larger versions of the hemispheres I piped instead of a round puff.

While the first tray of puffs baked, I set to unwrapping my tartlet rings, which had just arrived a day prior. I cannot recommend the astounding amount of plastic around each stainless steel ring, and I was secondarily infuriated by the none-too-easily-removable sticker on the surface of each tart ring. Would it really be so hard to swap the order of operations so the sticker at least was on the plastic?

Why would you make your packaging like this? Everyone who uses labels that don't have easily releasing adhesive should be reprimanded strongly and beaten with a 3M catalog.

The second tray of tarts seemed to rise a little rounder than the first, and I wonder if this is due to the resting/drying time while the first tray baked. Many people let their piped choux dry out before baking, but there's no good consensus on whether this is necessary, though empirically the second tray was a better rise for me. It's also possible I got better at piping the dough, letting it fall from my piping tip in a blob on the tray instead of pulling upwards from a piped puddle.

The second batch, for reasons probably due to my piping technique and not due to drying, though I cannot confirm this until I make the next batch

With the choux puffs cooling on a rack, I left the oven on as instructed and brought out my tart dough once more to begin cutting out the dough. I should mention that this Sunday was still part of our heat wave from last week, and it was a balmy temperature indoors that immediately began softening my tart dough as I rolled it out. But the tart dough was pretty soft to begin with, even after three hours chilling in the fridge, and I wonder if chilling for longer would even help. 

Nonetheless, I was able to roll out the dough with liberal amounts of flour, but nowhere near the called-for 2mm of thickness (mine was closer to 4mm). By some trick of nature, I got eight 10cm circles out of the first roll of the dough! Here's proof!

Mug I used as an exactly 10cm outline, and the proof that all eight circles fit on the rolled out sheet on the first go!

The cinnamon sweet tart dough was very soft and sticky, and difficult to press into the tins. I had buttered the tart rings well just in case they were a replication of the aluminum tart pan first time woes, but these stainless steel rings seemed to demold just fine. However, despite how lovingly I'd packed the tart crust into the corners, they shrank away significantly as they baked, and also sagged, and also the bottom puffed up on several, and also the dough itself puffed a lot...the list of consternations goes on and on. Ultimately, these were closer to 2.5" in diameter and half an inch tall, with an inside volume that was even smaller than expected.

These are some ugly tart shells, yo

Based on the delicate image provided in The Book, I'm going to have to try rolling out the dough while it's much firmer, and possibly even freezing the shells once they are put inside the rings for a few minutes before baking. At least they had no trouble demolding.

They pulled away in all directions from the edges and puffed into the center

While the tart shells cooled, I made the pastry cream, which was very straightforward, and stuck it in the fridge to chill with a piece of plastic wrap pressed to the surface to prevent a skin from forming as usual. I did find that my egg yolk scrambled ever so slightly, and I'd heard of a tip to use an immersion blender afterwards, but I risked using it as filling as is because there were so many components to this tart that they would surely distract from the cream's texture (and based on my housemates' feedback, I was totally right).

I opened a choux experimentally. Success! The inside was one large airy cavity, and the texture was a little eggy but still tender, with a significant savory taste from the equal parts of salt to sugar in the recipe. These would be delicious filled with an herbed ricotta or similar cream cheese.

The puffs were correctly hollow and very easy to eat too many of.

When it came time to pipe the cream, however, I ran into my second scaling issue: I only had enough cream for about twelve cream puffs and five tart shells (once I realized I was running out of cream and went to fill the tart shells). Not to mention my second scaling issue, which is that the choux puffs were WAY TOO BIG to fit on my slightly shrunken tart shells. I settled for placing one each on a shell, and, with the lack of space for additional whipped cream garnish, just drizzled chocolate on top. 

Drizzling chocolate was also a nightmare. I'm not sure whether I was just too scared to be messy, the chocolate wasn't warm enough, or if I wasn't supposed to try and make a parchment cone for drizzling, but I ended up using a spoon and it was very sloppy work. I've done enough origami that I feel like I should be able to make a better cone next time. 

The below is an image of the spread that exemplifies the scaling issues with this recipe. From left to right: Five tart shells and five filled cream puffs, a plate of extra cinnamon orange shortbread cookies and two empty tart shells, five filled cream puffs, and about thirty unfilled cream puffs still on the rack.

The ratios in the parts of this recipe were really messed up. I have no idea how this could possibly have been reconciled through simply better technique.

The unfilled chouquettes were devoured quite readily by my roommates over the next day, though the cream puff tarts were a bit of a higher commitment to be consumed, and took about 3 days to disappear from the fridge (though I imagine part of that is also Out of sight, out of mind).

These did not taste bad, though I liked them better a day later after the components had all mellowed out in texture to each other a bit. But a combination of the scales being incredibly off of each component, the quantity of the recipes not working together, and the tart dough being very uncooperative has led me to the conclusion that I have to bake this again in its entirety. The end result is just too far off from the objective. I will be trying this, along with a puff pastry experiment, before allowing myself to move onto the next section of classic cakes. 

Some thoughts for how to improve the imminent iteration: 

• I'm going to halve the quantity of choux pastry the next time I make this. Even with the surface area/interior volume ratio shift if I pipe even smaller puffs, there's no way this much batter can be used for just eight tarts of four tiny puffs each. 
• As mentioned, I'm going to try refrigerating the cinnamon shortcrust even longer to allow me to roll it out thinner and freezing before I bake the tart shells to prevent so much puffing/shrinking. 
• I'm going to try the immersion blender reconstitution of the scrambled custard (if I scramble it again! haha!)
• I should have trusted my instincts when I felt adding more eggs would make the choux batter too runny. Hopefully a stiffer batter will allow me to pipe more precisely small and hemispherical blobs. 
• I'm going to pipe two sheets as closely as I can and let one rest and the other bake immediately. Maybe I will bake the second sheet first so I can prove whether it's my technique or the resting/drying.
  
• What is up indeed with making a parchment cone for decoration! Both The Book and the Curley patisserie book include a how-to on making a parchment cone for fine decoration, so maybe there's just a preference for it over a disposable plastic cone with the smallest tip cut off? I suppose I shall try this again as well, I fail to imagine how one achieves such tidy chocolate drizzles without secretly piping it on with one of these. 
• I bought some pearl sugar, which I'm excited to try decorating with for the first time. 
• I feel so validated that the other blog author had similar problems with this recipe, and now, having become quite an accomplished baker of choux pastry among other things, vows that Edd Kimber's recipe for choux is their go-to: https://www.patisseriemakesperfect.co.uk/hazelnut-praline-choux-buns/ I noticed that the recipe there includes no milk, has only a quarter of the amount of salt vs sugar, and contains both AP and "strong" flour (bread flour-ish?), although I am somewhat chagrined to see that the ratio of eggs to flour is roughly the same, so maybe I'll just have to accept that the batter should be runnier than I think. "when it is lifted from the bowl, it should fall from the spatula in a ribbon that forms a "V" shape." But this recipe also asks for the dough to be piped into hemisphere molds and then frozen before baking, which seems like cheating/not how the french would do it. I might bake a separate batch of these alongside the half batch of the ones from The Book, and compare the two. Goodbye, dozen eggs I just bought.
  

Quote of the day: "Hahahaha no. No way. Just no." -My roommate Ryan, when I wondered aloud how I was supposed to fit a tetrahedron of cream puffs on a single tart shell.