Baking Bouchon - Recipe 9: Cream Puffs

This recipe caused me a lot of anxiety.  Not because it was exceptionally complicated, but because of CA's very high cream puff standards.  You see, he's been to the Wisconsin State Fair countless times and guess what the signature dish of the fair is?  Yep, cream puffs.  Apparently they sell hundreds of thousands of them at the fair each year and someone thinks they are the standard to which all cream puffs should be measured.  I've seen him scoff at lesser puffs so the bar was set quite high.

This recipe is actually two recipes (well, three, but we already talked about Pastry Cream).  One for Pate a Choux which is a light pastry dough that has a very high moisture content which, when cooked, creates steam and makes the dough puff.  It is used for cream puffs, eclairs, cheese puffs and beignets.  The dough itself has no sugar in it, the sweetness in this recipe comes from the pastry cream which fills it and the cookie which bakes on top of it.

The second recipe is the cookie which gets placed on top of the unbaked puff and is intended to ensure the top is crispy and gives it a "visually appealing appearance".  As if puffed dough filled with cream could NOT be visually appealing.

The cookie is the first thing one I worked on.  The ingredients are super simple; brown sugar, flour, almond flour and butter.

I put all the ingredients in the mixer and mixed and mixed and mixed.  Thomas warns the dough will be crumbly and will only come together into a ball once you mush it together with your hands.  I tried that and I got no ball so I cheated and put in 1 tsp of water.  It worked and the dough did eventually mush together... barely.

You then freeze the dough and attempt to roll it very thin.  Thomas warned me that this would be difficult and to persist by patching the dough and rolling again.  It eventually worked, but it took a while.  Once the dough is rolled out, it goes back in the freezer and waits for its partner to be done.

For the Pate A Choux, you melt butter with water and salt, then add flour and stir rapidly until the dough pulls away from the pan and is glossy and smooth, but not dry.  The whole "glossy and smooth" thing never happened to me and I kept waiting for it, but then I got freaked out that the dough might be too dry so I stopped.   See how chunky it is?  I thought I'd screwed it up, but in hindsight, it was ok.

Next, put that dry, chunky mess into the mixer, gradually add a lot of eggs and mix, mix, mix.  At this point, you pipe out the dough into individual, future puffs.

Thomas is very concerned that each puff is exactly the same size so he prefers to pipe the dough into silicone molds.  Me?  I don't have a silicone mold, so I piped them onto a silpad and because of my mad piping skills, they were pretty much the same size.  I popped the pan into the freezer and found something else to do for a couple of hours while they set up.  That something may have involved breaking off pieces of cookie dough and eating it.

So, after everyone was thoroughly frozen, it was finally time to bake these puffers.  I topped each puff with a brush of water and circle of cookie dough, popped them in the oven. and crossed my fingers that puffing actually occurred.

Success!!!  They puffed up beautifully with a nice little cavity inside just screaming for some pastry cream.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for pastry cream...

The cookie kind of melted into the top and left a nice little crunch similar to a struesel topping (which now that I think about it, has exactly the same ingredients in it).

The verdict?  According to CA, while the puff itself was very similar to the puff by which all puffs are judged, but the cookie top is totally different and the filling is too heavy.  It should really just be sweetened whipped cream.  All that said, it didn't stop him from eating them or telling me they were really tasty.  Just not the same.

I have never been to the State Fair or had one of these famous puffs, so I thought these were pretty darn tasty.  Although I do agree that the filling was a little heavy and would probably lighten it by combining the pastry cream with some whipped cream in the future.

Maybe someday I'll make it to the Wisconsin State Fair and get to taste the standard for myself.  Until then I'll eat these and when they're gone I'll find myself a local fair and try not to choke from inhaling the powdered sugar on my funnel cake.

Julie