Home › The World's Kitchen › Eclairs, Chantilly
Eclairs, Chantilly
Prepare a pate-a-choux. Slide a tube one-third of an inch in diameter in the bottom of a pastry bag. Drop the paste into the bag. Have a well-cleaned pastry pan ready, then carefully press down the preparation on the pan, three inches long by half an inch wide. Set the pan in the oven and bake for twenty minutes. Remove and let cool off for ten minutes. Make an incision with a knife at one side only. Then fill the apertures of the eclairs with a vanilla-whipped cream. Dredge a little powdered sugar over them all and serve.
A bare-bones professional note rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have choux paste and a working knowledge of the oven. The gaps are worth filling in.
- Pâte à chouxThe recipe assumes the paste is already known, and it is presumably given elsewhere in the book. A standard working ratio is 1 cup water, 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup flour and 4 eggs, the flour beaten in off the heat and the eggs added one at a time until the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the original assumes a range cook's judgment. Choux needs a hot start to generate steam and set the shell: 425F for the first 10-15 minutes, then down to 350F to dry the interior.
- Twenty minutes is shortThree-inch éclairs generally need 25-35 minutes total. Pull them early and they collapse. The cue is colour and weight: deep golden brown all over, and light and hollow-sounding when tapped.
- The hingeDo not open the oven during the first two-thirds of baking. The rise is entirely steam, and a draught of cool air deflates the shells before the walls have set.
- The tubeA third of an inch is roughly an 8 mm plain round tip. Anything from 1/2 inch down will work; a plain tube gives a smoother shell than a star.
- Pastry pan"Well-cleaned" means free of old grease that would cause spreading. A modern sheet pan lined with parchment is better still, and lets you space the piped lengths two inches apart.
- CoolingTen minutes is not enough. Slit each shell as directed to let steam escape, then cool completely before filling, or the cream will slacken and weep.
- ChantillyVanilla-whipped cream is simply heavy cream whipped to soft peaks with a spoonful or two of powdered sugar and vanilla. Fill through the side slit with a piping bag, and no more than an hour before serving "" choux shells soften quickly once wet.
- YieldA batch of choux from 1 cup of water gives roughly 18 to 24 éclairs of the stated size.
Chantilly is the standard pastry term for sweetened, vanilla-scented whipped cream, traditionally associated with the Château de Chantilly north of Paris and its kitchens under the seventeenth-century maître d'hôtel Vatel "" a link that is repeated everywhere but rests on no contemporary document. The éclair proper is a nineteenth-century Parisian form, an oblong of choux paste that in French practice is usually filled with pastry cream and glazed with fondant; the Chantilly version, split at the side and dusted with sugar instead of iced, is one of its lighter variants. Its appearance in a book organised as "The World's Kitchen" reflects how thoroughly French patisserie vocabulary had been absorbed into American hotel and restaurant cooking by the early twentieth century "" the writer expects a reader who already knows what a pâte à choux is and needs telling only the dimensions and the tube size.