- 1
Ingredients
- 150 ml water
- 120 ml whole milk
- 113 g unsalted butter, cut into pieces
- 2 tbsp. sweetened condensed milk
- 0.5 tsp. salt
- 165 g flour
- 4 large eggs
- Extra egg whites
Preparation
Step 1
Preheat oven to 200°C, 180°C Fan.
Crack the eggs into a jug and set next to your mixer.
Put the water, the milks, the butter and salt into a saucepan and bring to a full, rolling boil.
Add the flour all at once to the boiling mixture.
Take the pan off the heat and stir the mixture into a paste. It will look a bit like scrambled egg.
After the flour has been added - it will look a bit like scrambled egg. Keep stirring!
Return the pan to the heat, turn it to medium-low and continue stirring until the mixture comes together in a smooth lump and begins to stick to the pan a little.
Keep cooking and stirring it around over moderate heat to dry out the dough as much as possible. Time yourself. Three minutes. Seriously, set the timer. The drier the dough, the more eggs it will absorb, the puffier your choux buns will be.
After drying the dough, it needs to cool down a little before the eggs are added, otherwise the eggs will cook upon contact. Rather than wait, be proactive! If you’re using just a saucepan and spoon, continue stirring vigorously. If you’re using gadgets, tip the dough into a bowl and and turn the beaters on at the slowest speed.
At low speed, add the eggs, one at a time, beating thoroughly so that each egg is fully incorporated before adding the next.
Once all the eggs have been incorporated, check the consistency of the dough. Lots of my old recipe book mention ‘a dropping consistency’ when referring to cake and bun mixes – and really, there is no better description I can think of for the consistency we’re looking for. With the paddle of the stand mixer (or whatever you’re using) take a scoop of the pastry batter and see if it will drop smoothly and freely. The consistency should be similar to mayonnaise, or soft ice-cream. If the batter falls in a lump, or doesn’t fall at all, then it is too ‘tight’ and needs to be loosened by adding more egg whites. Do this gradually, adding a little at a time, checking that the egg-whites are fully incorporated before checking the consistency again.
Mix the egg yolk with 1 tbs water and brush over the choux buns. This is optional. Glazing the choux buns makes them slightly darker, and more shiny. The photo at the top of this post has a mixture of both, which I think looks quite nice. You decide.
Cook the choux one tray at a time. Choux pastry is leavened when the water held in the paste turns to steam in the heat of the oven. Too many trays in the oven at one time will create too much humidity, and wet heat won’t dry your choux buns to crisp, golden orbs – they’ll steam, be soggy and collapse. The additional trays will sit and wait quite happily for their turn in the oven with no side effects.
Cook each tray at 200°C, 180°C Fan oven for 10 minutes, then turn oven down to 175°C, 155°C Fan to continue baking/drying for 20 minutes more. NO PEEKING! If you open the door to check their progress, you let out all the heat which means no steam which means no puffing up.
Once the buns are cooked, remove from the oven and IMMEDIATELY poke a hole in the base of each with the point of a sharp knife to let out the steam. If you don’t do this, the steam will remain trapped inside and will make the bun soggy. You need to work fast, and sometimes it can be difficult to keep track of which buns you’ve done. My suggestion: Once you’ve poked a hole in a bun, put it back on the tray UPSIDE-DOWN. That way, its easy to see that any puffs the right way up have obviously not been done. To be really sure that the insides have dried out, once you have finished poking holes in each puff, you might like to return the tray to the oven for 5-10 minutes. Lower the heat slightly, or turn the oven off and leave the puffs drying as the oven cools.
Wet fillings will make your choux pastry soggy. Whipped cream is pretty high on the ‘wet’ scale, so if you’re serving profiteroles, I suggest fill them just before serving. DON’T use cream from an aerosol – your hard work deserves more than that. And besides, I will personally hunt you down and spank you. Just kidding. (Or am I??