Puff the Magic Swan

Pate a Choux, or puff pastry as some like to call it (is that the proper term, I suppose so), is the ONLY twice cooked pastry dough, so we were told. Its basically boiled water and butter with flour added, and then mixed with eggs. To be perfectly honest with you, it took more time getting it into a pastry bag than it did to prepare. Well… almost, but you get my point. It’s SUPER easy to prepare, and very rewarding!!

In brief, we made the pate a choux, we made a layered dough, which is worthy of some explanation, and we made a simple Chantilly cream (whipped cream with a touch of vanilla extract and sugar – it was delightful)

The layered dough, commonly used for desserts such as napoleons, is a pretty time consuming dough. The process entails encasing a beurrage within a detrempe (forming a paton) and rolling and folding multiple time. What the heck are those?! A Beurrage is, as its name suggests, BUTTER! We simply shape the butter into a flat square. The detrempe is the flour dough portion. We combine flour, water and butter to make a dough and let it relax for a while. Then when they’re both nice and cold, and well rested, we make a plus sign out of the detrempe, and put the beurrage in it. Fold the arms of the plus sign over, flatten and roll out (only in one direction).

You have to repeat this step, two rollings at a time, and then refrigerate. Take out, two rollings (we called turns, because we do a 90 degree turn between rolls), and back in the fridge. This process layers the butter, which started between two layers of dough, and flattens it out so that ultimately there are about 730 layers. If we folded it once more and rolled, we’d have about 2200 layers!! That’s pretty impressive. It results in layers of dough and butter, that when cooked, puff up. We haven’t gotten to the cooking part yet. They’re all sitting in the freezer as of now. I believe we’re making the filling for it in the next class so we will probably use it then.

Anyhow, the pate a choux was incredible. It batter dough we made puffs up to almost triple the size, and stays pretty hollow. We then take them out of the oven, and put them in a much lower temperature oven to dry out. Then we fill or…

WE MAKE SWANS! Chef showed us how to makes swans. They’re ridiculously easy, and look so amazing. You make a tear drop shape with the dough and you make these “S” shapes with the dough (very thin). There’s more to it, but this is the basic idea. After they’ve puffed and dried (the “S” pieces are the neck so must be thin) you cut the top half of the “tear drop” off. Then split the top half down the middle. It leaves you with two “D” shaped wings. Fill the bottom half with cream, stick a neck on, and stick the wings in. That’s it!! Obviously there’s much more you can do, particularly with the tips you use on the dough and cream, and sticking an almond sliver in the head as a beak, and putting a chocolate dot for the eye, etc. etc.

But even when I made them at home and burned the bottoms a bit, they were FANTASTIC! We also used the pate a choux to make éclairs, profiteroles and other random puffs. I will be sure to show off this newly learned skill next time I have a chance (Thanks giving?)