How to make the perfect chocolate eclairs & profiteroles | French Pastry in a Tiny Parisian Kitchen

Bonjour! Hello, my name is Ainsley DuRose and I'm a pastry chef living in Paris. And today I'm going to show you how to make one of the most quintessential French pastries, the eclair. And I'm also going to show you a version that's more Christmassy, since we're in the Christmas spirit today. So the first one is going to be just a regular chocolate eclair, and then I'm going to use that same dough to make a Christmas tree out of it. So let's get to it! So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to make the choux pastry. And you just really use basic ingredients that you probably already have in your cupboard. So we're going to use about 90 grams of full-fat milk, and 90 grams of water, just a pinch of salt, and then 75 grams of butter. And again, with all of my recipes, I always use a good high-fat European butter, so at least 82% of fat content. So then in a separate bowl, you just want to measure out your flour. It's just plain flour. In France, it's called T55. In the U.S., it's called an all-purpose flour. You need about 113 grams of it. So you want to put this on about medium-high heat, because you want the butter to melt. And then once it's melted, you can turn up the temperature, because you want it to start to boil and almost double in volume. So you can see the butter has melted, so we're just going to wait for it to rise up a bit. And all of the butter has kind of evaporated. So we'll turn that off, remove it from the heat, and you immediately add all of your flour. And you want to whisk it as soon as you put it in. And it will start to clump all together. So now we're going to put it back on the heat for about 30 seconds while continuously whisking it, just so you can dry it out. It should start to form a skin on the bottom of the pan. That's when you know that it's dried out and it's ready to go. I'm going to put this into a bigger bowl, because you want the dough to cool down as much as possible. And I'm just going to whisk this for another about 30 seconds. Just to release some of that steam from the boiling of it. So now we're going to add our eggs. We'll add them in one at a time, because you need about anywhere from 150 to about 200 grams of eggs. There's really not a measurement for it. You're kind of looking more about the consistency rather than how many grams to add. So we'll just do one at a time. And it will look very clumpy, but it will come together. You just have to keep whisking it. So now we'll add another egg. So I added about three eggs, and I think it still needs a little bit more, but I don't want to use a full egg. So just crack an egg into a different cup or container, mix it, and then you can add in bit by bit until you get the right consistency. So with choux pastry, the consistency of the dough is really important, because if it's too thick, then it's not nice and airy in the middle. But if it's too runny, then they don't really puff up. There is a trick that I'll show you when you know you've had the right consistency. Pull up your whisk, and if you have like a little beak, like a little bird beak, then you know that it's the right consistency. And you can stop adding egg, and we'll start piping our eclairs. So for normal eclairs, I like to use what's called a star tip, like this one. This dough can be made in advance. Even a day or two, you just put it in a piping bag, and you can put it in the fridge. And when you want to bake your eclairs, just take it out of the fridge and bake them. Pipe and bake them. For piping the eclairs, it's good to have a steady hand. Which is harder than it might look. You just press down evenly all the way. Just try to make it as straight as possible. You can really make them whatever size you want. I kind of use my baking tray as my template to see how big I want to make them. But just so you know, they are about five inches long, or I think that's 12 centimeters long. And so for the rest of the dough, we're going to make the little, what we call, profiteroles. Which is just the same dough. It's the same choux dough, but it's a different shape. It's just little, little balls that puff up. It's just the same, just a different shape. And I do use a different tip. It's just a standard round tip. So it's the same technique. You want an even pressure as you're piping, and then you stop and you flick off. And you want to make it very straight on. It's just a simple flick of the wrist, almost. So if you have any little tips on top, you just dip your finger in water and just slightly press them down. This is kind of another trick. Because the thing with eclairs is you want them to bake evenly and to not dry out. Because the reason that they puff is because there's moisture from the dough that kind of helps as they rise and the steam builds and evaporates. That's kind of what gives it that puff. So you want the surface of the dough to not dry out. So I spray a little bit of baking spray on top just to keep everything from cracking or not baking properly. And it's ready to bake. Now I bake it. The other thing that's important with eclairs is you want to have steam as it's first baking so that they can rise. So what I do is while my oven is preheating, I put a baking tray or a cake pan with a little bit of water. So as the temperature rises, the water will evaporate creating a steam. So I do that and then I pull it out. I put in the eclairs and I bake it at a high temperature around 220 degrees Celsius or what is that in Fahrenheit? Like 420, 450? Can't be too sure. I'll put it down below where the recipe is. Bake it at a high temperature and then you turn it down, open the oven, release the steam and then bake it for another 15-20 minutes. So now while the choux is baking in the oven, we'll move on to our pastry cream or what we're going to fill the eclairs with. So for a chocolate eclair, I'm going to make a chocolate pastry cream and I actually put coffee in mine. Not for it to taste like coffee. You won't taste it at all. It's just to enhance the chocolate flavor. I always add coffee to my chocolate desserts because it just adds a nice richness and it kind of elevates the chocolate flavor. I'm going to use espresso but you can use really whatever type of coffee that you have. And then we're going to add about 300 grams of milk and I'll add a pinch of salt and a little bit of vanilla. And I'm going to put this on the stove just to simmer. You don't want to bring it to a boil, you just want it to simmer. So about medium, medium-high heat. So while that is simmering, we're going to do our egg and sugar mixture. So you're going to need about two egg yolks and about one full egg. To this, we're going to add sugar. We're going to add about 25 grams of cornstarch. Add a little bit of flour and then we're just going to mix it all together. Once the milk starts to steam, we'll add it to our egg mixture. And what we're doing is we're just tempering the eggs. You're slowly, you're slowly building up the temperature of the eggs because if you were just to mix this all together and then put it on the stove, your eggs would curdle and it would not be a very nice, a nice texture or a nice taste because it would just taste like scrambled eggs. So you just little by little add the hot mixture into your eggs. And then we're going to add that back to the pan. And we're going to put this back on the heat at about medium heat. And you just want to whisk it continuously until it starts to thicken and bubble. It really makes sure that you get all the corners and the bottom of the pan when you whisk it so it doesn't start to curdle. So you know it's done when it's thickened and it starts to bubble on top. Now that's done, we're going to take it off the heat and we will add, so we're going to add about 100 grams of chocolate. I like to use a dark chocolate. It's usually about between 50 to 60 percent cacao. So eclairs are done. They've puffed and they're nice and golden brown. And you know they're done because if you flip them over, you can hear that they're a bit hollow. Leave these to cool. You don't really have to chop it up. The heat from the pastry cream will slowly melt the chocolate into the cream. And then we're going to add, of course, wouldn't be a French pastry without butter. So we're going to add about 40 grams of butter. Now if you want, you can strain this if you're worried about any lumps or anything. Or you can use a blender to blend it. But if you're like me, you're just a little bit lazy, you don't care. It's fine as is. So we're just going to leave this to cool. But while it cools, you do want to have something on top of it so that it doesn't develop any type of film. Because if you leave this to cool without covering it, it will develop like a skin on top of it. You put it directly on the surface of the cream. So now I'm going to make the ganache, which is the icing that goes on top of the eclair. The icing for eclairs are usually done with like a fondant type of icing. I find those a bit too sweet and artificial. And I kind of prefer the shininess of the ganache. And ganache is a super simple, easy thing to make. It's just equal parts chocolate to equal parts cream. So I also use a dark chocolate that I'm going to finely chop. So this is about 200 grams of chocolate. So now to this pan, I'm going to add about 200 grams of cream. I want cream that has at least 30% fat. I'm going to put this on the stove. And again, you just want it to simmer. You do not want it to boil. You just want to get really hot before it starts to boil. And I do like to add just a pinch of salt. I add salt to also everything in pastry. Just it balances the sweetness of everything. It kind of gives a better overall flavor to everything. So now that the cream has completely simmered, we're just going to pour it over the chocolate. Just leave it as is for about a minute, just so the chocolate can start to melt. And then we'll whisk it together. And then to make it just a tad bit shiny, I do add just a little bit of butter. So now that the eclairs have cooled completely and our pastry cream has cooled completely, we're going to start to fill them. So to do that, just take a really sharp kind of slender knife and you're just going to pierce the bottom of the eclairs. I like to do about three little holes. You don't want to make them too big, just enough that your pastry tip can go inside to be able to fill them. So for the pastry tip, you want one that is quite long, but also has a small enough tip to be able to go inside of the eclairs and profiteroles. So we'll just go right into the eclair and you just press until you start to feel the pastry cream come up to the surface. So to know if you've made your batter correct, if you cut into your eclair, you should have a nice hollow inside. It's a crisp outer shell and the inside is nice and has those big pockets of air where you can put all of the pastry cream. The eclairs have been filled and our ganache is still a little bit warm. You're just going to take your eclair and you're going to dip it about halfway up the side. Also, if you don't like that little stripe that runs through, you can take your finger and kind of smooth it out. So you can leave them as is, which I think are pretty enough, or you can decorate as you want. So I think I'll just add a little bit of chopped hazelnuts. I'll add just a little bit of edible gold leaf because it's Christmas. So these are chocolate eclairs. You can flavor them however you want. I think it's a really versatile pastry and a really pretty pastry to have, especially around this time for something a bit more festive. So now I'll show you how to make the croquembouche, which is just the profiteroles stacked on top of each other to kind of look like a little Christmas tree. So for our croquembouche, you can just stack the profiteroles on top of each other, free form, but if you wanted to have a bit of a professional look, or just to make sure that it's more cohesive, you can just get a little styrofoam cone. That's your local hobby shop or I think online. They're quite cheap and I'm just going to put a bit of parchment paper around it. To adhere your profiterole to your cone, we're just going to take some toothpicks and we're going to poke it into styrofoam and then we'll add our profiterole on top. So these are some little cranberries that I sugared, but you can add fresh cranberries, maybe even raspberries, really whatever you like just for a little bit extra decoration. Well thank you for watching my Christmas take on eclairs and I hope you enjoyed the video and it kind of gives you an idea for maybe some more festive baking and yeah, it's a nice Christmas take on a classic French pastry. Let me know if you make them, I'd love to see your creations as well and happy baking and happy holidays!