When: June 22
A chocolate éclair is three preparations in one: choux pastry, pastry cream, and chocolate glaze. Each can go wrong independently. Understanding why each step works produces a pastry that's significantly better than anything you'll find in most American bakeries.
The éclair is French pastry engineering at its most precise — and one of the most satisfying things to make from scratch.
The éclair is named "lightning" — from the French "éclair" — reportedly because it disappears so fast. The name is accurate about consumption. It is not accurate about production: the pastry requires a technique so counterintuitive that most bakers encounter it and assume something has gone wrong. Choux pastry — pâte à choux — is cooked twice. First on the stove: flour is poured into boiling water and fat and stirred until it forms a smooth dough that pulls away from the pan. Then eggs are beaten in one at a time off the heat. The result is a shiny, slightly sticky paste that looks nothing like ordinary dough and behaves like nothing else in baking. In the oven, the water in the dough flash-vaporizes and puffs the paste dramatically, creating a hollow shell without any leavening agent. The shells must not be opened during baking — cold air collapses them before they can set. The éclair as a specific form — elongated, filled with pastry cream, glazed with chocolate — is 19th century...