Recipe Station

Here's everything you need for these luscious chocolate eclairs. This recipe makes 12 to 14 eclairs.

Ingredients to Gather

For the Choux paste:
6 tablespoons (85g) unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
4 teaspoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup water
1/4 cup milk
1/2 cup (65g) all purpose unbleached flour
1/2 cup (65g) bread flour
4 eggs
1 egg white

For the filling and glaze:
3 cups (triple recipe) of Vanilla Rice Pastry Cream (link in directions) or your favorite pastry cream, chilled
4 ounces (115g) dark chocolate (55% to 70% cacao)
6 tablespoons (85g) unsalted butter
1 1/2 teaspoons light corn syrup
2 1/2 teaspoons water

Directions to Follow

Step 1: Draw your measurements on parchment paper, then squeeze out your choux.
I thought I could encourage everyone to make éclairs by addressing all of the questions about choux and making the process more accessible. To that end, I made my old recipe three times: once with all-purpose unbleached flour, once with bread flour, and once with half of each. I baked a portion of each batch at different temperatures, and tested some of each batch brushed with water, left naked, and slightly textured with the tines of a fork. I tried different ratios of milk to water, single and double baking sheets, and different positions in the oven.

Here’s the thing. I never got bad results. I just never got perfection: my shapes weren’t perfectly even or perfectly crispy, or perfectly dry inside. However, the éclairs I made from them were completely yummy. A couple of my guests said they didn’t know éclairs could be that good.

Step 2: One your shells are ready, drill two holes in them to make room for pastry cream.
But I was looking for perfection, so I asked my friend, Robert Wemischner (Author of The Dessert Architect) for advice. I also exchanged emails with a cooking teacher that I met on Twitter! I tweaked the amount of butter in my recipe and added an egg white, per Robert’s advice, and tested some more. (Keeping track of all of this was the hardest part.)

I did not achieve the perfection I sought. I did come to see choux as a metaphor—a journey towards an elusive treasure, with valuable lessons, and many pleasures (aka éclairs), along the way. Some advice was very helpful but some did not work for me. After making dozens of choux, I am convinced that there is no one recipe that fits all. What works in one chef’s kitchen may need adjusting in yours. But that is okay.

Step 3: Fill!
Here’s what I learned about making perfectly delicious, if not perfectly perfect, éclairs:

Use a pot that is 7 to 8 inches in diameter, so there is plenty of cooking surface to spread and the paste, so it dries out to the ideal consistency

Cook the paste longer than you probably thought you should; set a timer. Expect some crust—not just a film of butter— to form in the bottom of the pot.

Now, after you've beaten in the eggs, beat the batter a little more to develop gluten, and then brush the outside of the eclairs with water or egg wash before baking. Bake them until they're browned.

Wow! This certainly does make it a lot simpler to make eclairs. We've shied away from making them because we were afraid we'd mess them up, but we may just give it another shot. Yum!

Article Source: Food52