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Mar. 27th, 2006 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI blame ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wootsauce.
In response to the cooking challenge,wootsauce made cornstarch chocolate pudding from scratch and got to pick something for me to do. That something was cream puffs. Now, the whole point here is to make things you haven't already made so if woot'd picked like apple pie or something I would have had to 'fess up to already being able to make that pretty damn well. 'Pon my honor, I had not heretofore made cream puffs or, as it happens, anything involving Pate a Choux or whatever the hell it is. (Yeah, yeah, missing a hat on the first A and an accent on the second A. Sue me.)
I turned to The Joy of Cooking which offered a recipe for choux paste of 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 cup water, 1 stick unsalted butter, 1/2 teaspoon salt >> put to boil. Add one cup flour (sifted). Make with the cooking and then the cooling and stirring. Thoroughly mixing in please to be four eggieweggs, one at a time. (I used a mixer for this part.) I followed the directions, except I used skim milk instead of whole and regular butter instead of unsalted and cut the salt in half (because of the salted butter). If I were doing this again, I would totally omit the salt and use ordinary salted butter -- I think it'd be fine. This makes your choux (rhymes with shoe, more or less) paste. It's yellow and sticky, almost glue-y in texture. It does not taste good. It tastes like rawish eggs. (Yes, of course I taste things. It's the nature of my cooking. This is My Way. You want a different way, go see Mrs. Cosmopilite.)
The choux you glop down on parchment paper like you're making drop cookies, maybe, on a cookie sheet and slam into a heavily preheated oven and make with the baking for about forty minutes, give or take. You drop the temperature after the first fifteen minutes and then cook for another twenty or twenty-five. On reflection, I should not have rushed this. The puff part depends on the innards being fully dried out and if you yank your puffs out of the oven prematurely, they sort of wilt due to the oppressive moistness of their innards. The cookbook mentioned this and I thought it was exaggerating. It was not. Oops. I will know better next time.
Here are raw creampuffs:
Here are cooked puffs:
For inside your cream puffs, you can use whipped cream (which I didn't have) or some other things I didn't have or you could, like a complete wanker, make your own home-made pastry cream which Joy helpfully includes directions for doing. There are a fuckload of egg yolks in pastry cream. Do not attempt cream puffs without a full dozen eggs. You will need at least eight of them, so just buy a dozen and be done with it. The pastry cream recipe I used was to take four egg yolks and add 2 tbsp. each of flour and cornstarch and a third a cup of sugar and beat the hell out of it until light yellow and fluffy. Meanwhile, in a pan, heating up of milk, some quantity larger than a cup. Possibly a cup and a half. I'm not real sure and I'm too damn lazy to check. Anyway, when the milk is at a simmer, you take a third of the volume and use it to temper the egg yolk mixture. (I already know how to do this for things like coconut cream pie and assorted other custardy things, so it was not a major effort for me. If you don't know what you are doing, refer to your Joy, which goes into detail for tempering egg yolk mixtures right there where you need it for the pastry cream instructions.) Then, dump the preheated egg yolk stuff into the rest of the milk and cook while whisking constantly (they do mean constantly, btw) until it's boiled for about a minute. Remove from heat, add half a teaspoon vanilla extract, put in bowl to chill with saran wrap pressed down onto the top so that you don't get that rubbery pudding skin thing, and wait for it to cool.
The pastry cream stuff is very tasty. I could eat it with a spoon, no problem. It certainly does not taste like it's made mainly of egg yolks.
Anyway, when everything's cooled off, you slice the tops off the pastry parts and fill the innards with the pastry cream and set the tops back on. Then you eat 'em. You can't dick around forever before eating, but they'll hold about an hour without getting annoyingly soggy. If you are making them ahead for a party, you can probably wait to assemble them until right before serving.
Here is a finished cream puff:
Note how I carefully took the pictures so's to not reveal any of my (very tidy, sparklingly clean, tastefully decorated and enviously spacious) kitchen. I didn't want to make anyone jealous...
For the next challenge: Thou shalt research and generate a soup from scratch. Thou shalt not make with the canned stock. Thou shalt not make with the dry soup mixes. Thou shalt make thy own stock, if needed, and thou shalt not employ pre-mixed spicing packets. Persons who would like there to be nutritious soup are advised to choose wisely. (Yes, yes, I could tell you what kind of soup to make. And then I'd have to deal with people going on about how they'd like to play but they once saw a regrettable food gallery item containing that kind of soup or how they're on a salt-free diet and couldn't possibly or how they don't eat mammals or how they're keeping kosher except for bacon or whatever. I'm not doing that. If you want to play, go find a soup that you can make and make it. Do not use canned stock or dry soup mixes. Let us know how you make out. Pictures are a bonus.)
wootsauce.In response to the cooking challenge,
wootsauce made cornstarch chocolate pudding from scratch and got to pick something for me to do. That something was cream puffs. Now, the whole point here is to make things you haven't already made so if woot'd picked like apple pie or something I would have had to 'fess up to already being able to make that pretty damn well. 'Pon my honor, I had not heretofore made cream puffs or, as it happens, anything involving Pate a Choux or whatever the hell it is. (Yeah, yeah, missing a hat on the first A and an accent on the second A. Sue me.)I turned to The Joy of Cooking which offered a recipe for choux paste of 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 cup water, 1 stick unsalted butter, 1/2 teaspoon salt >> put to boil. Add one cup flour (sifted). Make with the cooking and then the cooling and stirring. Thoroughly mixing in please to be four eggieweggs, one at a time. (I used a mixer for this part.) I followed the directions, except I used skim milk instead of whole and regular butter instead of unsalted and cut the salt in half (because of the salted butter). If I were doing this again, I would totally omit the salt and use ordinary salted butter -- I think it'd be fine. This makes your choux (rhymes with shoe, more or less) paste. It's yellow and sticky, almost glue-y in texture. It does not taste good. It tastes like rawish eggs. (Yes, of course I taste things. It's the nature of my cooking. This is My Way. You want a different way, go see Mrs. Cosmopilite.)
The choux you glop down on parchment paper like you're making drop cookies, maybe, on a cookie sheet and slam into a heavily preheated oven and make with the baking for about forty minutes, give or take. You drop the temperature after the first fifteen minutes and then cook for another twenty or twenty-five. On reflection, I should not have rushed this. The puff part depends on the innards being fully dried out and if you yank your puffs out of the oven prematurely, they sort of wilt due to the oppressive moistness of their innards. The cookbook mentioned this and I thought it was exaggerating. It was not. Oops. I will know better next time.
Here are raw creampuffs:
Here are cooked puffs:
For inside your cream puffs, you can use whipped cream (which I didn't have) or some other things I didn't have or you could, like a complete wanker, make your own home-made pastry cream which Joy helpfully includes directions for doing. There are a fuckload of egg yolks in pastry cream. Do not attempt cream puffs without a full dozen eggs. You will need at least eight of them, so just buy a dozen and be done with it. The pastry cream recipe I used was to take four egg yolks and add 2 tbsp. each of flour and cornstarch and a third a cup of sugar and beat the hell out of it until light yellow and fluffy. Meanwhile, in a pan, heating up of milk, some quantity larger than a cup. Possibly a cup and a half. I'm not real sure and I'm too damn lazy to check. Anyway, when the milk is at a simmer, you take a third of the volume and use it to temper the egg yolk mixture. (I already know how to do this for things like coconut cream pie and assorted other custardy things, so it was not a major effort for me. If you don't know what you are doing, refer to your Joy, which goes into detail for tempering egg yolk mixtures right there where you need it for the pastry cream instructions.) Then, dump the preheated egg yolk stuff into the rest of the milk and cook while whisking constantly (they do mean constantly, btw) until it's boiled for about a minute. Remove from heat, add half a teaspoon vanilla extract, put in bowl to chill with saran wrap pressed down onto the top so that you don't get that rubbery pudding skin thing, and wait for it to cool.
The pastry cream stuff is very tasty. I could eat it with a spoon, no problem. It certainly does not taste like it's made mainly of egg yolks.
Anyway, when everything's cooled off, you slice the tops off the pastry parts and fill the innards with the pastry cream and set the tops back on. Then you eat 'em. You can't dick around forever before eating, but they'll hold about an hour without getting annoyingly soggy. If you are making them ahead for a party, you can probably wait to assemble them until right before serving.
Here is a finished cream puff:
Note how I carefully took the pictures so's to not reveal any of my (very tidy, sparklingly clean, tastefully decorated and enviously spacious) kitchen. I didn't want to make anyone jealous...
For the next challenge: Thou shalt research and generate a soup from scratch. Thou shalt not make with the canned stock. Thou shalt not make with the dry soup mixes. Thou shalt make thy own stock, if needed, and thou shalt not employ pre-mixed spicing packets. Persons who would like there to be nutritious soup are advised to choose wisely. (Yes, yes, I could tell you what kind of soup to make. And then I'd have to deal with people going on about how they'd like to play but they once saw a regrettable food gallery item containing that kind of soup or how they're on a salt-free diet and couldn't possibly or how they don't eat mammals or how they're keeping kosher except for bacon or whatever. I'm not doing that. If you want to play, go find a soup that you can make and make it. Do not use canned stock or dry soup mixes. Let us know how you make out. Pictures are a bonus.)
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 02:47 am (UTC)I'm of the opinion that cream puffs freeze well, but I like to eat them still partially frozen because I'm strange. Mmm....cream puffs. I also put the creamy inside parts (that I usually cheat on) with a cake frosty bag thingy.
I've made chicken soup from scratch, as well as pumpkin leek, now that I think of it. And beef stew.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 11:00 am (UTC)And if you still want to play, you can either pick a new soup that you haven't made or suggest something back at me on the grounds that you've already made soup. (The problem of making the activity less restrictive is that it opens it up to more interpretation.) If you're tired of playing, we can stop. It doesn't really matter either way.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 06:32 pm (UTC)Hmm. I've been meaning to try to make a good vegetable or minestrone (minestroni? who the hell knows how that's spelled) soup for a while... maybe. Then again, that would probably involve going to the store.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 04:11 am (UTC)Eric made real honest-to-God egg drop soup the other weekend, based on his boiled-chicken-carcass stock. It was excellent and better than most I've had at Chinese restaurants. Wow.
I just feed us day-to-day with a rotation of staples and leftovers. Eric does the cheffing.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 02:20 pm (UTC)I just did this with my Curried Cream of Carrot soup. I shall have to think long and hard about the next soup I want to create!
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 05:01 pm (UTC)Cousin Sue: What shall my next creation be?
Igor: May I suggest...soup?
Cousin Sue: Soup, you say? Soup?
[Lightning crashes.]
Cousin Sue: Yes! Yes! They laughed at me in home-ec class, but I'll show them. I'll show them all!
[An electric arc climbs the Jacob's Ladder behind Sue. Lightning crashes again. Exeunt omnes.]
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 06:07 pm (UTC)Just you wait...
It must be a soup in no way, shape, or form similar to any soups I have created before.
Which is going to be tough, as the soup I wanted to create, the curried carrot one, was what I've been working on for several years now...
still and all, there was a curried chicken with apples that we had at a restaurant that *should* have worked, but didn't. Part of that was the corn starch they used for thickener... hmmmm...