All the components of an éclair are at least partly microwaveable, flavorful and pretty forgiving. Even if you have to serve them upside down.
February 18, 2016 9:57 pm
All the components of an éclair are at least partly microwaveable, flavorful and pretty forgiving. Even if you have to serve them upside down.
Here we go again, because it’s been Valentine’s Day this past weekend and I have pretty loose time standards for such things…I did actually make these before dinner on the 14th, so it counts. Not that you really need VDay as an excuse.
Éclairs are a lot simpler than they look in the pastry shops, and a lot cheaper than you’d think to make at home–in fact, cheaper than almost any American-style dessert in terms of calories, sugar, fat, salt… A surprisingly small amount of ordinary pantry staple ingredients goes a very long way and makes a bigger show than if you tried making brownies.
If you have a microwave, they can also be a lot quicker than most cookbook recipe specs, even though there are three separate parts to prepare and assemble–the filling, the shell, and the chocolate topping–rather than the usual American one-bowl dump-mix-and-bake scheme.
Éclairs don’t hit you over the head with sweet–they rely on the contrast of textures and flavors between the mostly unsweet pastry shell, the delicately sweet pastry cream, and the deep chocolate (or other flavor, but it has to be an actual flavor to be good, not the typical flavorless, oversweetened canned cake frosting) topping.
Éclairs have also become something of a canvas for artistic expression in Parisian bakeries; David Lebovitz has some great photos of ones with reproductions of paintings screened onto the tops, woodland scenes in colored icing and fondant and flavored marshmallows, fruit fantasias, and I don’t know what else, not to mention the fillings. They’re gorgeous to look at in the glass pastry cases but you couldn’t walk down the street, find a park bench, and just eat them with your fingers. You’d end up wearing them.
So the classic chocolate-topped, pastry cream-filled éclairs are still my favorite, partly because you can’t find them in most of the bakeries here.
Baking the dough is the one part you can’t really do in the microwave, more’s the pity (although you can do it in the toaster oven for a small batch). But otherwise, I can say it was worth it and–although I needed to step on a scale Monday morning to be certain–not that devastating dietwise…or even diabetes-wise. But, as with rugelach, you probably shouldn’t do this too often. Holidays and sharing are a pretty good idea. Leftovers are not. Limit the dietary badness.
Unromantic morning-after nutrition stat check: At the medium-small size I made, they weigh in at about 22 grams of carbohydrate, 160 calories, 6 grams of fat (mostly saturated, from the butter and chocolate plus egg yolks) and maybe 40-50 mg max of sodium apiece. Verdict: Not too shabby for a French dessert. Could be worse and often is. Stick to one apiece, plus some fruit, and eat it with a light supper that includes a green salad and you should be reasonably fine. Also svelte, happy, and able to sing «Non…je ne régrette rien…» the next morning. But please don’t. Not before coffee.
Even if you eat two at a time after supper because you’re not sure how long you can store the extras in the fridge so they don’t go all soggy the next day, it shouldn’t hit you like a ton of lead…well, not too much like a ton of lead. At least they weren’t full sized; they were pretty filling. Afterward, when we were lying in a daze on the couch recovering, my husband suggested just freezing any extras next time. He had a point.
About halving a recipe
I was in a hurry and couldn’t find the lower-saturated-fat recipe I’d used successfully for “Emergency éclairs 1.0” so I went with the recipes for choux paste shells and pastry cream in the “basics” back section of the white Silver Palate Cookbook. The dough and pastry cream worked fine in the microwave, as I think almost any standard recipes would.
Since there are only myself, my husband and our daughter here for dinner and eligible for éclairs (plus the cat, who is miffed that we didn’t count her), I cut both recipes in half–I repeat, limit the dietary badness…
The pastry cream was fine, but I hadn’t read all the instructions for the choux pastry, or I’d have known that the 3rd egg was for a completely unnecessary egg yolk glaze. When I halved the recipe I used an extra egg white as the “half egg,” and when the puffs puffed, they left nothing behind, no base, just a hollow, once I peeled them off the foil. The result was still fine for us but a little awkward for presentation–I had to sit them upside down like boats to fill them, and then cover the filling with the ganache. So definitely go back to the right proportions for the choux recipe (repeated below).
The ganache…is always very chocolate, very microwaveable, very forgiving of awkwardness and therefore perfection itself. It covers a lot of sins and makes you feel much better about them.
Mostly Microwaveable Éclairs
This is half-recipes all the way: it makes 6-7 half-size éclairs, 3″ rather than the standard 6″ monsters at the bakery. We each had two after supper and were completely stuffed.
Timing: If you’re doing the whole thing in one go, start by preheating the (regular) oven to 400 F, then make the pastry cream, which is really fast, and chill and stick it in the fridge, then do the choux paste, because as soon as you make that you need to dollop it out and bake it right away. If you use the microwave for the pastry cream, and you should, the choux will be ready to go just about when the oven beeps.
Pastry Cream
Half-recipe; makes ~1 1/4 cup; just enough for 6-7 3″ éclairs. Adapted from the white Silver Palate Cookbook. This one’s not too sweet and could possibly use a very tiny pinch of salt, nutmeg or grated orange peel if you’re using it as a custard for some other purpose. It’s a bit bland on its own but surprisingly good against dark chocolate ganache in the actual éclairs.
The Silver Palate recipe calls for scalding milk, stirring it into the sugar and flour, cooking 10 minutes on the stove while stirring to avoid lumps, adding egg yolks and cooking while stirring another 10 minutes over a pot of simmering water. No. You know how I feel about waiting for a pot of water to boil, and simmering is not much less annoying. Only about half a minute worth.
All the steps for pastry cream can definitely be done, and done faster, with a lot less washing up, in a microwave instead. Keep in mind that this is a half-recipe and takes somewhat less time than the full volume would, it’s a 4-minute operation (if you’re doing a whole recipe, you may need another 30-60 seconds for each step).
5. Chill the mixture. I’m paranoid about lightly-cooked eggs; I want it to chill asap. The fastest way is to do the lab tech thing and make an ice-water bath to sit it on. Scrape the custard out of the hot bowl and into a thin-walled snaplock container with a lid, sit it on top of some ice cubes and water in a pan for a few minutes until it’s cooler than room temperature. Much quicker than trying to get it air-cooled in a hot kitchen. Then stick it in the fridge while doing the choux paste.
Choux Paste
Do half of a nice, evenly divisible recipe, not my mistaken one with the extra egg white that left the shells open on the bottom. This below is the properly halved Silver Palate recipe, no glaze, and should work better.
5. The puffs bake brown in about 20-25 minutes. If they start collapsing when you take them out, stick them back in the oven quickly and let them reinflate and go another couple of minutes to dry out a little more until they can stand on their own.
6.Let the puffs cool and peel them very gently off the foil.
Assembling the éclairs
Closer to serving time is probably a good idea, but they can sit filled and glazed for an hour or so on a plate in the fridge with a loose tent of foil over them. Just keep that cut onion far, far away from them.
As I mentioned, my puffs had an extra egg white and didn’t form a good bottom crust, but yours should do okay if you use the recipe above. I had to fill and glaze mine upside down, with the ridged tops underneath. They still tasted good, if that’s any reassurance. (I am not too proud to show the resulting picture, just to show you can survive it without mortification, even though you might not win any big pastry contests…)
Chilled pastry cream needs stirring up to smooth it out before you fill the puffs.
To fill the éclairs, either cut them in half lengthwise along one side, like a hotdog bun, or else if you do have a star tip lurking somewhere in your silverware drawer, poke a small hole in one end of each éclair with a thin knife (butter knife is okay) and turn it around inside the éclair to clear out the hollow all the way.
Stir up the chilled, set custard to make sure it’s smooth. Either scoop some of it into each sliced éclair with a spoon and sandwich it back together, or clip a tiny bottom corner off a plastic ziplock sandwich baggie, push the star tip halfway out through the hole, scoop all the custard into the bag and seal it, then carefully pipe the custard into the ends of the pastry shells to fill them. Set the filled éclairs on a plate in the fridge to chill again.
Make the ganache to glaze the tops–it only takes a minute or so to make it, but it still has to be pretty warm to be able to spread, so you want the éclairs cold.
Ganache
This amount was just enough for a stripe over each of the half-size éclairs, so scale up as desired; the leftovers make nice chocolate truffles once chilled…you might also want this a bit sweeter or smoother, but I was impatient last night and did a pretty minimalist version.
While the ganache still warm and spreadable, spoon half-inch-wide stripes over the tops of the éclairs (or in my more awkward version yesterday evening, the bottoms with the exposed but at least cold custard filling).
Chill the éclairs again until ready to serve.
Posted by DebbieN
Categories: baking, cooking, Desserts, frugality, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes
Tags: baking, Desserts, food, French food, recipes
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Love your blog, nice to read someone so smart! So sick of all the microwave-phobic pseudo warning nonsense! I love my microwave and I’m always trying something weird. My fave cheap snack trick when I need something crunchy…I stick those Asian fake “shrimp” chips on a plate in the nuker for a minute and they puff up awesomely with no oil! Mexican chicharrones de harina (or duros/duritos) and Indian “Fryums” are similar and can be microwaved the same way, playing with timing. Even some pastas and Asian rice noodles will puff, trial and error I guess.
Unfortunately I can’t do eggs and cream (or animal products or fat in general, if I want to stay a FORMER T2 diabetic) but gonna experiment with the whipping/egg-mimicking properties of “aquafaba” as soon as I cook up some chickpeas! Instead of crying about limitations it’s a hell of a lot more fun to challenge myself with creative solutions! Gotta love the internet for ideas! Eating a whole food plant based diet has changed everything for me, so very strong motivation too!
By Vege-tater on February 19, 2016 at 1:02 am
Thanks–I really enjoy hearing how people use a microwave (for food, anyhow!). I’ll have to look up aquafaba and figure out what it is. From the sound of it it sounds a bit like the proteins and starches that come out in the water when you cook chickpeas and make it foam up? A bit more available and possibly less expensive or time-consuming option: You might also try a spoonful of ground flaxmeal (linseed), fresh-ground if at all possible, mixed with a bit of water to substitute. My sisters-in-law are mostly vegan vegetarians and have used this to good effect in baking recipes, but I still haven’t tried it as a substitute for whipped egg whites. Let me know how it goes! And when/if you buy flaxmeal, make sure to get the freshest you can, preferably whole if you have a spice or coffee grinder, keep them wrapped tightly in plastic and store in the freezer, because linseed (as many other nuts and seeds, particularly poppyseed) goes rancid pretty easily. For other egg substitutes, I’ve used soft or regular tofu in brownies, about the same size chunk as the whole egg(s).
By DebbieN on February 21, 2016 at 11:35 pm
It’s kind of funny that I resisted getting a microwave for ages way back in the 70’s because I was suspicious of of the technology, and now I’m the one who uses it a bunch, while everyone uses it just to reheat or as a breadbox!
Yeah, flax is awesome, a fave ingredient for omega 3’s and binding all kinds of stuff. I just made some simple nuked “muffins” that are basically just oatmeal, grated carrots, pureed apples, raisins, ground dates and spices with flax and besan as a binder. They don’t rise much and are sure not light and fluffy, but sorta like a cross between bread pudding and a carrot cake, substantial and satisfying. Quick, easy, and versatile, just switch off the fruit and spices, can’t mess em up! I have tried whipping flax “eggs”, but my beater is ancient and lame so not great results.
And yes, aquafaba is just exactly what you said, if anyone is interested, here’s a site where all the experiments get archived, fun. https://www.facebook.com/Aquafaba-848906331868991/
By Vege-tater on February 22, 2016 at 2:06 am