- This will be Homer
Simpson's last lagniappe. - Come on, you're gonna
kill him with a pastry? I've seen this man eat a bowl of change! This eclair is over one million calories, 25 pounds of butter per square inch, covered with chocolate so dark, light cannot escape its surface. No, no, no! This is just a picture. - [Andrew] Hey, what's up guys? Welcome back to Binging with
Babish, where this week, I forgot to film my walk-on shot, so here's a little bit of
table cleaning for you. Squeaky clean, so now let's take a look at that eclair from The Simpsons. First up, we gotta make some choux pastry, combining 180 grams of unsalted
butter and 225 grams each water and milk in a large
saucepan over medium heat. Then, in a separate bowl,
we're combining 225 grams of bread flour, one tablespoon of sugar, and 12 grams of butter powder. This is an attempt to pack even
more butter per square inch into our eclairs. Go ahead and bring the butter,
water, and milk mixture up to a bare simmer. As soon as you start
to see some little bubs around the outside of the
pan, take it off the heat and add the dry ingredients, mixing together into a thick pasty dough. Once all the flour's nice and hydrated and no dry clumps remain,
we're gonna place this guy back over medium heat
and we're gonna cook it for anywhere from five to seven minutes. And, joy of joys, we need
to stir it constantly. You know that it's ready
to remove from the heat when a thin layer of fond starts forming on the bottom of the pot. This indicates that your
starches are gelatinized or something, I dunno. Kendall told me what it means
and I forgot immediately. Dump this into the bowl of
your awaiting stand mixer with the paddle attachment attached, bust up and thoroughly beat
together half a dozen eggs, and then we're gonna slowly
pour the eggs into the mixer while it's running, maybe
half a cup at a time, letting it fully
incorporate into the batter before adding any more. Our objective is to turn
this from a pasty batter into more of a gooey batter, which you know it's done
when it makes an hourglass when stretched between two fingers, or it makes the Dairy Queen,
that's not quite right. Let's try that again. Or it makes the Dairy
Queen, (beep) damn it. Or when it makes the Dairy
Queen curl, there it is, when a finger dipped into
the dough is inverted. That means our dough is ready to pipe, so we're gonna place it into a piping bag and then line a rimmed baking
sheet with parchment paper, using nonstick spray
to secure it in place. Once you got that nice and laid out, it's time to pipe out some pastry fingers. You can expect them to
just about double in size in the oven, so bear that
in mind when deciding on length and girth, and
then right at the end, you want to stop squeezing
the bag and sort of flip the pastry back onto itself. Then once everybody's
all nice and piped out, including the runty last one,
because I ran out of dough, you can flatten these little tails out using a wetted finger. Then these guys are headed for the oven, where I learned a lesson
about temperature. I started off my first batch
at 425 degrees Fahrenheit for about 20, 25 minutes, which unfortunately
caused them to explode. I did a little bit of
research and turns out, too high temperatures in the
oven can cause choux explosion. Good news is that these
guys were still hollow, which means that our pastry's good. We just got to try cranking
things down a little bit. So for the next batch, I went with 375, plus slightly smaller fingers
just to see what would happen. These guys came out much
more even, much smoother, and no blowouts. But as you may have predicted,
they're way too small to kill anyone, much less Homer Simpson. So slightly bigger fingers, 375 Fahrenheit for 30 to 35 minutes, and
I cranked on my oven's convection function towards
the last 10 minutes of cooking for perfectly puffed choux
with nice even browning. Now, while these guys cool completely, we got a bunch of other stuff to make. First up, some pastry cream. We're measuring out 150 grams of eggs. Go ahead and beat those up a
little bit in a heatproof bowl and set them aside. Then, in a separate bowl,
we need to make a slurry out of 40 grams of corn
starch, 25 grams of sugar that we're gonna whisk in
there to act as dispersant, and 50 grams of whole milk. Go ahead and tiny whisk
that together to combine, and bear in mind, you're
gonna need to whisk it again before you use it. Last thing before we head
over to the stovetop, we're gonna slice and
scrape one vanilla pod. Now, in our large saucepan, we're combining 400 grams of
whole milk, 50 grams of sugar, and our sliced and scraped vanilla bean. Whisk to combine, and
then, over medium heat, we're gonna bring this
guy just shy of a simmer. We just want it getting a little steamy. Then we're gonna go do the
custard thing with our eggs. We're gonna start by whisking
50 final grams of sugar into our eggs. Sorry, tiny whisk, I think this
job for your bigger brother, because in order to temper
the eggs with our steamy milk mixture, we need to
keep it moving constantly. Now here you can see me blissfully
unaware that I'm spilling milk everywhere because it's
right out of my eyeline. I'm just living my life,
having a grand old time. So you might want to do what
I normally do when I make custard on the show, which is
slowly ladle it into the eggs. But I think I got enough in there, so I'm gonna dump the eggs
back into the steaming milk, once again whisking
constantly and thoroughly to make sure that we
don't scramble anybody. Then this guy's headed
back over to the stovetop, where we're gonna bring
him up to a bare simmer over medium heat. And of course, story of my
life, while whisking constantly. Once it just starts to
bubble, now's the time that we're gonna add
our cornstarch slurry. This stuff starts to thicken
as soon as it hits the heat, so you want to pour it in slowly and, you guessed it, whisk constantly. We're gonna cook this
for about one minute, whisking constantly, until the corn starch is fully activated and we
have a nice thick custard. Kill the heat, and then all we have to do is add 45 grams of unsalted
butter from its container that it really doesn't want to leave. Whisk that in until it's
fully melted and incorporated, retrieved the vanilla pod,
and there you have it, a classic vanilla pastry cream, which now needs to be fully chilled, and the fastest way to do
that is to spread it out on a rimmed baking sheet
lined with plastic wrap. This stuff starts to
form a skin very quickly, so we want to immediately
wrap it in said plastic wrap, making sure that there are no air bubbles and that it's all directly in contact with the surface of the custard. Then this guy's headed into the
fridge for at least an hour. Last up, the chocolate glaze,
which was described as so dark that light could not escape its surface. So I got 250 grams of finely chopped very very dark chocolate,
that is, 100% chocolate, which I'm gonna start to
melt in a double boiler. About halfway through,
I'm adding 125 grams of unsalted butter cut into cubes and about 15 grams of
extra Dutch cocoa powder, the darkest cocoa powder I could find. Also, since dark chocolate
is very, very bitter, we're gonna bring some sweetness by virtue of 75 grams of corn syrup. Go ahead and melt that
completely in the double boiler, mixing constantly, of course, until it's smooth and
glassy ready for dipping. But first we must fill our eclairs. The traditional way to do
this is to cut little Xs at three points in the
bottom of each choux pastry and use those as entry points for the nozzle of a piping bag. Pipe just about as much
as you can in there, because you want to fill
the cavity of the eclair as best you can. Then these guys are going
for an upside down dip in the chocolate bath. I found it helpful to
hold the eclair vertically and let chocolate drip off one side, so that way you end up with
nice clean chocolatey edges. Once those guys are all
coated in the chocolate glaze, we're gonna let that set
for about 15 minutes, before attempting to decorate
with Chantilly cream. For that, we've got one and a
half cups of cold heavy cream, a teaspoon of vanilla extract,
and about three tablespoons of powdered sugar, which
we're gonna beat together into what you might think
is called whipped cream, but it's not, it's Chantilly cream. It sounds fancier. Also, Chantilly cream is, by definition, about twice as sweet as whipped cream, which we need with all
that bitter dark chocolate. Now all we have to do is pipe
some exquisite decorations onto our eclairs, which, as you can see, I'm struggling with, but
practice makes perfect, and by the fifth or sixth one, I was actually making
'em look pretty nice. And there you have it, a
batch of extra buttery, extra dark chocolatey eclairs. Of varying decorative quality,
so here's my favorite one, and sure, it looks pretty
enough, but how's it taste? And the answer is, pretty tasty, just like an eclair, with maybe
slightly darker chocolate, but it's definitely not
one million calories, and it's definitely not gonna
kill anybody anytime soon. For that, we need to step up
our form factor a little bit, so let's make some big
ol' choux pastry puffs. I'm baking these at 350
for about 40 minutes to make sure that they don't burn and so that they're cooked
all the way through. There we go. That's looking a little
bit more like La Bombe. And Kendall had a fun idea
for how to make it deadly. As you may or may not know, I may or may not be allergic to bananas. Not really sure. Last time I ate a banana, I
went into anaphylactic shock. So a few healthy glugs of banana extract, and maybe a slightly more
sinister tool for filling it up. There we go, that looks every bit as scary as I hoped it would, so now let's use it to
fill up our La Bombe. This will be Binging with Babish's last, I can't do a French accent, I guess. Make sure it's filled to the
brim with banana pastry cream, give it a dip, let it drip
horizontally to keep those nice crisp chocolatey edges, let
that sit for about 15 minutes, and then the Chantilly
cream on The Simpsons was kind of this big gnarled stripe. So there that is, and here we go. Nice knowing you guys. I had a good run. Oop! Thank you, Kendall Lisa. (jazzy music)
Is it low fat?
Did the banana one get eaten? That sounds fucking delicious and I hope someone (other than babby) enjoyed it.
...this episode disappointed me. :/
Essentially just a bog-standard eclair recipe aside from the butter powder and glaze. I feel like there were so many missed opportunities. If you really wanted to pack in as much butter as possible, turn the pastry cream into mousseline cream, and replace the Chantilly with Italian Meringue Buttercream. For extra giggles, you could make a vanilla curd and do a dual filled eclair with that and the mousseline cream.
For full accuracy, Kendall should've yelled "IT'S LOW FAT" after which Babish throws the eclair off camera where it explodes
I was hoping to see Vantablack or one of those other light-absorbing black paints incorporated into the chocolate topping but I imagine those aren’t edible
I feel like they are foreshadowing that some restaurant might serve food close to that calorie count
As someone who has tried and failed and making eclairs this was an amazing episode for me! Can't wait to give it a shot!
Is that a new watch?
what episode is this from?