Claire Saffitz Makes Croquembouche, A Cream Puff Tower

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I was thinking about making one of these for Christmas Eve, but after watching this video I’m like maybe not lol.

👍︎︎ 125 👤︎︎ u/merebat 📅︎︎ Dec 20 2020 🗫︎ replies

Truly the best Claire. Silver lining to everything I we get to see Claire in her natural habitat, not being forced to make frikin pop rocks.

👍︎︎ 80 👤︎︎ u/UtterlyConfused93 📅︎︎ Dec 20 2020 🗫︎ replies

Real ones remember this dish from The Weekenders.

👍︎︎ 16 👤︎︎ u/KareemAbuJafar 📅︎︎ Dec 20 2020 🗫︎ replies

I set myself the challenge of making everything in Dessert Person and this is one of the things I am not looking forward to.

👍︎︎ 13 👤︎︎ u/DrugCrazed 📅︎︎ Dec 20 2020 🗫︎ replies

heck YAAAA 🤪🤪

👍︎︎ 9 👤︎︎ u/icedalmondmilkchai 📅︎︎ Dec 20 2020 🗫︎ replies

[removed]

👍︎︎ 16 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Dec 20 2020 🗫︎ replies

I just would really love to have her as a friend. I enjoy her so much. The yummy food would def be a bonus tho 😋

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/wtf_kinda_world 📅︎︎ Dec 21 2020 🗫︎ replies

beautiful video!

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/elyse-upton 📅︎︎ Dec 20 2020 🗫︎ replies

Big Mom’s favorite

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Ciabattabunns 📅︎︎ Dec 21 2020 🗫︎ replies
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-It is hard to think of something that feels more celebratory than a croquembouche, and you have this incredibly beautiful creation. ♪♪ Hey, everyone, I'm Claire Saffitz. I am here in the Munchies test kitchen, and today I'm going to show you a recipe from my new cookbook, "Dessert Person," for something called croquembouche, which is like the Mount Everest of pastry recipes. So we start by baking the cream puffs, and there is an important element called craquelin that goes on top of the cream puffs, and that helps to give the cream puffs a really round, even shape and a nice kind of textured surface. I'm starting with a stick of butter, room temp, and I'm just kind of beating it a little bit against the side of a bowl. And now I'm adding brown sugar, a pinch of salt. So I have this pretty well creamed. And now all I'm adding is all-purpose flour. I'll just fold this together. It will make a fairly stiff dough. Croquembouche is a French recipe. It means "crunchy in the mouth." And that comes from that hard caramel that's on the exterior of the cream puffs. It's an incredibly celebratory recipe. So something I've made for New Year's. I think it's traditionally like a wedding dessert in France. So if, at a certain point, your spatula just isn't cutting it, get in there with your hand. We're going to turn it over onto itself a bunch of times, get it even. It's all come together. I'm going to just divide it in half, and then, I'm going to roll out each half between two pieces of parchment paper. So I'm going for 1/8 of an inch thickness. Okay. And I'm going to basically punch out with a one-inch cutter. If you don't have a one-inch cutter, you can use a bottle cap. And these are going to sit on top of the cream puffs as they bake. I position the cutter as close together as possible so that I maximize my yield. And a good technique for the cutter is pressed straight down and then twist once you hit the parchment. I want to get a yield of 70 cream puffs, which is a comfortable number to work with. Once you have all the craquelin separated, that's going to rest in the refrigerator. Now we can move on to the pate à choux, which is kind of the base of this recipe. It's a very eggy dough, and that is what gives the dough its, like, intense puffing action that makes the cream puffs. So it's cooked on the stove and then obviously baked. So the 1/2 a cup of milk, and I'm going to add 1/2 a cup of water. This recipe for pate à choux was in the foundation's chapter in the cookbook because it's just something that you'll use over and over again. And I actually think it's really fun to make. I have butter. So salt and sugar, as well. This is not an overly sweet recipe. You can also make, like, savory puffs with this. This mixture has just come up to a rapid simmer. Now, all in one shot, I'm adding the flour. And then, you want, immediately to stir the flour in. Don't stir too vigorously, 'cause you'll, like, splash the hot milk mixture on you. And so what we're doing here is cooking the flour, and you'll see it immediately comes together into a dough. So I want to cook this mixture until it loses its raw, floury taste and I have a nice, cohesive dough. And I'm also trying to drive out some of that moisture. Your dough comes together, and you have a clean pot. You'll see that a film will form in the saucepan. And I actually continue to cook and stir like this until the film is, like, reabsorbed. So this will take several minutes. Bring it together by doing this. So we have this really nice, smooth dough. The saucepan is perfectly clean. I'm ready to take it off the stove. We'll let it rest because, if I were to start adding eggs now, the mixture is so hot it might cook the egg. So I'm going to let it hang out for like a minute or so. Whiles that is resting, I'm going to trace my circles for my cream puffs. It is very helpful for the architecture of the croquembouche to have perfectly uniform puffs. I think I can get, like, 35 basically on a single tray. So that would be 7x5. If you're not using a perfect one-inch round, that's fine. It's actually more important that they all be the same size. And it goes ink side down on your sheet tray. So another trick, rather than tracing, is buttering your sheet tray. You just need a very, very thin layer. Going to dust it with flour to create a nice, even, and, like, very thin coating. Tap it around. Take your cutter. And you're basically pressing down into that floured surface and turning it, and then you can see the outline of the ring. One reason I like the parchment is I think that, actually, like, this creates more browning on the bottom. The parchment I prefer because you can get more even baking. Let's finish up the pate à choux. I'm going to turn my mixer on low, medium-low. So I have five eggs here that are fairly room temperature. I might not need all five eggs. This is a step where you're really going to rely on visual indicators to kind of let you know when you've added enough eggs. Gonna add them one at a time. Once you add an egg, it's very normal for the mixture to look like it's losing its cohesion. That's normal. It will all come back together the more you mix. I'm going to wait until this egg is fully incorporated and the dough is smooth again, and then I'll add the second one. Onto egg number three. That one. Ooh. [ Laughing ] God. I'll just throw it back in. So that's the last egg. And the dough, when it's done, will be silky and smooth, like a sheet, just like that. I'm going to put it into my pastry bag, fold down the top of the bag. You could use a resealable plastic bag like a Ziploc or anything with high sides. You're going to gather the top of the bag, pressing out any air, and give it a twist to seal the bag. So I'll snip like a 1/2-inch opening or so. [ Laughing ] Yeah, I know -- Thank you. It can be really annoying to pipe on parchment if it's moving around, so I make a really little dabs in each of the four corners of the sheet tray. So, now, for piping, you don't want to move the bag. You keep in the tip of the pastry bag right at the circle, and you just squeeze until it's filled. So if your pate à choux is the right texture, you should get a nice mound that settles a little bit but mostly keeps its shape. I have some pate à choux left, and so I'm looking at them being like, oh, these are a little smaller. So now I'm going to go back because I want to use everything that I have. So I'm just adding a little bit more. Oh, God. Stupid. Why -- Why -- This is not a good idea. Thought it was. My sister. I was actually just talking to my sister on the phone, and I was telling her like, "Oh, I'm making croquembouche." And she was like, "Oh, are you going to tell everyone the story of when you made it at my house and you, like, got really mad at me and, like, banished me from my own kitchen?" I was like, "Well, no, I wasn't going to." But I was in her kitchen making a croquembouche and I burned the caramel, and it was, like, I did what I had said in the beginning not to do, which was, like, I kind of under-planned and was, like, stressed out about time. I, like, yelled at her and, like, we got in a fight and then I, like, made her go buy me more sugar. And that was the whole story. And she was like, "Remember that time?" And I was like, "Yes, we talk about it constantly. You always bring it up." Now you just take the craquelin and place it on top like a little hat. And don't press down. You can just let it kind of rest gently on top. If you decided to omit the craquelin in this recipe, then you would want to egg wash them just for that extra bit of shine. The thing that gives these puffs that ability to, like, rise and hollow out so that you have that, like, hollow interior for filling is all those eggs. And it benefits from a nice blast of heat at the beginning. So I actually preheat the oven to 425. So these go into a very hot oven, and then I drop the temp immediately to 375, and then they bake all the way through. And I'm going to make sure that they're thoroughly baked so they don't collapse. Components three or four of the croquembouche is the pastry cream filling. I have two cups of milk, just a little salt. Salt is a flavor enhancer. I'm going to grab a paring knife to scrape vanilla bean. You can use extract, you could use paste. The whole thing goes in and let this slowly come up to a simmer. So this is obviously a vanilla pastry cream, but I'm going to add chocolate to it to make a chocolate version. So this is dark chocolate. I'm just chopping it up into bits. I think the chocolate tempers some of the sweetness. And it also makes a firmer-set pastry cream, which I think works really well into croquembouche. One of the reasons why pastry cream is so delicious is because it has a lot of egg yolks in it. So five large egg yolks. It's easier to separate eggs when they're cold. Pastry cream is kind of easy to goof up. But one of the best things that you can do to ensure success is to use a pot that has a really thick bottom and walls. If you have a really flimsy, thin aluminum pot, that's not ideal because there's always a risk of it scorching on the bottom. I'm going to do what's called blanch my egg yolks. So that is adding sugar and cornstarch. So cornstarch is also the thickening power in addition to the egg yolks. And I want to whisk all of this together. I'm going to start kind of slow, and it will seem like there's too much of the sugar and cornstarch to incorporate with the yolks, but it will smooth out and then loosen up a bit. Sometimes I have to hold the bowl down here, sorry. You don't get to see this part. It's a secret. Okay, you can see it, like, folds onto itself in what's called a ribbon and it sits there for a few seconds before it settles into the rest of the mixture. Right now I can see little bubbles are starting to kind of form under the surface. There's a bit of a skin on top, so we're ready to go. This next step is called tempering. Set this on a towel so it won't move around. I'm going to pour some of the hot milk mixture into the egg mixture and slowly bring up the temperature, whisking constantly, by the way. Then all of this can go back into the saucepan. And that just prevents any of the eggs from curdling or changing temperature too quickly. It's on, like, medium heat. You need to constantly agitate the mixture so that you don't get any scorching or even curdling on the bottom. It kind of looks like nothing's happening for a while, and then you immediately start to see a change. If your pastry cream is not thickening, try turning up your heat a little bit. But that thickening happens very quickly. You want a pretty stiff pastry cream, so it's okay to stop whisking long enough to sort of see if anything's happening, but then you want to immediately start again so that nothing scorches. If you do scorch it, just make sure you strain it really, really well. This is ready to come off the heat. And I'm pretty confident that, like, I didn't overcook it. I don't see any curds in there, but it's a good idea just to strain it anyway. And of course, it's going to take out that vanilla bean. I'm adding cold cubed butter a piece or two at a time. The butter, of course, makes it richer and makes it taste extra delicious. But because butter obviously is solid at room temperature, it also increases the kind of setting power and thickens it, as well. So once you see the pieces kind of disappear, you can add a few more. Hit pause on these. I'm going to rotate my cream puffs, which are baking. You can see how beautiful and evenly puffed they are. This is basically done. This is now vanilla pastry cream, but I'm adding the chocolate to it. The heat that's still in the pastry cream will just melt everything. So here is this, like, just beautiful, gorgeous, delicious chocolate pastry cream. And then I cover this, and that is to prevent a skin from forming. I press the plastic directly onto the surface of the pastry cream, and this just goes right into the fridge. My cream puffs are done, but it's very important that the dough is thoroughly dried out so that the moisture inside doesn't cause the puff to collapse. And I just prop the door open and let them finish baking and cool for about 15 minutes. I'm going to show you the last step of the pastry cream. This is the chocolate pastry cream that has chilled. So it has fully set. So, to smooth it out, I'll just give it a once over with a whisk. But I like to add a little crème fraîche. I like the tang that it adds, and it lightens it a little bit. ♪♪ You want to put the tip inside before you fill the bag. And then, same thing with filling. ♪♪ The cream puffs are done. Oh, my gosh, they look so good. We poke holes in the bottom of each of the puffs with a paring knife. I'm going to go back into that little opening with the pastry tip. I'm using just a regular round tip. So, how do you know if you filled it the right amount? I like to go by weight. Like, it should feel solid, for lack of a better word. I made this for my family last holidays. It was the talk of the town. When I made it, my -- my brother-in-law was, like, obsessed with it and was -- He came into town, like, later than everyone else and I was like, "So we -- we have a -- I made -- I made you a croquembouche." And the whole weekend, he was talking about his bouche, how much he loved it. [ Laughs ] We are moving on to the caramel stage. So caramel is the last component of the croquembouche. I have granulated sugar, and I'm making what's called a wet caramel, meaning I am dissolving the sugar in water first. Going to to bring this up. Because you're adding water, there is always a risk that your sugar will crystallize. So that just means you want to be careful stirring it. You don't want to over-stir it. Once we start to see it turn color and take on a little bit of an amber hue, that's like we're already at the caramel stage that we want. So, really, we're just going for a color. So I'm not stirring anymore because I don't want to encourage crystallization. I'm going to swirl the pot. And by swirling, I'm helping to even out the temperature all the way around. I can take the wet pastry brush dipped in a little water, and I'm just brushing down the sides of the pot. That's re-dissolving any undissolved sugar. I probably haven't made more than 10 croquembouche. I think it has an S on the end, but you just say croquembouche. It's like "les" versus "le," I guess. That's about as far as I got in my French education. So I'm at that stage where most of the water has boiled off. And I know that because the bubbles that I'm seeing are much bigger and slower bubbles, not the kind of rapid bubbles of water boiling. And I'm starting to see some golden tones on the surface. And it goes from light golden to light amber to amber to dark amber to burnt remarkably fast. I'm actually moderating the temperature a little bit and turning it down because I don't want it to go too fast. Caramel that goes to dark just gets a little bit bitter. All right. So I'm at a good color. The caramel will continue to take on color because there's so much heat in it. So I actually transfer the caramel into a heat-proof bowl or measuring cup and make sure it's, like, really clean and dry. You want to use tremendous caution when dipping. So that's why I'm putting on a glove, 'cause it at least creates a little bit of a barrier if it gets on your skin. And that way it hardens on the glove and on your skin. And now I'm taking the puffs one at a time and dipping them craquelin side down into the caramel. And I just want to get that beautiful caramel coating. And at this stage, it's still very liquid. As it sits in this bowl, it will harden. So at this stage where it's very liquid, I kind of turn the puff so that I don't get, like, a big trip down one side. I'm just grasping like a claw hand so that I can dip the entire face into the bowl and then putting it right side up. So I'm trying to work as quickly as possible because it's also cooling and, therefore, thickening. All right. Now we're do that whole thing again with another batch. No one said this was quick, this recipe. ♪♪ Okay. You're going to start assembling. So I have my first ring. I built progressively smaller rings, and that's how you get that cone shape. A sheet of parchment paper is going to be my kind of circular guide. And now I'm taking, this time, a side of the choux. If there's a wider side, if it's a little bit more oval, I'll go for the wider side. And I dip the side in the caramel. I'm going to place on the side of the plate. ♪♪ And I also like to angle ever so slightly toward the center, because, again, like, I'm not making a cylinder, I'm making a cone, so it's going to slope gently up the sides. ♪♪ So, now, when I'm building the second ring, I'm actually going in between the little gap created from the two below. So I have some extras that I saved. So I might have to employ an extra one... with them. I put that on the side. So I can see that, like, this last ring that I did, I think it's a little bit too, like, sloped inward, so I might try to finagle it a little bit. If your caramel starts to harden, try zapping it in the microwave, and that should loosen it up. ♪♪ Okay, so, now I'm going to start to create threads around the croquembouche. So I want to wait until the caramel is cool enough that it falls in a thread and starts to harden and kind of pull it and wrap around the whole croquembouche. All right. And here is a croquembouche. This thing is obviously quite towering. I wouldn't recommend transporting this, but it is relatively stable. Like, this caramel, it's not going anywhere. But as it sits, the moisture in the pastry cream, over time, will hydrate the caramel, and it will become sticky and soft. There's only one thing left to do, which is taste it. You see the chocolate filling inside? Crunchy caramel. Mm. So crunchy. And just the right amount of filling inside. Such a good desert. You can check out the recipe in "Dessert Person," or you can click the link below. Check it out. And why not give it a try? ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪
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Channel: Munchies
Views: 1,151,096
Rating: 4.9568067 out of 5
Keywords: MUNCHIES, food, how-to, How To, how to make, cooking, CHEFS, dessert, cream puffs, christmas dinner, cooking tutorials, claire saffitz, bon appetit, dessert person, holiday dessert, cream puffs near me, how to make cream puffs, croquembouche, festive desserts, how to make caramel, vice, documentary, culture, interview, drinks, eating, vicevideos, Chef, restaurant, travel, vice videos, INTERVIEWS, exclusive, funny, world, documentaries, Munchiestv, munchies tv, pastry, french pastry, best french pastry
Id: Ydw6k01_OPk
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Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)
Published: Sun Dec 20 2020
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