How to make a simple French style vanilla slice in 30 minutes

welcome back everyone this is stefan on the french cooking academy last weekend i went to see some friends and uh they got a milk farm okay and they have their own milk and the neighbors give them plenty of eggs oh we are crawling on the milk and eggs you know what perfect time to make a vanilla slice i don't know how to do that this is too complicated it's like it's accurate to me that actually is many people out there that don't know that you can make an easy version of the vanilla slice in about 30 minutes and i'm not talking about a trick we're gonna be making in this video a french tarvina slice with the pastry cream made by hand except that we're gonna use real puff pastry and only two sheets instead of free and that dessert is that simple so if you love banana slice this is it you're going to start making it and enjoying it anytime you want let's go [Music] so let's demystify the vanilla slice because honestly it is such a dead simple dessert what is a vanilla slice it is basically add a minimum two layer of puff pastry within the middle a layer of pastry cream that's it okay a pastry cream is basically a custard that is thickened with flour to make a pastry cream all what you need is milk eggs sugar and some flavoring here is going to be a vanilla bean and for the thickening you have the choice you can use a mix of normal flour and corn flour only corn flour if you're gluten intolerant and you can use only flour if you don't have corn flour so it's really up to you so the first thing you're going to do here because we're going to have to cook the puff paste we're going to preheat your oven at 200 degrees celsius which is about 400 degrees fahrenheit okay and make sure you measure all the ingredients everything's going to be listed in the video description next all what you have to do is take a medium sized saucepan the heat is not on we're going to take half a liter of milk okay and put everything in you're gonna add about one or two tablespoons of sugar in there next we're gonna put the vanilla flavoring in so the big question i get all the time can i use vanilla essence to make that sort of dessert yes you can but let me tell you nothing beats the pure simple vanilla bean and that is the key to having a great tasting vanilla slice okay so vanilla pod of onion whatever you call it you're gonna flatten it first with a knife once it's flattened or what you're going to do you're going to take your knife because it's nice and flat you're going to cut the whole bin in half like that okay and then you're going to split both half up two pieces then look at this when it's in half you see this this kind of shiny little things in there these are the seeds from the vanilla pod and all what we want is this the inside so we're gonna take the knife we're gonna flatten here and we're just gonna go across and extract all of the gold of the vanilla pod perfect so once you've got the seeds extracted you're going to put the part of the bin here and these seeds in your pan of the milk and you repeat the same with the other half and that's it you've done your flavoured milk what needs to happen now is a medium heat and you're gonna bring this barely to a boil so just before you do make sure you take a spoon you mix the sugar that you have in here and don't use it too high heat because we need some time to prepare the rest of the custard okay i'm gonna leave this to warm up next for the custard you're only gonna need egg yolks you're gonna take your eggs and you're gonna separate the whites from the yolks right now this is one of the drawback people and what i'm gonna do with the white the egg whites you can keep them covered in an airtight container in the fridge for up to two weeks to make meringues a very very old egg white makes the best meringue so keep this in mind for the custard large bowl all of the egg yolks and even if you have a bit of white in there it does not matter break everything sugar in and then you mix now this whisking action is called in french blanche which means to whiten the eggs and as you can see here what's happening basically we're dissolving the sugar with the egg yolks so you're gonna do this like for one or two minutes maximum and you're gonna see your mix is gonna become a little bit paler and peter okay i'm all done next step we need to have something that's gonna be thick okay because the pastry cream has to be cooked it has to be thick to hold in between your layers of pastry so we're gonna take the flour first always use a sieve and sift everything over once you're done you're gonna start to mix that in and gently and don't put flour everywhere if possible beautiful and to add a little bit of elasticity in the mix we're gonna add some corn flour as well same thing pass through the sieve and incorporate hold on so by the time you do this most likely your milk is going to be ready so you're going to take the sieve i remove the excess of flour you're going to start by pouring some of the milk maybe half of it and then slowly same thing you incorporate when everything is mixed in you're going to take the rest of the milk all in boom and you mix and once you're done guess what we're gonna do we're gonna pour everything back in that same pan using that same sieve okay and everything at once and make sure to grab these little seeds at the bottom so old ones like that boom beautiful take your weeks make sure there's no seeds and the precious vanilla seeds in there put them back in and back on the stove all right we're back on the stove and this is where a lot of people when we talk custard gets really scared because the normal liquid type of custards and the sweet custard with desserts you cannot cook the eggs so it's that gentle line between oh how far can i go with the heat pastry cream you don't have that problem heat on medium and we're gonna cook the heck out of this until it boils because we have to actually cook the egg in here so it's that easy so all what we're gonna do medium heat and you're gonna keep on whisking this very slowly until it thickens okay so after four and a half minutes look at this everything is nice and thick so you're gonna want to reduce your heat and wait for the boil to appear and this is gonna be let me show you if they appear it's like a little volcano little bubble that pops up at the top here and there they are you see a little puff little puff here that's it so from here you keep on whisking for one and a half minutes and we're done and that's it i've turned my heat off and this is the consistency we have it is thick because it has to hold okay in your pastry if it's too liquid it's going to fall apart so we want it thick so now i'm going to reserve this and let it cool down so what do i mean by reserve basically you take all of the cream and you're going to pour it in a cold tray now clean wrap okay it has to touch the pastry cream because really pastry's got a bad tendency of really crusting it dries and makes a nasty crust so you want to have this everything touching everywhere and that's it we're going to cool this down until we are making the puff pastry it's very important that your pastry cream is really really cold so first i'm going to put this a little bit in the freezer and then straight into the fridge and now for the puff pastry so important you need a square or rectangle and you can use any size you want i'm using two large sheets in here that i'm going to cut after once they cook but it's up to you we don't want this to rise at all which is the great thing about that recipe because you don't have to you know wonder is this going to work is it not going to work so what you're going to do first pastry here you're going to take a fork and you're going to make these holes in there to prevent the pastry from puffing all done the holes are ready what you're going to do next is to take some sugar and you a very fine sprinkle of fine sugar castor sugar on top and now for the final step so this is what you've done you've got your pastry regular holes you get the sugar and to make absolutely sure it's not going to rise we're going to take this a cooling or i can use another baking tray i'm going to put this on top i'm going to put some weight on here one and then two and i'm going to cook this like that in the oven for 15-20 minutes until the pastry is nice and golden that's it we're done hold on my pastry is cooked so let's reveal boom this is what you should have so all what we have basically here is these two thin layers of pastry you know not very thick but just enough for the vanilla slice now that the pastry is cooling down the final touch for the pastry cream which is now called we're going to put everything in a bowl and this is the same bowl i've used before it's nice and gooey and what we need to do here is to add some flavoring this is optional but i like to use a little bit of rum you can use like a cointreau so a little bit in here i like to have lots of rom it's up to you but i think rom adds a nice flavor and then we're just gonna whisk the whole lot wow this aromas of rum is just insane you know what i cannot resist i need to try that [Music] delicioso okay so now we've got everything we need basically we've got the bottom part here and we've got another part that we're going to be placing after it's just on top like this so if you want you can turn it on the other side it's really up to you doesn't really matter so what you need to do here is simply put as much or as little pastry cream as you want so if you want something that's going to be like the master thick vanilla slice you put plenty of cream if you want something thinner it's up to you but you know what i kind of like something that is nice and fake plenty of cream in there so i'm all done so what you need to try to do is try to get something pretty even but it does not have to be perfect at all and look at my side here there's no cream here not cream there and tell you what there's a little trick to it so i'm gonna take my top here i'm just gonna put this on top like that okay i'm gonna slightly apply pressure down too much you don't want to crack your pastry and then for the grand finale we're just gonna trim the edges to have that picture perfect in your slice and now for the best part so as you can see if it hasn't been done perfectly it's a bit everywhere there's cream pouring out etcetera etcetera so in france what's being done in a lot of the the bakery in the patisserie or what you have to do to make this clear you're going to trim off with a knife you can go as deep or zero as you want and you're gonna cut through to really just keep that bit here and that makes you that perfect edge so yes it can be a bit of a messy business so try to do this on a silicon mat or something and as you can see i've done the two edges here and it starts to look really really nice and now it's perfect there's no gaps and you've got cream absolutely everywhere so i'm gonna go around and do all the four corners finally when you're done with all the edges it is up to you to decide how wide the slice should be do you want something like this like this like this like that so here is enough for about three so i think i'm gonna cut around something like that i think this looks pretty right and there we have it so once it's cut this starts to look like a proper vanilla slice we've got this nice layer of cream on there a nice thickness all what's needed here is a sprinkle of sugar you put your stuff on your cooling rack is best and then from above you're gonna basically sprinkle the whole thing with a nice layer of sugar okay no icing and that's it look at this beauty and there we have it so as soon as you put the sugar you need to eat your banana slice if you want to keep it longer you can keep it in the fridge without the sugar until you're ready to eat it the colder the butter but honestly how does that look such a simple dessert to make so it's not the fancy version we only have two layers of puff pastry and instead of an icing we just got a sprinkle of sugar but honestly you know what that does the job so as always if you have any questions use the comment section if you want to make this and show your picture when are putting this into our instagram feed everything you make is gonna be on how stories so do make the vanilla slice and share it on instagram french cook academy and now to finish up the video and before i go to the big announcement that i want to make there is a brand new course coming out in a few weeks time on how online school and this is the course you've been asking for and waiting for which is a course fully dedicated to french source making that's right we've been working on this for month and month and month and we really wanted to bring something truly special and i'm so excited because this is now almost done and we're going to raise the course very soon now for the release we are running a special early bird price meaning it's a discounted price for a limited period for people that are part of the newsletter that we have so if you want to get that discount you're going to use the link in the video description you're going to join the news that you're just giving your email and when the time comes you're going to receive an email saying yes the course is live you can join and you're going to basically get that offer with the discounted price now there would be a video that i'm going to be making with all the details and the content of the course what we've made plus the world's first trailer that we've created as well coming with the course all what i say is get ready because it's going to rock the boat okay i'll see you all next time for another video on the french cooking academy take care all bye [Music] you

Channel: French Cooking Academy

Views: 238,724

Rating: 4.9461513 out of 5

Keywords: french cuisine, french food, french food recipes, french cooking video, the french cooking academy, vanilla slice, simple vanilla slice, french vanilla slice in 30 minute, pastry cream, simple, quick, easy, dessert, slice, vanilla

Id: ZY-wZPBvDz0

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021