- Mille-feuille, or a thousand sheets in French, is a classic dessert of puff pastry layers with
pastry cream and an icing top. It looks super fancy and
difficult, but it's not. And you're gonna love the flavor too. Hey, you're watching a
"Preppy Kitchen" where I, John Kanell teach you how to
make delicious homemade dishes to share with your family and friends. These mille-feuille will be
ready before you know it. So let's get started. First off, let's make
that amazing pastry cream. It's one of my favorite things to eat. You could use vanilla
extract, vanilla bean paste, or a vanilla bean for this. I'm gonna be splurging and using my special
occasion vanilla beans that have been in the pantry for a while. Split it open with a sharp knife. You can use a knife or a spoon
and just scrape them out. That is black gold. Into a medium pot, two cups
or 480 mL of whole milk. In you go. Pop those seeds in, give
it a little bit of a whisk and set it over a medium heat. Bring it to a boil, whisking occasionally, and then take it off heat immediately. While that milk is heating up, we're gonna mix up the
rest of our pastry cream. So, two thirds of a cup, that's 200 times 0.6666, repetend. And then a quarter cup of corn starch. Give this a quick whisk. Whisk, whisk, whisk, and then set it aside. For this recipe, we'll
be using six egg yolks. So separate those six egg yolks. What's that sound I hear? It is my milk. It's come to a boil. So we're setting that aside
off heat just to infuse for like 10 minutes or so. Fun fact, by the by, this is being made for my cream puff video. I lost the footage for making
this part of the pastry cream so I had to redo it. I will not ever in my life
be wasting pastry cream. It is the most delicious thing. I could eat it by the bowlful. So we're gonna make the
mille-feuille with this, but you're gonna see this footage twice. Full transparency. It happens sometimes. Here's the fun part. We're gonna add our six
partially-intact yolks to our bed of sugar and cornstarch. We're gonna mix it up until it's a beautiful, lemony light color and kind of a thick but flowing paste. All right, perfectly ready. I'm gonna let my milk
just cool down for a bit before I temper this mixture. Once your mixture is cooled down a bit, so it's warm and not scalding hot anymore, all you need to do is pour
about a third of a cup or so into there while you're whisking. This is called tempering the mixture. So whisk, whisk, whisk, while you pour. Once that mixture's tempered, we can add the rest of the
milk in there while whisking, and then we're going to
strain it back into the pot. Straining will catch any
bits of vanilla bean pod and any kind of like skin from the milk or anything else that happened. This is a good practice and it gives you a really
smooth, creamy pastry cream. Strain it back in, and then place it over a
medium heat while whisking. Whisk, whisk, whisk. And it's always better to use
a French whisk if you can, it'll be narrower and really
hit the corners of that pot. So we're just gonna whisk
this while it's over heat, and you will notice a definite
change in the consistency. It'll get really thick, bubbly, and it'll coat the back of a wooden spoon. So you can see just like
that, it thickened up. Okay, this is just off the heat. And you're gonna add in one
tablespoon of cold butter and just stir, stir, stir, stir, stir. This'll help smooth things out. It's also cooling it down just a bit. And as soon as that butter's incorporated, we'll be transferring this to a glass bowl or any bowl, really. Look at that nice and
silky, but very steamy. This custard could cool in the pot, but it would take so long
'cause this pot is very warm. So we're gonna transfer it to a cool bowl and let it hang out in the refrigerator. Get it all out there. Give it a little bit of a smooth after you've transferred it over. This is gonna be covered with plastic now. So we don't want a skin to form on this. So just place the plastic
directly on the surface, put this into the fridge
and let it chill out until it is cool. It should be like an hour or two. This dessert is so much
easier than it looks as long as you're not making
a puff pastry from scratch. If you'd like me to do
tutorial for puff pastry, let me know in the
comments, I'd be happy to, but today we're using
store-bought puff pastry. It works really well and
it is so much quicker. So let it thaw on the
counter for like 45 minutes. Just take it apart. You can place it on a
lightly-floured surface and then we're gonna roll this out. Puff pastry will puff up, hence the name, but we want these to be really
like kind of tight layers. So we're going to roll it out
to about a 16th of an inch. I'll put the millimeters for
that in the subtitles below. I don't remember. And try and keep that rectangular shape. We do not want a circle
because we're gonna be cutting these into rectangles. I think this dessert should
look really dramatic, really clean and beautiful
when you present it. Because I want it to look that way, I'm gonna cut them into
individual squares. Just rolla, rolla, rolla. Once you're happy with her
puff pastry, you can think, hmm, how big do I want my pastries to be? I think two by four inches
is a really nice size. So I'm gonna take my ruler out and just make a bunch of
two by four inch rectangles. If you wanna make one
big one, just say, hmm, how big do I want my big one to be? You might wanna do a four by eight or even go a bit bigger. It's totally up to you. This is super easy to cut by the way, with a pizza wheel, so fast. So I made some little
score marks with a ruler, and now I'm just going
to use my pizza cutter and slice away. Don't worry if this isn't perfect because you can always cut it afterwards. The sneaky perfectionist. You know what? I'm gonna do this for me. I am lefthanded and I'm not gonna do it to camera anymore, sorry. It's not, it doesn't work. Okay? That wasn't so bad. Now I have my first set of rectangles. You'll repeat this with the
second piece of puff pastry, depending on how many you wanna make, it's totally up to you. I would recommend making the whole batch. Now we're gonna set this
aside, grab a baking sheet, line it with parchment paper. And you're going to make
a giant sandwich of sorts. Metal sandwich, delicious. Just carefully take your rectangles. And at this point, if you want, it's easy to use a knife
just to transfer them over. I think this looks best if when
you present the final dish, it appears as though you've
cut these perfect rectangles, but somehow they've
been piped beautifully. Nothing's been smushed, which is impossible if
you're actually cutting it. So after these bake, I'm gonna show you how
to create that illusion and impress everybody with
your perfect rectangles. Even if you didn't do the
best job, cutting them out in the first place. Right, this is good. You wanna give them a little bit of space and now you're gonna place a second piece of parchment paper on top, and then you need a weight. So the easiest thing to do is
just use another baking sheet, plop it down. This is gonna go into
the oven at 400 degrees for about 11 minutes, exactly. 5.5 minutes in, switch it through halfway. If your oven runs really hot,
maybe 10 minutes, by the by. Into the oven. My puff pastry is out of the oven and cooling on a wire rack. It only takes a few minutes. So while that happens, let's
make this really easy icing. You want three cups of powdered sugar and this is not, you know, weighing it out by grams. It really is pretty much an estimate. So, to that three cups, I'm gonna add two teaspoons
of vanilla extract. Mm, nothing better than
nice vanilla, I tell ya. Now I have a quarter
of a cup of milk here. I'm gonna drizzle in a few
tablespoons to get this started. You want it to be able to spread,
but not like all fall off. Give this a nice mix. Okay, when you're making a glaze, it gets to the stage where
it's like all crunky, like, ah, I need to add much more liquid, but don't add a lotta liquid. Just keep stirring it. It takes like a few minutes, like a minute or two. Mix, mix, mix. And I just told you not
to add too much liquid, but you can add a little bit. This is thicker than I want. Now you're gonna see it come together. And I want this to be, you
know, falling off of my whisk, but like that, but not onto my hand. That never happened. All right, so you can see
the consistency is nice and falling off. Perfect. Now you're gonna take maybe like a third of a cup of the glaze. That's good. Maybe a quarter cup and to that you're gonna add
a quarter cup of cocoa powder. This is gonna be our
chocolate bit that we use for our chevron pattern. Okay, normally I would
sift the cocoa powder, but when you're making a glaze,
it doesn't really matter. Once again, you're like, oh
my God, this is a nightmare. However, just to drizzle in some milk and it'll fix everything. So it looks like I was greedy
and added too much milk in which means that you can just
add some more powdered sugar. This'll tighten it up. That's good. So now I have a nice
drizzling consistency. This is gonna get
transferred to a piping bag. This will get smeared on
top of our mille-feuille, no need for a piping bag. Okay. Now I wanna talk to you
about these rectangles. My first batch is out of the oven. You cut them out. You use a ruler, let's say, if you're doing this individually, you'll have groups that are similar sizes and you're like, hmm,
that's a similar size, but not a totally perfect edge, which means that you're going to want to kinda like put your groups together. And next you can cut them
so they're not perfect, but like they're much nicer. Okay. If you're gonna shave them
down, just really quickly, I'm gonna show you, there's two options. You could use a zester or
a rasp or a sharp knife. Don't you dare. If you're using the zester, you can just put them, put your pieces where they look like
they're almost a match. Just grate it down. When you do that, it'll create the illusion
that they have been cut since you can see the layers inside. That kind of like makes
people think like, oh my gosh, this crazy person went and
like did this insane thing. Pretty simple and I like the effect. If you don't have a rasp or you would like to use your knife, because this makes a ton of crumbs, you're gonna do something similar. Just see which pieces need to be cut. Just use your knife and, with confidence, chop it down and you get a
really nice flaky effect too. So here, this one's cut. You would just repeat that
process with the other two. I've cut my first batch,
let's get to decorating. This is the really fun part. And it's so much easier than you think. Placed the mille-feuille pieces
that you'll be decorating on like a wire rack, over a piece of parchment
paper, just for cleanup. You could put newspaper on
the bottom too if you want. Let's transfer our chocolate
icing to that piping bag. If you're using a piping tip, I would think maybe like a number three or four would be good. It's a round, small round circle. Okay, set that aside in a place where it won't leak onto your counter. And now, you could do this individually, or you could place these pieces together to make one big one. If that's easier to you. We'll use little spatula and add some of that frosting on top. You wanna smear this towards the edge. You don't want it like
drizzling over to create a mess, so try not to add too much
and you can remove the excess as well, if you'd like, once you have that all frostinged up, all you have to do is drizzle
that chocolate over it. So rake the chocolate across
to create stripes, okay. Use a skewer or a knife,
whatever you'd like, to rake across. Use a paper towel just to
clean it off in between. Okay, that looks nice. I love it. That's good. You can set this one aside. The other ones, let's just
do them in one big batch. It'll be fun, I tells ya. Cover them with, frosting. Okay, I've iced all of my tops and now we're just gonna
rake across all of them, just like we did before, but just in one big batch
and it goes really fast. One thing that's nice is to get the lines kinda the same distance
apart for all these guys. So if you can, do your best. Very irregular stripes there it's okay. Now just start your swipin'. One. You don't wanna wait too
long between all these steps because the icing will start setting up. So just be forewarned. Okay, those look great. I would caution you like
not to make a big batch of 14 because it will start to setting up a little bit more quickly, do maybe like six at a time,
five at a time, four at a time. Whatever you feel comfortable with. These will be set aside, now. You kinda want them to kinda firm up a bit before we handle them. And in the meantime, we're going to soften
our chilled pastry cream and fold in some whipped cream. While my tops dry, I'm
doing an optional step. The pastry cream is ready to use and you do not need to lighten it up, but I'm doing that anyways
because I love whipped cream. So I'm taking a little
bit less than half a cup, 100 mL, add it into your bowl, along with three tablespoons
of powdered sugar. And we're gonna whip this up, then we're gonna fold it in and you're gonna see some
delicious magic happen. Don't over whip it and turn
it into a delicious butter. You want it to be just like
nice, almost stiff peaks. This is getting really close, I'm just gonna finish it off by hand. Right to the edge. You can't do that with
the machine running. It's just like, it never works out, right? So I like to just do a few seconds by hand and it's always right. Ready to assemble. So here's the deal, I'm gonna
add in my whipped cream. And I'm just gonna mix it in actually because this is so silky already. If you want to be extra special, you could use your spatula
and do the folding, but it takes so long. Okay, now you can see, I have a wonderful pipeable pastry cream, which is beyond delicious. I can't even describe
to you how good it is. This can get transferred into a piping bag and, again, we want these to look nice, so I'm piping individual dollops. If you're making a big mille-feuille that you're gonna cut up, you're going to smear this on and not use super thick layers. You wanna have them be
like a little bit shorter than mine because you'll be cutting it and you don't want it to all go (grunts). Piping bag, 1A tip. You can see it's like a larger
round tip, but not giant. Fill it halfway up and it's
time for the first batch. So let's make a little assembly station. Now it's the fun part, the assembly. I'm gonna assemble this
right onto a plate. If you're doing dollops,
just eight dollops. Place your first layer on
top and repeat the process. That's it. It's so easy, with just a couple of steps. Now you have a delicious
dessert, ready to serve. If you're making this in advance, clearly you're not gonna
be like assembly line into people's mouths. They can hang out in the
fridge even overnight and it's fine. If you are making them overnight, just remember the pastry won't be as flaky and you should put them
in a case or cover them because you don't want the
pastry cream to develop a film. Before I take a bite,
if you like this recipe, check out my French playlist. Lots of delicious French recipes that you're bound to enjoy too. But now it's all about this. That is so good. Let me tell you, flaky,
light-as-air puff pastry, creamy, dreamy,
vanilla-packed pastry cream. And that icing on top is actually the perfect touch of sweetness. My mouth is watering. This'll be devoured. Thanks so much for watching. If you liked this recipe, hit that like button and subscribe and I'll see you the next French video.
