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a trip to the patisseries of paris will show you all the classics. streets full of mille feuilles, tarte tatin, frasier, macaroon, opera …. the list goes on and on. these cakes and pastries are everywhere. the fun part is to see how all of these shops do the same thing and at the same time all do it differently. it is amazing to see how many different way a chef can take something as simple as baba and manipulate it with out losing the original essence.
over the past several years crumble/streussal have really come into fashion at many of the top pastry shops. these products are showing their face in everything from entremet to brioche. one form of this that has fascinated me since i first saw it was the abandoning of fondant on eclair. many shops now feature eclair covered with chocolate, green tea, mango, coffee or fruit flavoured streussal.
i first leaned of this through the pastry chef that i was working with several years ago. after much discussion and careful evaluation of a picture he brought back from paris our first thoughts were that the eclair were covered with some form of dutch crunch topping. this was not how they did it but it did lead to some interesting brioche products with crunchy toppings.
a year or two later we met in paris and did a tour of all the top pastry shops, eclair with this strange topping being one thing we were very interested in. we walked the city and ended up back at our hotel room with bags of pastries that would eaten with scientific precision. the answer became a little more obvious… streussal/sable/crumble was baked on top.
on my return back to the uk recreating this product became part of our weekly routine. eclair were baked with various forms of dough on top. in the end the most simple answer lead to the best results. traditional choux paste with a layer of basic streussal, rolled flat and cut into a rectangle, placed on top.
we started with equal parts sugar, butter and flour, processed it in the robocoupe and rolled it thin like tart dough. once chilled the dough was cut to the shape desired, egg washed and placed on top of the raw choux. this ratio has shown to be quite flexible. substitute 30% of the flour with cocoa and bump the sugar up 10% for a nice chocolate topping.
the most recent experiment was with corn/maize meal. i wanted the crust to be a a little more crisp and thin. rather than rolling the dough thinner i opted for more sugar and less flour so the dough would spread more in the oven. the only other change was the addition of cornmeal.
there are certain things in food i don’t think you should mess with, eclair being one of them. a perfect chocolate eclair is just that… perfect. it does not need other flavors or magic powders…. but this week it was a cornmeal eclair with roasted white chocolate cream. what is the saying about rules being broken…
cornmeal streussal
70g flour
125g sugar
100g butter
40g cornmeal
-place dry ingredients in robocoupe and blend
-blend in cold butter until sand texture forms
-roll between acetate sheets to 2mm and chill
-cut to desired shape, egg wash and place on choux
Tags: corn meal, eclair, french pastry, sable, streussal