Now let’s cook
Choux pastry meets the heat twice, on the hob and in the oven. The cream never meets it.
Ingredients
- 150 ml waterplain tap water
- 1 g saltfine table salt
- 100 g butterchurned from cow’s-milk cream
- 220 g wheat flourground from wheat grains
- 4 eggslarge hen’s egg, about 50 g without the shell
- 525 g tvoroga fresh white curd cheese, made by souring milk and draining off the whey
- 1 tbsp vanilla sugarmixed with vanilla or vanillin, used to flavour baking
- 240 g icing sugargranulated sugar milled to a fine powder
- 180 g butterchurned from cow’s-milk cream
- 20 g icing sugargranulated sugar milled to a fine powder
Method
Pour 150 ml of water into a saucepan, add 1 g of salt and 100 g of butter cut into cubes. Put the pan over a high heat and bring the water to the boil.
Turn the heat down to the lowest setting, tip in 220 g of flour and immediately stir it in thoroughly with a spatula. Keep the dough on the heat for 1–2 minutes, until it comes together in a ball and a white film forms on the bottom of the pan. Take the pan off the heat, work the dough with the spatula and leave it for 15 minutes at room temperature.
When the dough is warm, add 4 eggs one at a time, mixing thoroughly each time. Do not taste the raw dough: it contains raw eggs. The dough is ready when the groove left by a thin wooden stick does not close up.
Heat the oven to 200 °C and line a baking tray with baking paper. Put the dough into a piping bag with a wide round nozzle and pipe strips 10 cm long onto the tray, 3 cm apart.
Bake for 20 minutes at 200 °C without opening the oven, then turn the heat down to 160 °C and leave the éclairs in for another 10 minutes, until they turn golden: at least 74 °C in the wall of the éclair. Let the éclairs cool.
While the éclairs bake, rub 525 g of crumbly tvorog with at least 9% fat through a sieve or blend it. Mix the tvorog with 1 tbsp of vanilla sugar and 120 g of icing sugar.
With a mixer, whip 180 g of cold butter until pale and fluffy, add the remaining 120 g of icing sugar and whip again. Mix the tvorog mixture into the whipped butter.
Put the cream into a piping bag with a thin nozzle. Make a hole in the bottom of each cooled éclair and fill it with the cream. Put the éclairs in the fridge for about 1 hour.
Just before serving, dust the éclairs with 20 g of icing sugar.
