CHEF: What makes a pastry cream really good and tasty to me
is this light flavor of eggs.
It's not too pronounced.
It's not too eggy, but you can still definitely taste it.
The butter adds a lot to it, as well, the creamy texture.
There's many, many different ways
you can use this pastry cream.
It can be a filling for a cream puff.
You can also eat it by itself with some fresh fruits.
This one will be used for a fruit tart
that we're going to assemble together.
So for this recipe, just a few ingredients.
We're going to start with our milk
that we're going to put in the pot and bring to a simmer.
For the heat of the milk, always keep it on medium, medium high.
So the milk is a very important part of the recipe
here because you can flavor the pastry cream with pretty
much anything you want.
If you want add some spice, you can always
add a stick of cinnamon and infuse it in the milk.
So you can always bring it to a simmer,
infuse your spice, or anything like hazelnut, or basil,
lavender.
You can always put it inside the milk,
cover it up with just plastic wrap,
let it sit for 15 to 20 minutes, strain it out, and then go back
to the full process of the recipe.
The next step will be to combine together
the yolks, half of the sugar, and the other half
will go with the milk.
One important step here-- when you mix sugar with yolks,
always mix it right away.
It's what we call burning the eggs.
If you don't mix it right away, the eggs will turn all white
and start crystallizing, and you'll have pieces of egg yolk,
so mix it immediately.
And then we'll add the corn starch to the yolks and sugar.
So you want to have the texture right here that is very smooth.
We shouldn't see any lump, any pieces.
This is why you incorporate the cornstarch with the yolks--
to make sure it's fully dissolved
before cooking the pastry cream.
Our milk is pretty hot here.
It's not to a simmer yet, but I always
like to take a little bit of the milk
and add it to the egg yolks.
The reason why is that we don't cook the egg yolks too fast.
So this mixture is going to be just warm,
and then I'll go back to my simmering milk
and add everything together so it doesn't seize,
so it doesn't cook too fast.
So you want to do it in two steps.
Take about 50% of the milk that is warm, hot.
Mix it to the egg yolks, and then go back to the pot.
So if try to go too fast, if the milk is boiling
and you try to add the yolks, it's
going to turn instantly into scrambled eggs,
and we don't want this to happen.
So what we do here is what we call tempering.
We're tempering the egg yolks.
So our milk here is almost to a boil.
We're going to add this mix with egg yolks and sugar,
and make sure you stir right away.
So we start mixing before we start pouring
and make sure this doesn't turn into scrambled eggs.
Here we can mix pretty fast in the beginning.
But what we're looking for here is to thicken this mix.
It's going to cook, and we want to make
sure we get every side of the pot so we have a smooth texture
once we're done cooking.
And a good thing that I've learned in the kitchen
is that, in the beginning, everything
gets very foamy on top, because you whisk it so much,
but when it starts thickening and starts cooking,
you will see this foam actually disappearing.
It's the sign of your mix getting right, and thickening,
and actually cooking.
One other thing that I've learned in school
is what my teach told me.
When you whisk something, there is no need
to make crazy movement with your arm.
You actually tire yourself up, and everything is in the wrist.
So if you just move your wrist and you turn around,
that'll be like actually not tiring to do this.
Another thing that I've learned that's cool
is do the number 80 inside a pot.
So you get every side of the pot.
So you draw an eight with your whisk, and then draw a zero.
An eight, and a zero.
An eight, and a zero, and you repeat this forever.
Or you can just whisk it.
And you see the foam is already disappearing right now,
and the batter is getting thicker and thicker.
So this is when you have to be very careful,
and you really start whisking a lot.
You don't want the pastry cream to stick
on the bottom of the pot.
It will then burn, so you want to mix it really fast.
And if you see that it's thickening a little bit too
fast, like it is here, I can always
reduce the heat underneath.
So when it starts setting and cooking, it thickens very fast.
There's many ways you can actually mess this up.
If you heat up the milk too fast, you're going to burn it.
If you don't whisk fast enough, you're
going to have clumps and lumps inside the pastry cream.
Make sure you keep an eye on the texture of the cream,
and you actually feel the texture.
You're going to feel inside the whisk is going
to get thicker and thicker.
So once this is thick, we're going
to cook this for just a few minutes on the stove.
It's going to keep pretty much the same texture for a while.
The most important is to cook the starch,
to cook the cornstarch that's inside, which is our thickener.
And if you don't cook it all the way through,
you will feel like the texture of the curd
is actually starchy.
This is when you know you haven't
cooked your curd enough.
So that's pretty much it.
It takes just a few minutes, and if you look at the texture--
I'm going to turn this off.
If you look at the texture, it should
be almost like melted butter, like
a beautiful, custardy texture.
It's creamy.
It's yellow.
It's just delicious.
I want to eat it, but I'm just going
to wait a second so I don't burn myself.
That's amazing.
That's delicious.
So when you taste this, you should taste it's sweet,
it's thick, it's creamy, it has a little bit of eggy flavor,
but without being too pronounced.
So then we'll let this go at room temperature,
and when it's warm, we'll incorporate our butter.
Our pastry cream is now cooled down a little bit.
It's still warm.
So the best way to tell is actually
to very carefully touch the bottom of the pot.
And if you can handle the heat, and it should be slightly warm,
it's time for you to put the butter in.
The butter has been cubed and left out for this one
about a half an hour, and it has this creamy texture.
So that's what we're looking for.
If it's a little bit too cold, you
can always microwave very carefully,
not to melt the butter.
Microwave for a few seconds until you get this really
smooth, creamy texture.
So if you add the butter when the pastry cream is too hot,
it's going to melt the butter.
And once you melt the better, there's
no way to re-emulsify it into the mix.
Therefore you're going to have a texture of pastry cream
that is going to be crumbly and really not pleasant to eat.
So we add all the butter at once,
and we're going to whisk it very quickly in the pastry cream.
Once everything is fully incorporated,
you can just remove the whisk.
I'm going to place plastic wrap over the pastry cream
and put it back in the fridge until we need it.
Just make sure you push the plastic wrap against the pastry
cream so there's no air gap and the pastry cream doesn't dry.
If you don't put the plastic wrap right,
it will form a skin on top, and then you'll
have pieces into your pastry cream, which you should avoid.
So there's many, many different ways you can use pastry cream.
This can be mixed with almond cream.
It turns into a frangipane.
Frangipane is used for almond croissant.
This can be mixed with a meringue
and turned into a chiboust.
A chiboust is very light cream that is used to build cakes.
It can also be mixed with whipped cream
to have a creme legere, a very light, fluffy cream that
can be used to eat with fruits.
You can always have this in your repertoire.
It's a very versatile recipe that
can be used in many different preparations.