Binging with Babish: Death by Chocolate Éclair from The Simpsons

- This will be Homer Simpson's last lagniappe. - Come on, are you going to kill him with a cupcake? I've seen this man eat a plate of coins! This e

clair

has over a million calories, 25 pounds of butter per square inch, covered in

chocolate

so dark that light cannot escape its surface. No no no! This is just an image. - Hey, what's up guys? Welcome back to Binging with Babish, where this week I forgot to film my entrance shot, so here's a little table clearing. Absolutely clean, so now let's take a look at that e

clair

from The Simpsons.

First, we must make a choux pastry, combining 180 grams of unsalted butter and 225 grams of water and milk in a large saucepan over medium heat. Then, in a separate container, we combine 225 grams of bread flour, a tablespoon of sugar and 12 grams of powdered butter. This is an attempt to include even more butter per square inch in our eclairs. Go ahead and bring the butter, water and milk mixture to a simmer. As soon as you start to see some small bubbles around the outside of the pan, remove it from the heat and add the dry ingredients, mixing until you have a thick, pasty batter.

Once all the flour is well hydrated and there are no dry lumps, we will return this flour to medium heat and cook it for between five and seven minutes. And, joy of joys, we must stir it constantly. You will know it is ready to remove from the heat when a thin layer of honey begins to form on the bottom of the pot. This indicates that your starches are gelatinized or something, I don't know. Kendall told me what it means and I immediately forgot. Pour this into the bowl of your waiting stand mixer with the paddle attachment attached, crack and beat half a dozen eggs well, and then we'll slowly pour the eggs into the mixer while it's running, maybe half a cup at a time. time, allowing it to fully incorporate into the dough before adding more.

Our goal is to turn this doughy dough into a stickier dough, which you know you do when it forms an hourglass when you stretch it between two fingers, or you do the Dairy Queen, that's not quite right. Let's try again. Or makes the Dairy Queen, (bleep), damn it. Or when you make the Dairy Queen fold, there it is, when you invert a finger dipped in the dough. That means our dough is ready to shape, so we'll place it in a pastry bag and then line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper, using nonstick spray to secure it in place.

Once you've got it nice and set, it's time to break out some pastry fingers. You can expect them to almost double in size in the oven, so keep that in mind when deciding the length and thickness, and then right at the end you should stop squeezing the bag and turn the dough over onto itself. Then, once they're all nice and ready, including the last one, because I ran out of dough, you can flatten these little tails with a wet finger. Then these guys head to the oven, where I learned a lesson about temperature. I started my first batch at 425 degrees Fahrenheit for about 20 or 25 minutes, which unfortunately caused them to explode.

I did a little research and it turns out that too high temperatures in the oven can cause a choux explosion. The good news is that these guys were still hollow, which means our dough is good. We just have to try to tone things down a bit. So for the next batch I went with 375, plus slightly smaller fingers just to see what would happen. These guys came out much more even, much smoother and without blowouts. But as you might have predicted, they're too small to kill anyone, much less Homer Simpson. So, with slightly bigger fingers, 375 Fahrenheit for 30 to 35 minutes, and I turned on my oven's convection function toward the last 10 minutes of cooking to get perfectly puffed choux with a nice, even brown.

Now, while these guys completely calm down, we have a lot of other things to do. First, some pastry cream. We are measuring 150 grams of eggs. Go ahead and whisk them a little in a heatproof bowl and set them aside. Then, in a separate container, we must make a slurry with 40 grams of corn starch, 25 grams of sugar that we will add to act as a dispersant and 50 grams of whole milk. Go ahead and whisk it lightly to combine, keeping in mind that you'll need to whisk it again before using. Last thing before we head to the stove, we'll cut and scrape a vanilla bean.

Now, in our large saucepan, we combine 400 grams of whole milk, 50 grams of sugar and our cut and scraped vanilla bean. Whisk to combine and then over medium heat we'll bring this guy to a simmer. We just want it to get a little steamy. Then we are going to do the custard thing with our eggs. We will start by beating the last 50 grams of sugar into our eggs. Sorry, little whisk, I think this job is for your big brother, because to temper the eggs with our steaming milk mixture, we have to keep it moving constantly. Now here you can see me blissfully unaware that I'm spilling milk everywhere because it's right out of my field of vision.

I'm just living my life, having a great time. So you might want to do what I normally do when I make custard on the show, which is slowly pour it into the eggs. But I think I have enough, so I'll pour the eggs back into the steaming milk, whisking once again constantly and thoroughly to make sure I don't stir anyone. Then this guy will go back to the stove, where we'll bring it to a simmer over medium heat. And of course, story of my life, while constantly beating. Once it starts to bubble, now it's time to add our cornstarch mixture.

This product starts to thicken as soon as it's heated, so you need to pour it in slowly and, you guessed it, whisk constantly. We're going to cook this for about a minute, whisking constantly, until the cornstarch is fully activated and we have a nice thick custard. Kill the fire, and then we only have to add 45 grams of unsalted butter from its container that really doesn't want to come out. Whisk that in until it's completely melted and incorporated, scoop out the vanilla bean and there you have it, a classic vanilla custard, which should now be completely cooled, and the quickest way to do that is to spread it over one edge. baking tray lined with plastic wrap.

This material begins to form a skin very quickly, so we want to immediately wrap it in said plastic film, making sure that there are no air bubbles and that everything is directly in contact with the surface of the custard. Then this type is put in the refrigerator for at least an hour. Lastly, the

chocolate

glaze, which was described as so dark that light could not escape its surface. So I got 250 grams of finely chopped very very dark chocolate, that is, 100% chocolate, which I am going to start melting in a bain-marie. About halfway through, I add 125 grams of cubed unsalted butter and about 15 grams of additional Dutch cocoa powder, the darkest cocoa powder I could find.

Also, since dark chocolate is very, very bitter, we will add some sweetness thanks to 75 grams of corn syrup. Go ahead and melt it completely in a double boiler, mixing constantly of course, until it's smooth and glassy, ​​ready for dipping. But first we must fill our eclairs. The traditional way to do this is to cut small Put as much as you can in there, because you want to fill the cavity of the eclair as best as you can. Then these guys will take an upside down dip in the chocolate bath. I found it helpful to hold the eclair vertically and let the chocolate drip down one side, so you end up with nice, clean chocolate edges.

Once everyone is covered with the chocolate glaze, we'll let it sit for about 15 minutes, before trying to decorate with chantilly cream. For that, we have a cup and a half of cold heavy cream, a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and about three tablespoons of powdered sugar, which we're going to whip until we get what you might think is called whipped cream, but it's no, it's cream. chantilly. It sounds more elegant. Plus, chantilly cream is, by definition, about twice as sweet as whipped cream, which we need with all that dark, dark chocolate. Now all we have to do is put some exquisite decorations on our eclairs, which as you can see I'm struggling with, but practice makes perfect, and by the fifth or sixth, I was actually making them look quite pretty. .

And there you have it, a batch of extra buttery, dark chocolate eclairs. Of different decorative quality, so here's my favorite, and sure, it looks pretty pretty, but what does it taste like? And the answer is quite tasty, like an eclair, maybe with a little darker chocolate, but it's definitely not a million calories and it definitely won't kill anyone anytime soon. For that, we need to improve our form factor a bit, so let's make some big choux pastry puffs. I will bake them at 350 for about 40 minutes to make sure they don't burn and are cooked through. Here we go.

It looks a little more like La Bombe. And Kendall had a fun idea on how to make it deadly. As you may or may not know, I may or may not be allergic to bananas. Not very sure. The last time I ate a banana I went into anaphylactic shock. So a few healthy shots of banana extract and perhaps a slightly more sinister tool to fill it up. There we go, it looks as scary as I expected, so now let's use it to fill our La Bombe. This will be the last Binging with Babish, I guess I can't use a French accent.

Make sure it's filled to the brim with banana custard, give it a dip, let it drip horizontally to keep those nice crunchy chocolate edges, let it sit for about 15 minutes and then the Simpsons Chantilly cream was this big. gnarled stripe. So there it is, and here we go. It's a pleasure to meet you. I had a good career. Oops! Thank you, Kendall Lisa. (jazz music)