Choux pastry

[nerakrose]

I just learned that apparently gluten free choux pastry is a very tricky thing, which is a surprise to me because I didn't know that. I've made it several times, with two different commercial flour blends, and it's always come out just fine. (Maybe the trick is that I didn't know it was tricky, so I just did it? Who was it that said 'don't tell me the odds' - Han Solo?)

ANYWAY.

This recipe makes about 30 small puffy things.

Ingredients
150g flour of your choice *
2 1/2dl water
100g butter
1/4tsp salt
4-5 eggs

* My favourite commercial blend is the Provena Gluten-Free Baking Flour with Oats, which is also what I used the last time, but in the past I've also had success with the red Finax flourblend (which is mostly wheat starch, powedered milk, and stabilisers).

Procedure
Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celcius (sorry Fahrenheit folks).

Heat water, butter and salt in a casserole until the butter is melted. Bring to the boil briefly, then take the pot off the heat. Add the flour and stir with vigour with a wooden spoon until the mixture is smooth and comes free from the sides of the pot. NOTE: depending on your flour mix, you might need to add a little more flour to make this happen. Let the dough cool for a bit.

When the dough is no longer piping hot but still hot (but not so hot eggs will scramble instantly), add one egg and stir with the same wooden spoon, with vigour, until the egg is incorporated. This is the hard part as it'll look and feel like the egg will NEVER incorporate, but just keep going. (And switch arms when the going gets hard.) When the egg is incorporated, add another egg. Keep going until the dough is shiny and just soft enough that it'll come off the spoon like very thick custard.

You might not need all the eggs. If your eggs are large, 3-4 might do it, if they're small, 5-6 might do it. I tend to use M/L sized eggs and last time I used all 5. If you're unsure about how much egg to add, you can always whisk the remaining 1-2 eggs together and just add small amounts at a time until the dough looks right, so you won't accidentally overdo it.

Then you do whatever you want with the dough! Put it in a piping bag (I never do this, I never feel like the dough is actually soft enough that it can be piped comfortably), or just scoop with a tablespoon, to put it on your baking sheet.

Bake at 200 degrees C until done. (Depending on size, 20-30 minutes.) If using the hot air function in your oven, bake at 190 degrees C.


These are small, and took about 20 minutes to bake.

The final product, Icelandic carnival buns (bolludagsbollur). Filled with homemade raspberry jam**, whipped cream, and topped with cocoa icing. The traditional way to make these is to slice the puff in half with a knife to fill them using a spoon, which is why they look Like That, but obv you can do like the rest of the world and just pipe the filling in through a small hole.


Here's older pictures of the same things made with the Finax blend:



The colour difference stems from the colour of the egg yolk coming through more bright when using the Finax blend (which is white) and the Provena mix having a high oat content, which makes the flour (and the baking done with it) duller, as the flour is more grey in colour. Also, different days and different lighting and all, but the Provena oat flours do tend to look grey.

** If there's interest, I'll post the recipe for that too. This jam actually contains only two tablespoons maple syrup - the recipe comes from a Danish cook book for baking gluten free, dairy free, & no white sugar.

Comments

[runpunkrun]

These look amazing! So puffy and delicate, and that cocoa icing is so shiny and beautiful. Wowzers.

(which is mostly wheat starch, powedered milk, and stabilisers)

...do you mean some other kind of starch there?

[nerakrose]

Thanks!

No, I do mean wheat starch :) there's no gluten (a protein) in starch (carbs). Wheat starch is gluten free because it's made from the part of the wheat that's all starch, and this blend is certified gluten free. HOWEVER...people who are nervous about there possibly being microscopic trace amounts despite the certification - if such trace amounts are enough to trigger health issues for them - should probably proceed with caution. I've personally never had a problem with this blend, but I also don't have an autoimmune disease triggered by gluten.

[runpunkrun]

I learned something! Thanks for explaining.

I haven't encountered this before because in the US it's very rare to have wheat starch in gluten-free products. From what I can Google, it's only relatively recently that the FDA has even allowed it, and the few GF products that do use wheat starch are mostly European.

So I'm probably not the only person who read that and went, "Wha--?"

[nerakrose]

Np! I understand the confusion. My guess is wheat starch isn't safe for people allergic to wheat either, so it makes sense not to use it in gluten-free stuff at all.

Haha yeah, I'm as European as they come and pretty much only have accesss to European products (I live in Denmark). Finax I believe is a Danish brand, Provena is Finnish. Most have wheat starch in, if they're not corn starch based (Schär (Italian) and Semper (Swedish) do mostly corn starch based products). I don't have great experiences with the corn based ones so tend to avoid them. Some of the Semper mixes have worked very well for me, and Amo (another Danish brand) tend to use rice flour/potato starch/buckwheat blends, some of which have also been really good.

[ldybastet]

These look absolutely lovely! I showed my mum the pictures and she's impressed at how good they look. We've craved something yummy like this for ages! I think she's now going to "force" me to bake these! Thank you for including what flours you've tried it with, and also pics of both outcomes. :D We have the Provena flour in shops here, but I might try first with the Schär flour I already have.

[nerakrose]

Thank you!

Good luck with it! The Schär flours are very yellow bc of the high corn content, so just a heads up that yours might end up even "brighter" than mine. And do report back - I'd love to know how it went! I have a bag of Schär flour I want to use up and I wouldn't mind baking these again...

[fred_mouse]

Ooh, I haven't made choux pastry in ages. I used to use a mix of buckwheat and either tapioca, potato, or corn based cornflour*. From memory, one part buckwheat to one part lighter. I suspect sorghum would go nicely too.


* australian 'cornflour' is either wheaten or corn, depending on manufacturer.

[nerakrose]

ohh interesting, i had thought maybe buckwheat would've been too dense for choux pastry. i might have to try it sometime. (one of the commercial flour mixes i use a lot is about 1/3 buckwheat.)

[fred_mouse]

It might depend on which miller it is from? Certainly, I know at one point, the buckwheat flour I was buying was much heavier, and didn't work for some of my dishes. But it is also why I cut it 1:1 with the lighter flour, rather than my usual 2 parts buckwheat to 1 part (or less) of other.

Also, for a long time, it was the one readily accessible flour that wasn't really just starch, so I used it for everything.

"never tell me the odds"

[rafiwinters]

Yeah, it was Han.

On the recipe: I'd love to try that! I'd have to convert the measurements to U.S. measurements but that shouldn't be too hard; Google knows everything, and so do my cookbooks.

Re: "never tell me the odds"

[nerakrose]

:D

i usually use this when I do conversions from US to European: http://www.onlineconversion.com/cooking_volume.htm it's not failed me yet. this recipe has measurements by both weight and mass, where g is gram and dl is deciliter. :)

Re: "never tell me the odds"

[jesse_the_k]

That is one nifty calculator. The wild profusion of measurement standards doesn't make it easy!

Today I learned that the US, UK, and Metric all agree that
3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon

while Australia believes
4 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon.

So far so good. But the US, UK, and Metric all measure "1 Tablespoon" differently. According to Calculatorology

1 tablespoon [US] = 14.7867648 Milliliters

1 tablespoon [Metric] = 15 Milliliters

1 Tablespoon [UK] = 17.758164 Milliliters

Re: "never tell me the odds"

[nerakrose]

oh i know! my metric spoons are 5ml for teaspoon and 15ml for a tablespoon (it's printed right on my spoons). i even have an even smaller spoon that's just 1ml, though i've never used it.

tbh, the difference is small enough that it doesn't matter. same with cups - like, i know that 1 cup is not the same as 250ml, but the difference is really, really, tiny, and it's not going to make a difference so long as i just use the same scale throughout the entire recipe. so if i'm reading an american recipe and it calls for 1 cup of milk or whatever, i'll just automatically translate that to 250ml and go from there.

this choux pastry recipe is from my mum, who got it from who knows where, and then i modified it to be gluten free. the recipe she has on her card has two sets of measurements, the one i used here and then one that has everything in cups. however, the cups in her recipe is not a US cup or a UK cup - it's a coffee mug. (in icelandic cup/mug is the same word, and her recipe was written down in the late 80s, in icelandic.) it's a very specific mug too, and i have no idea how many ml it is because i never tested it (ca 200ml is my best guess), but also it doesn't matter because she uses the same mug for everything, so the measurements are never off. (so if i wanted to use the cups version of the recipe, i'd just grab a mug from my cupboard and use that, and adjust the number of eggs when i get to that step.)

I LOVE THE COFFEE MUG

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for talking me down from my measurement-induced panic, and I think I'll start a tips'n'tricks thread about measuring in general.

Re: I LOVE THE COFFEE MUG

[nerakrose]

idunno if it helps or if it's just my brain that's weird, but i think of it like pound cake. the basic premise of a pound cake is that you have a pound of each ingredient - a pound of butter, a pound of flour, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs. so you can scale that up and down any way you like; so long as you use the same scale you'll get the same cake. so a mug of butter, a mug of flour, a mug of sugar, a mug of eggs...makes a pound cake, but smaller. (ETA: except technically not because weight and mass isn't the same, BUT THE CONCEPT is what I'm getting at. sorry, i'm tired.)

Re: "never tell me the odds"

[rafiwinters]

Oh, that's excellent to have! Thank you. Where do you hail from? I'm in Boston, Massachusetts in the U.S.

Re: "never tell me the odds"

[nerakrose]

np. :) I'm from Iceland, but I currently live in Copenhagen, Denmark. :) I've lived in Finland in the past as well.

Re: "never tell me the odds"

[rafiwinters]

So you've moved around a bit, then?

Re: "never tell me the odds"

[nerakrose]

i have, yeah. :) and i'm in the process of moving again.

Re: "never tell me the odds"

[rafiwinters]

So what has driven your various moves? *is curious--or nosy, depending on your point of view*

Re: "never tell me the odds"

[nerakrose]

well, as a kid i didn't really have a choice. as an adult it's been about wanting to try something new. idk if it's because i've moved around so much in my life since childhood or what, but i tend to get restless after a while. i tried to put down roots here in CPH (which is indeed the longest i've ever lived in the same city (10 years give or take), though not in the same house) but i'm itching to leave, so...

Re: "never tell me the odds"

[rafiwinters]

Just friended you so we can continue this conversation elsewhere. :-)