french | toast

Pastry chef Keli Fayard offered paris-brests and chocolate éclairs after a talk on the history of French pastry. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL

Some Chicagoans won’t get up before 10 a.m. on a Saturday without a very good reason, and a French pastry provided more than adequate incentive for a group of culinary connoisseurs.

The Culinary Historians of Chicago traced the ancestry of French pastry all the way back to 1440, when a gourmet guild in France banned its members from baking cakes. Keli Fayard, co-owner of Chicago’s Vanille Pâtisserie, filled in the lore of the sweet treats at a meeting Saturday morning at Kendall College. About 45 people attended.

Certain pastry ingredients have their own histories, Fayard said. The Romans rolled phyllo dough in butter, creating an early form of puff pastry. Fritters and other yeast pastries became popular in the 16th century.

Fayard focused on pâte à choux pastries such as éclairs and mousse cakes called entremets.

“A pastry shop without pâte à choux and entremets would probably not be a pastry shop anymore,” Fayard said.

The difference is in the dough. Pâte à choux is a dough made by “boiling milk and butter, a little pinch of sugar. Once it comes to a boil then you add flour, cook that down and then slowly you have to beat in the eggs,” she said. “When it bakes, there’s a little air pocket inside. It’s nice and crusty on the outside and it’s very soft and moist inside. It’s actually a hollow shell,” Fayard said.

Americans are most familiar with the feather-light dough in the form of éclairs, though there’s no written history of the invention of this popular sweet. The name translates to “bolt of lightning,” thought to come from the pastry’s shiny chocolate or coffee glazes, Fayard said.

Pâte à choux is also used to make a variety of other pastries. The religieuse is a kind of vertical éclair meant to resemble a rope-tied religious habit, consisting of two filled choux puffs held together with a little bit of butter cream frosting.

“We’ve actually tried to sell religieuse in our pastry shop,” Fayard said. “We had them sitting side by side [with the éclairs]. Nobody really understood what the religieuse was so they didn’t buy it. They just sat there, which was fine with me because I love them.”

Choux also figures prominently in the traditional croquembouche, a decorated tower of filled puffs held together with a hard caramel. Fayard said the confection is a common sight at French events, appearing at weddings and other festive occasions.

While the casual observer may not immediately link cycling and pâte à choux, an enterprising baker who wanted to peddle his wares to the crowds of spectators developed another pastry, the paris-brest, during the Tour de France, Fayard said. It is intended to look like a bicycle wheel and is filled with a praline cream and topped with caramelized almonds. The name refers to two cities in France.

The entremets also offer a lot of variety.

“Early on, they just did basic cake, a lot of mousse and maybe one cream in the center,” Fayard said.

“Some of the cakes can have six different recipes inside” now, Fayard said. “It’s not ‘let’s see how many we can fit inside.’ It’s creating a balance of flavor and texture and it has to also have a balance of sweetness. They’re very beautiful when they’re cut because you can see all the different layers. If done right, every single layer should be perfectly straight.”

Making French pastries in Chicago poses certain challenges, including some ingredients, Fayard said. France doesn’t export butter or flour, Fayard said, so her French husband, pastry chef and co-owner Dimitri Fayard, has had to change certain recipes.

In addition, American tastes for salt and sugar differ from those in France. Keli Fayard said their recipes were adjusted while keeping the overall balance of sweetness in mind. “It’s another reason that maybe our desserts might be rich, but they’re not that ultra-sticky, gooey sweetness that you traditionally taste in American-made goodies.”

After Fayard’s presentation, the audience enthusiastically tasted samples of French pastry from Vanille, including entremets, cream puffs, paris-brests, and chocolate éclairs. History and tradition filled every delicious bite.

The cream puff offered an airy example of the hollowness of pâte à choux—the delicate, spherical shell was filled with a vanilla pastry cream and topped with a crunchy transparent glaze.

The surprising paris-brest looked like a miniature bagel with cream cheese but proved to be much lighter. With a rich hazelnut filling and dusting of powdered sugar and almonds, it was easy to see why it’s one of Fayard’s favorites.

“I’m far removed from college, but it’s nice for me on a Saturday to actually come to a culinary school,” said Patty Erd, co-owner of the Spice House shops in Chicago, Evanston and Milwaukee. Erd said she’s been a member of the Culinary Historians for about 10 years.

Nicole Musil, of River North, hadn’t been to a Culinary Historians meeting before. She particularly liked the paris-brest, and said she found the meeting online and brought her pastry-loving mother with her. Musil said she might come to another meeting if the topic interested her.

Vanille, located at 2229 N. Clybourn, opened in 2003 and became an instant success. While éclairs are guaranteed crowd pleasers, Fayard carries the confection to a new level with the chocolate she uses in the creamy filling. Fayard said her chocolate comes from Switzerland and contains 64 percent cacao solids.

In 2007, Chicago magazine named it the best bakery in Lincoln Park. The same year, Fayard’s husband was voted one of the top 10 pastry chefs in the U.S. by Pastry Arts & Design magazine. He has won several contests and recently became a pastry world champion.

“We really focus on the purity of pastry,” Keli Fayard said. “We do what we love and we won’t change anything we do to pinch a penny or save time.”

Keli Fayard, co-owner of Vanille Pâtisserie in Lincoln Park, shows off an elaborate tower of choux puffs called a croquembouche. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL	Sculptural entremets, or mousse cakes, are among the most popular offerings at Chicago’s Vanille Pâtisserie. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL

The Chemistry of Cream Puffs

There’s real science behind the intoxicating taste of pastry. Just ask Kantha Shelke of Corvus Blue LLC, a Chicago-based food science company and think tank.

Shelke was trained in the art and science of French baking by bread specialist Raymond Calvel and Danielle Forestier. She has taught baking science and technology at several universities, including North Dakota State University and Kansas State University.

• What separates French pastry from American counterparts?

Mostly the richness. French pastries tend to be leaner and less [sweet] than their American counterparts. Scientifically speaking, French baking takes advantage of the functionality of the ingredients – flour protein, yeast and/or leavening action and dough structure to develop the texture and flavor without emphasis from additional ingredients. American pastry on the other hand, typically uses sweeteners and fat to emphasize texture and taste for a public that is not as sophisticated about textures and tastes.

• If you were to try to make a French pastry as you would if you were there, how would you go about getting the ingredients? Is there a chemical difference between American and French creams?

Professional bakers usually spec their ingredients and specifications can help tailor the ingredients for the end product. French butter tends to have higher fat content, and one can get that percentage from spun butter here. Butter is 8-10 percent water. The water is not intrinsic but it is definitely part of the butter structure. One way to approximate French butter is to spin American butter in a centrifuge to remove some of the moisture.

Our wheats are very different from native French wheats. In the US, there are 5 kinds of wheat…classified on the basis of the hardness or softness of the kernels. Typically, the hard wheats are higher in protein. Two of those proteins form gluten when mixed with water. The quality of the flour is based on the amount and quality of gluten. Soft flours are used to make cookies, cakes and pastries, while harder flours can support the formation of air bubbles in breads. Generally, we can achieve a similar functionality by blending hard and soft wheats to match the functionality of French flours.

• Do the hormones we give our cows affect the butter?

Emotions aside and scientifically speaking, growth hormones do not affect the quality of butter. They only affect the amount of butter produced.

There is a significant difference between the compositions of French dairy cream creams and American dairy cream. The difference arises from the species of the cows and their diets and also to the farming style. Free range farming often produces creams with complex taste and color compounds based on what plants the cows choose to eat and cannot be duplicated easily by industrially raised dairy cows fed a packaged meal. “We have focused on uniformity and consistency.”

• Temperature seems to play a large role in pastry. For instance, pâte à choux is made on a stove, and many pie crusts specify how cold water, butter or lard should be. Why is that?

The texture of end product decides the method. The pâte à choux is meant to be tender and soft while pie crusts are designed to be flaky and tender without being moist. Soft tenderness can be attained by the stovetop.

Flakiness comes from layering dough and fat. Home cooks can achieve that by cutting a fat that remains solid above room temperature into the flour. The fat separates the layers of flour.

• There seems to be a lot of debate as to which fats make the perfect pie crust. Some people prefer butter, others lard or vegetable shortening and still others a combination of the two. Is there a difference? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Regional preferences largely dictate the method for creating the texture. Butter has some intrinsic moisture which softens the flaky layers in a pie crust by moistening the flour. The crust also develops a distinct color and flavor associated with butter products.

Lard, on the other hand, is drier and creates flakiness with a crunch that is generally not obtained with butter. In some parts of the country, the taste profile of lard is preferred over that of butter. Vegetable shortenings can duplicate lard textures as well as butter textures but cannot produce the flavor of either to discerning palates.

The general advantage has to do with economics – lard is cheaper than butter and vegetable shortening is the cheapest of all.

This story originally appeared on the Medill News Service website.