Christina Hollis: Monkey See, Monkey Do, Choux...

Last week I had a real eureka moment, courtesy of the internet.

By Andrew Knowles

I learned to cook by watching my grandmother. In her day, women didn't work outside the home after marriage, so she went from creating dishes for aristocrats to catering for her own family on a fraction of the budget. When I was little, if I wanted to try making a recipe from one of her old books, it had to be something economical. One thing I always wanted to try but never did was choux pastry. Not only does it contain butter and eggs, it then gets filled with Chantilly cream or crème pâtissière and topped with  chocolate ganache. That was several extravagant steps too far for Gran!

Years later, once I’d left home, I tried making choux pastry.  It was an inedible disaster. I never got as far as experimenting with any classy fillings or toppings. Then the Great British Bake-Off started on TV and I decided to try again. I used the basic choux recipe from this Bake-Off challenge (I wasn’t mad enough to think I could construct religieuse, I just wanted to get the pastry part right!). The result was at least edible, but as DD said, they looked like “fried pinwheels”.  I adjusted the oven temperature, in case my oven wasn’t hot enough. Batch two was better, but still heavy and close textured so I gave up. Then OH reminded me that my home-made bread improved enormously after I watched Daniel Stevens baking on TV. Before that, I'd been following recipes to the letter but the texture of perfect dough was something I needed to see before I could get it exactly right. 

That sent me straight to YouTube, where I found this 101 on choux pastry...

and yes, there's a world of difference between following written instructions and actually watching someone work. I didn't use the quantities in the film, it was the consistency of the paste while cooking and when ready for piping that I needed to see. My next batch of choux pastry turned out perfectly, and was filled with crème pâtissière and topped with shiny chocolate ganache (though I still didn’t bother turning them into religieuse).  If only I’d been able to see Gran working with the right consistency of choux dough years ago, I could have saved myself a lot of time and effort.  

What’s the most useful thing you’ve learned online? There’s a signed book from my backlist for a comment drawn at random on Monday, 18th November.