pastry
I would like to make choux pastry, and the recipe I have emphasises bringing the pan quickly to a boil after the butter has melted into the water at the beginning of the procedure.
I only have electric hobs available, which can take a few minutes to go from a simmer to a proper boil.
Will this have a negative impact on my pastry, and if so is there a way I can work around it?
It's actually been a few years since I made éclairs, so I might be forgetting a few things, but here are my immediate reactions to the recipe:
"Plain flour" (by which I assume they mean all-purpose flour) is not appropriate for choux paste. You should be using bread flour (AKA "strong flour"), you need the extra gluten for this. That is probably the most important reason why your choux paste didn't turn out right.
The ratio of fat to water is off. You want a 2:1 water:fat ratio. Use 50 g of butter or shortening for every 100 mL of water. For reference, if you're going to adjust the ratio then you also want to use approximately 2.4 eggs per 100 mL of water. The recipe mentioned in the question is close, but slightly short, so be careful if scaling up.
The ratio of flour to water is blatantly wrong, for both the posted recipe and what you say is the cookbook recipe, and you should never ever use volumetric measurements for flour in such a sensitive baking recipe. You want to measure out 75 g of flour per 100 mL of water. For a cup of water that's about 175 g of bread flour. Don't even try to calculate the volume, weigh it. This is extremely important, if you don't use enough flour then the choux paste won't fully gelatinize!
A "pinch" of salt is probably OK at this small scale, but if you ever decide to scale up then you need to be accurate; use 2% salt (2 g per 100 mL of water).
The recipe is correct in warning you against letting any of the water evaporate, and telling you to cook and stir the roux until it clears the side and forms balls when shaken. You should also see a white film on the bottom of the pan.
One thing that the recipe doesn't mention that is extremely important is that you need to wait for the roux to cool before adding the eggs. Whole egg coagulates at 65° C (149° F) so it is absolutely imperative that the roux is cooler than that, otherwise you will end up with scrambled eggs.
Make sure you completely incorporate the eggs. Scrape the sides of the bowl if necessary. And don't try to cut corners by adding all the eggs at once; you really need to add them one at a time, otherwise you'll end up with lumps. Missing this probably won't cause failure to rise, but you don't want lumps, trust me.
When you're done, you should have a paste that resembles the consistency of a meringue, but heavier. That is, it holds its shape, even against gravity, but is still soft enough to spread. I check with my finger. If it's too stiff, you can add milk to soften it, but if it's not stiff enough, then you didn't get enough of the flour gelatinized and your paste is ruined. (So don't overmilk!)
I don't agree with their "very hot oven, then lower the temperature to 180° C" instruction. 180° C is a very low temperature for baking choux paste, and I don't think that the 10 minutes of "very hot" temperature (whatever that is) are going to compensate for it. I have always baked choux paste shells at a straight 200° C (390° F) for 30 minutes.
That's about it for tearing apart their choux paste recipe. I'm not even going to touch their "custard cream" recipe, which is just not even remotely close to the chantilly cream that éclairs are supposed to have.
Abstract: Ganache is delicious, but not everyone eats dairy. We examined whether coconut milk can be used for the creation of a non-dairy ganache. We ran a series of experiments. The answer is that, with some creative techniques, you can use it, but it does not come anywhere near to the real thing.
Introduction. Someone wrote a question on Seasoned advice about coconut based ganache and we got curious.
Background. We love ganache even more than pure chocolate, and make it often ourselves, so we think we have all the prerequisites needed to create and judge a coconut based ganache recipe. Our favorite ganache recipe 1 (which we used as a starting point) is: 100 g chocolate, 72% cocoa (only made from cocoa, sugar, and cocoa butter, no vegetable fat or emulsifiers); 100 g cream, at least 30% (non-UHT), 25 g butter.
Method. We prepared the base mix as follows: 25 g coconut milk were heated until boiling. They were removed from the heat. 25 g chocolate (72%) and 6g cocoa butter were added. Everything was left to dissolve. After 5 minutes, the mixture was whipped with a handheld mixer at the second-to-highest setting. This was Version 0. It was divided in two batches. Different versions were made from each batch by gradually adding guar (a knife-point-ful), egg yolk (1, in lieu of lecithine) and sugar (8g per batch). Each version was whipped for at least 3 minutes. The final versions (1c and 2b) where put for 30 min in the refrigerator, then taken out and whipped again. As there were no observable changes after the cold whipping, we do not treat them as a different version. We also made a small portion of dairy ganache for comparison purposes.
Results. These are listed in Table 1. The numbers in the ingredients columns of the table represent the order of adding the ingredients to the mixtures.
Table 1. Experiment results.
The final consistency of version 1c is documented in Figure 1. Note that the peaks do not drip and you can rotate the bowl at 180° without anything falling out. The piece of chocolate was added for color comparison.
Figure 2 shows a zoom of the blue bordered area in Figure 1.
Discussion. It is possible to make a profiterole filling with coconut milk based ganache, but it isn't quite like the real deal. Also, it resembles non-whipped ganache more closely than whipped ganache.
The basic ganache recipe can be done with coconut milk instead of cream and cocoa butter instead of butter. However, it tastes fattier than real ganache, and it is runnier. Unlike dairy ganache, whipping does not result in aeration.
We think that eliminating the cocoa butter altogether will somewhat alleviate the fatiness problem, but we did not test this proposal yet.
A thickening and or emulsifying agent can improve the ganache texture. Even though egg yolk improves aeration, is not a good choice, as it results in a slimy feel. Guar is a better solution.
The addition of sugar ruins the chocolateness of the taste. If bitterness is not desired, a sweeter chocolate (50%) should be used. Only dedicated sugar lovers or Americans should resort to adding sugar. In that case, it should be added before the guar (we would suggest dissolving it in the coconut milk before boiling it) as not to interfere with the texture of the final product.
Threats to validity. First, there was a single tester (the quasi-royal we). Second, this tester is already biased in favor of dairy products in general and specifically for dairy based ganache. Third, many interesting combinations (including xanthan gum and corn starch) could not be tested due to lack of resources.
Conclusion and outlook. We found the experiment very inspirating. It was also yummy. But we'd like to issue an warning: This experiment is dangerous. In the preparation phase, we discovered a penchant for guared coconut water deep fried in coconut fat we'd rather not have known about. Nevertheless, we are looking forward to offering the results for peer preview to a chocolate-loving lactose intolerant co worker.
References: 1 My own recipe book
Best Answer
Unless there is something seriously wrong with your stove, you should not have any negative effects from using it to make choux pastry. Simply melt the butter into the water over medium then adjust the temperature to high.
The purpose of boiling the water and then cooking the pastry over low heat is to gelatinize the starches in the flour. Your recipe likely adds emphasis to the point of bringing the water to a boil quickly so that you do not simmer the water away. Doing so can have negative effects on the finished product because it will throw off the water:flour ratio and you will not be able to completely gelatinize the starches.
If your stove heats up so slowly that you think this might be an issue, you can simply place a lid over the pot as you bring it to a boil, making sure to add back to the pot any condensed vapor on the inside of the lid.