Crème Pâtissière (Pastry Cream) with Milk
A light, silky, tender cornerstone of the pastry arts! Crème pâtissière — the pastry chef's cream — is an essential building block for desserts like éclairs, Napoleon cake, and countless other cakes. It goes into baked goods, fills tartlets and pastry shells, and makes a delicious stuffing for crêpes. You can also eat it on its own as a dessert, with fruit, berries, chocolate, or cookies — it's all up to your imagination. And you can simply eat it straight from the pot with a spoon. The main thing is to stop in time, because this cream has a way of vanishing from the saucepan quietly and at an astonishing speed.
Cooking method
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Step 1:
The ingredients you'll need to make the pastry cream.
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Step 2:
Take 2 eggs and separate the yolks from the whites — the 2 yolks go into the cream, and you can save the whites for something else. Put the yolks in a heatproof bowl, crack in one whole egg, and add the sugar.
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Step 3:
Beat everything into a fluffy, pale, smooth mixture.
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Step 4:
Add the flour and starch. Keep beating until you have a thick, pale, fluffy base for the cream.
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Step 5:
Stir the vanilla sugar into the warm milk.
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Step 6:
Pour the vanilla milk into the egg mixture in a thin stream, whisking everything until smooth.
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Step 7:
Set the bowl over a water bath. For the water bath, choose a saucepan whose diameter fits the bottom of the bowl. Fill it one-third with boiling water, set the bowl on top, and cook the cream, stirring constantly. It's IMPORTANT to stir nonstop, or the cream will turn out lumpy.
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Step 8:
As soon as the cream comes to a boil, take it off the heat. If lumps did form, pass the cream through a sieve.
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Step 9:
Smear a small piece of butter over the surface. The butter helps keep the cream from drying out and forming an unappetizing skin as it cools. You can also cool the cream by pressing plastic wrap directly onto its surface so it sticks.
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Step 10:
Spoon the finished cream into dessert cups, or use it for whatever you're baking.
Caloric content of the products possible in the composition of the dish
- Whole cow's milk - 68 kcal/100g
- Milk 3.5% fat content - 64 kcal/100g
- Milk 3.2% fat content - 60 kcal/100g
- Milk 1.5% fat content - 47 kcal/100g
- Concentrated milk 7.5% fat content - 140 kcal/100g
- Milk 2.5% fat content - 54 kcal/100g
- Granulated sugar - 398 kcal/100g
- Sugar - 398 kcal/100g
- Starch - 320 kcal/100g
- Wheat flour - 325 kcal/100g
- Vanilla Sugar - 379 kcal/100g
- Chicken egg - 80 kcal/100g
