Pastry Dough (Pâte à Choux: Part 1)

You add the flour all at once, and then return it back to the heat, and then just start stirring. You'll see it's a little bit lumpy. As the flour absorbs the water it'll start to turn into a dough. So you can see this is starting to come together into a paste that looks a little bit gluey. And that's perfectly fine. And you're also going to notice that it's going to start forming a skin on the bottom of the pan, which is also perfectly normal. It's actually exactly what you want because it will help the dough to not burn in the pan at all. That skin will kind of protect the dough from the bottom of the pan and the heat that's right beneath it. Okay, so now you can see it's really starting to come together. All of the water has been absorbed. It looks beautiful. So in just a few minutes I'm going to take this off the heat and get it into my standing mixer, okay, and you just want to mix that on low, and what you're trying to do is cool the dough down because we're going to be adding eggs, and if you add the eggs at this point it's just going to cook the eggs and you'll have scrambled eggs in your pate a choux and that's not very good at all. So you basically want to let this mix on low until there's no more steam coming out of the dough. So as our dough is cooling down you can get the rest of your ingredients ready if you haven't gotten it already. So we need four eggs. And you're also going to need a pastry bag with a very large tip, a number 5 tip, and you're also going to need a parchment lined baking sheet. So here I've got a glass and I've fit my pastry bag in the glass, and that just helps me have an extra set of hands when I'm trying to transfer the dough into the pastry bag. So I'm feeling the side of the bowl and it's no longer too hot to touch, which is excellent, it means it's cooling down and I'm going to go ahead and start adding my eggs. I'm going to turn this back on low. And you want just to add your eggs one at a time. You want the egg to incorporate completely before you add the next egg.