Éclair

An éclair is a French pastry made by filling the hollow of an elongated choux shell with cream and coating the top with a thin layer of icing or chocolate. If the shell is dried thoroughly, the cream is brought to a firmness that makes it easy to fill, and it is filled from end to end, you taste both shell and filling in every bite. Although the shape was similar, under its old 19th-century name, duchesse, it was also made with fruit fillings and whipped cream that differ from those used today.

Puffing and drying elongated choux pastry

Milk or water, butter and other ingredients are brought to a boil, flour is added, the moisture is driven off in the pan, and once the mixture has cooled slightly, eggs are incorporated little by little. When the dough is piped to a uniform thickness and length and baked, the moisture inside turns to steam and makes it puff up. If the choux shell does not set firmly enough, the elongated shape tends to collapse, so additional drying is sometimes done after baking. The firmness of the dough, the diameter of the piping tip, and the spacing on the baking sheet are also conditions for producing a uniform shape.

Fixed dimensions make it easier to standardize the process, but lengths and baking conditions are not uniform. Valrhona’s chocolate éclair is a recette (the formula of ingredients and the method) in which the dough is piped 12 cm long with a 14 mm tip, baked at 180°C, and then, if necessary, dried further at 165°C.

Emulsifying custard and chocolate

One way to make a chocolate filling is to combine melted chocolate with a custard made by cooking milk, egg yolks, sugar and starch. Adding the warm milk to the egg mixture little by little before returning it to the pan keeps the eggs alone from setting in spots.

The hot cream is poured onto the melted chocolate in several additions and stirred in small circles from the center to emulsify it. Unlike adding cocoa powder alone, this also brings in the fat and sugar contained in the chocolate, so the formula takes into account the firmness after cooling. Plastic wrap is pressed directly onto the surface while it chills, and the cream is brought to a consistency that allows it to be filled into the shells.

Filling through holes versus slicing open and layering

In a recette for an éclair filled with vanilla crémeux that Valrhona publishes for professionals, three holes are made in the shell. Rather than simply pushing the cream in through a single hole at one end, this method also fills the elongated cavity from points along its length. Whatever the thickness, what matters is that the filling reaches from end to end, leaving no section that is just shell with no filling.

In a rose-scented example, in which the dough is piped into an elongated mold and its rise is held down by weighting it with a baking sheet, the shell is cut to reveal a raspberry cream and topped with a scented ganache montée. Whether made the traditional way, filled from the end, or the modern way, sliced open to show the layers, both combine an elongated choux shell with a filling and a topping.

Icing after baking and craquelin before baking

Fondant, used as a topping, is a white paste containing fine sugar crystals. It is softened over a water bath and flavored and colored with coffee extract or cocoa. In a professional’s demonstration, it is warmed to no more than 37–40°C and handled so that overheating does not cause it to lose its sheen. The rounded top of the éclair is dipped in, the excess is wiped off, the thickness is evened out with the edge of a spatula, and the éclair is set down flat to firm up. Unlike a finish of sprinkled sugar, the thin icing coats the surface evenly.

A soft glaze made by emulsifying chocolate and cream can also be used. In one Valrhona example, the chilled glaze is brought back to 28–30°C and used to coat the rounded surface. Fondant, with its sugar crystals, and an emulsion containing chocolate differ not only in sweetness but also in how they break apart when you bite into them.

Craquelin, on the other hand, is a thin dough placed on choux before baking. In Puratos’s chocolate éclair, for example, a dough of butter, sugar, flour, chocolate and other ingredients is rolled out thin, chilled, placed on top of the choux, and baked with it. Whereas icing is applied to the baked pastry, craquelin is a finish that creates the texture of the surface in the oven.

The 1815 duchesse filled with fruit

Antonin Carême’s 1815 pastry book includes elongated “petits pains à la duchesse.” Eggs are added to dough that has been worked and dried in a pan, and it is shaped to about 3 pouces long, brushed with egg, and baked at a higher heat than round choux. The recette called for dusting the pastries with fine sugar, glazing them with the heat at the mouth of the oven, letting them cool, then cutting them open on one side and filling them with apricot or peach marmalade or redcurrant jelly. Unlike preparations that combine cold icing and custard, this was a pastry whose shell, glazed by melting sugar with heat, was filled with fruit.

The 19th-century renaming and the spread of fillings

Jules Gouffé’s Le Livre de pâtisserie (1873) also uses the name “pain à la duchesse.” The coffee-flavored version is piped 8 cm long and 2 cm wide. After icing, a hole is made at the end and the pastry is filled with coffee chantilly. Some versions use chocolate or strawberries, so the filling is not limited to one kind. The book also describes choosing fillings according to the season, for example suggesting Saint-Honoré cream as an alternative in hot weather.

Gouffé writes that people had begun calling them “éclairs” about 20 years earlier. Based on this recollection, the name is thought to have changed around the 1850s. Who named it, and when it first began to be called by that name, is not certain. The eighth edition of the Académie française dictionary links the ordinary word for “lightning” to the fact that the pastry is eaten so quickly.

Mary J. Lincoln’s 1884 Boston Cook Book also includes éclairs about 4 inches long. The same choux used for cream cakes is baked and cooled, cut and filled, and coated with chocolate or vanilla icing. For the cream of milk, cornstarch, whole eggs and sugar, the starch is cooked in the milk before the eggs are added, and the mixture is then heated further over a water bath. Within the 19th century, the fillings of the same elongated shell had spread from fruit to chantilly and to creams made with eggs and starch.

From single servings to large éclairs for slicing

The elongated shape is not always a single serving. The pastries of L’Éclair de Génie, a specialty shop carried by the Paris department store Galeries Lafayette, come in different sizes: single-serving, the small Caroline, and the large XXL. Choosing flavors from an assortment of small ones and sharing one large éclair are both ways of enjoying it that are unique to the éclair, which combines an elongated choux with a filling and a topping.

Glossary