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Hey, I'm John Cannell and today on Preppy Kitchen we're making a luscious and dreamy pastry cream. So, let's get started. First off, we are going to grab one vanilla bean and scrape it up. But, if you don't have one, because they are pricey, you can use vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste. That'll be added later in the recipe. This is one of my very most favorite things. Pastry cream or crème pâtissière is a French vanilla custard and it is the foundation for éclairs, a mille-feuille, a profiterole, or a Boston cream pie here in the US. Once you split your vanilla bean pod, separate it out. We
want to scrape some of the seeds out just so they can infuse more easily into our milk. So, open it up and now you have all these beautiful flavorful black seeds from this exotic orchid pod. There. That is black gold. I would say the top two uses for crème pâtissière are for éclairs. And you can click up here for my éclair video. So lovely and choux is easy to make. It is beyond delicious, too. Into a medium saucepan, we're adding two cups of whole milk. If you're not using the vanilla pod, we're still going to heat the milk up. It's very important. Add your vanilla pod and the seeds to the milk. This will infuse as it warms up and form a beautiful like vanilla milk tea.
Okay. Transfer this to your stove now. We're going to place it over medium heat and bring it to a simmer. It should be 4 to 8 minutes depending on your stove. We are of course making a custard, so we need some eggs, specifically the egg yolks. Separate them out from the whites. You can save your egg whites for an egg white omelet. You can make a meringue. They freeze so you can hold them for later. Ooh, pastry cream is also the for a beautiful French fruit tart. At first, when you see this recipe, you're going to think, "Hmm, seems a little challenging. There's a couple steps in
here that I don't know about." But after you make this, or maybe after you just watch this video, you'll see it is so simple. You can make this on autopilot, and it makes your desserts so much more special. This is one of those things I could just eat by the spoonful. And by the way, if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button. There's two new recipes every single week. And you can order my new book, too. Preppy Kitchen Everyday Baking. All right, six egg yolks. Save this for later. You can freeze it or do with it what you like.
Keep an eye on your milk, too. Oh, right, I forgot about it. It's almost there. To my egg yolks, I'm adding 2/3 of a cup of granulated sugar. Sprinkle it over your eggs. This milk will have to cool down. So, if you separated your eggs but didn't do anything, they would form a skin, and it's going to be so annoying. So, the sugar will fix this. It's a preservative. We're going to mix this up until it's nice and smooth, and we have a beautiful lighter color. While I was doing that, my milk came to a simmer. You can see it's nice and steamy. It smells amazing. Set this aside to cool for about 15 minutes. It
is too hot to touch our egg yolks right now. And we also want to infuse that vanilla flavor into the milk, so it needs a little bit of time. Mix, mix, mix, mix, mix. And if you wanted to, you could definitely double the batch here to make more pastry cream. This stuff is so delicious that you'll only wish you had more. This is lightened up a bit. It's nice and smooth. You can see it's a sunny sherbety color. Now I can set this aside. We're going to come back in 10 minutes with the magic of editing so we can get this done. Our egg yolks are providing richness and they will also help the custard set. But to make sure it happens perfectly, we're going to use a quarter cup or 40 g of
cornstarch. This is lump city. Unacceptable in our custard. So, you're going to sift and whisk and sift and whisk so that no lumps remain. Whisk. My milk and vanilla have cooled. The vanilla has steeped in there. This is ready to go. But if you're not using vanilla bean, right now you would just whisk in vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste into your egg mixture. And that would be a tablespoon of the extract or paste. Remove the vanilla bean from your milk. This can be popped into some sugar for vanilla sugar if you want. It's not garbage. Grab half a cup of your hot milk and we're going to drizzle this in
as we whisk vigorously. This is tempering the mixture and we're just making sure that the eggs don't curdle. We want a silky, melt-in-your-mouth luscious custard, not sweet vanilla scrambled eggs. Okay. Now we've thinned out and warmed our egg mixture so we can add the rest of the milk in while whisking. You might have seen some chunks of the vanilla pod coming out with the milk. We don't want that in our custard. So, grab a fine-mesh sieve and we're going to pour this back into the pot through the sieve. The vanilla bean seeds tend to kind of go to the bottom of your pot, so get them all out. All this junk does not go in. We're going to take our pot back
onto the burners and pop it over medium heat along with a whisk. We're going to gently whisk continuously, but I've switched to a narrow whisk, also known as a French whisk. Before, I was using a balloon. This just gets the corner of the pot and we don't have as much overcooked congealed stuff. Gently whisk and when you're whisking, I like to start in the center, move out to the edge in circles, and then come back to the center. This way, I really get a nice even heat for all of my crème brûlée here. Continue whisking gently for 5 to 8 minutes until it's thickened up and starts to bubble. You will see a very noticeable difference that happens like that, so fast. So, it'll go from being
the same, the same, the same, nothing's happening, nothing's happening to completely done. By the way, this recipe is almost done. There's just a couple steps left here and what's shocking is one, how easy it really is and two, how our final ingredient completely changes the way you taste this. This happened so fast. Now, I have a lovely custard. If you tasted this right now, you would say, "John, this is delicious." And I would say, "Hold on to your hat, it's going to get so much better." This custard has a lovely flavor, but you know what we need to really taste it is a little bit of fat. Just one tablespoon of cold butter plopped right in will change everything. This will dissolve on your tongue now and the way
it hits your taste buds will make it so much better. I can't even describe. Just stir until the butter is all melted. As this butter melts in, you can see the texture changing. It's relaxed. It looks more silky and it tastes more silky as well. Crème pâtissière is of course a French invention and its first mention is in 1691, but it really becomes popular in the 18th century when you have the refinement of French pastries. So now once choux, which is a lovely kind of dough that you use to make éclairs and cream puffs, gets paired with this pastry cream, magic happens. You get the cream puffs. You get the éclairs, the mille-feuille, all sorts of cakes, pastries, and tarts get filled with this pastry cream because it's
lovely and thick. It really holds its texture and it pairs so beautifully with other things. And if you think vanilla is boring, I disagree, but respectfully so. You can change the flavors here. I've made a passion fruit crème pâtissière, chocolate crème pâtissière. You can add caramel. You can add almost any flavor and get a completely different result, but that base of that luscious custard is still so versatile. This looks gorgeous. I love the thousands of little vanilla specs throughout, too. This is not really usable right now because it is very hot and flowy. We want it to set. So, transfer this into a bowl. Get it out of this hot pan.
And because this is a milk-based custard, it will form a skin unless you cover it. So, grab some parchment paper and place that right over pressing down so it forms contact. This can go into the fridge now. We're going to chill for at least 2 hours, but you can have this in the fridge up to 24 hours in advance. When it comes out, I'll show you how to use it and I'll show you how to make crème diplomat, which makes this even more versatile. Once chilled, you can remove your cover and notice that you have an unusable blob. Blob, blob, blob. Look at this. So, we have to make this supple and lovely again. You could use a whisk, but it's much easier
to use an electric hand mixer on low. We're going to agitate this a little bit, but it'll become nice and silky again, but still be beautiful and thick. Really just 30 seconds of mixing is all you need. You want to break up those bonds holding it together. It should still be really nice and thick and creamy, though. If you wanted this to have more volume and be a bit lighter in flavor, you could add one cup of heavy whipped cream that's whipped up to nice stiff peaks. That's if you're going to enjoy it right away and it's now called crème diplomat. If you want to use this in something that's going to sit for a bit,
take 1 tsp of gelatin with 3 tbsp of water, melt it in the microwave 30 seconds, stir that into the crème pat right now, and then fold in your whipped cream and you'll have a lovely lightened custard. So good. You now have a perfect crème pâtissière, which is amazing for filling all kinds of desserts. As a special treat, I'm making a batch of eclairs later today. So, my pastry cream is going to be chilled and ready to pipe once my choux comes out of the oven. Okay. I just want to show you how lovely this is because when you make a mille-feuille, you can pipe beautiful little dollops of crème pâtissière and they kind of hover between your layers of puff pastry. Take a look.
Lovely little dollops. And just like that, your crème pâtissière is ready to use as you desire. You could even eat it by the spoonful. This stuff is beyond delicious. Creamy, dreamy, cool, vanilla, amazingness. It is so lovely and pairs perfectly with all kinds of things. I hope you get a chance to use this delicious recipe. And if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button and check out my French playlist.
