Last week I arrived home with a delicious pear frangipane pie from the local bakery. The contents of the cardboard pie box didn’t last long, but on top of it, in a corner, a pink round sticker caught my attention: it read WEEK VAN DE ECLAIR (8th Edition). Today marks the last day of that special week so perhaps it’s not too late to rush off to fetch some after finishing this article, even though I’m not particularly fond of them.
You see, exactly ten years ago, during this period my friend & I had to prepare and defend our bakery skills in front of a jury. After three years of éclair after éclair after éclair, you get sick at just the sight of them. The Belgian patisserie scene is just like most other Belgian gastronomic affairs: it’s mainly variations of French cuisine—hence the éclair as the pinnacle of an indulgent Sunday afternoon snack.
During our training, the cooking of the pudding and the preparation of the choux pastry dough was perfected by repetition, until we could do it with our eyes closed. Most of these Fridays I would return home with a painful tummy. How else do you judge the readiness of the pudding than by tasting too much of it? Hence my growing disgust of the éclair.
If you don’t know what a choux pastry is, just think huge profiterole tower—the one where you pour a ton of hot chocolate over. These round doughy balls, risen by employing the steam of the wet pastry, are usually filled with either whipped cream or custard/pudding. An éclair is a longer pudding-filled profiterole. One of our assignments was the creation of such a tower, yet now that I look back at the photos we took of our table displaying the baked goods, somehow the profiteroles disappeared? Perhaps in the jury’s belly? I can’t remember.
What I can remember is that we didn’t like the traditional Flemish/Belgian take on most of these pastries. My friend and I visited Paris to do a marathon bakery run and the result was no ordinary pudding/custard. Instead, we infused the boiling milk with a good dose of chai tea.
Most other pastries got the “twist treatment” as well. For example, the frangipane dough we were taught is awfully dry. We Belgians are used to that kind of filling but I didn’t like it. I found recipes that combine half frangipane and half pudding/custard to create a smoother texture (the little tartlets on the left part of the picture with pear slices in them). The result? Our jury was displeased: the filling was “too wet”. Sure, if you compare it to the junk typical Belgian bakeries sell you, then yes. Needless to say, the training encouraged you to stay in line and not experiment too much.
The black gooey swirls are supposed to be what we call brioches made with buttery yeasted dough. That’s a bit of a deception though: a French brioche is something else entirely, and most swirls you’ll encounter in a French bakery are made with laminated dough instead. Historically speaking, both brioches should share the same yeasted basis, but ours is much less enriched with butter/eggs. Normally, we would spread out the dough, slather it with more pudding and raisins, roll them up and proceed to bake after a quick second rise. We couldn’t stand even more pudding so we turned to David Lebovitz’ chocolate babka whilst keeping the form of a Flemish brioche.
Want more pudding? You can’t handle the pudding! I know I can’t. The round sugar powdered things on the far left are boule de Berlins or Berliners. They are traditionally made by deep frying like a doughnut but we made them from sandwich dough instead to keep them light (and digestible). The baked and cooled round shapes are then cut in half, after which… one proceeds by filling them with a thick layer of pudding with the help of a piping bag. No jam-filled Berliner to be found here: pudding pudding pudding. I think I threw up once after getting home from one of the many pudding-filled lessons.
As you can see, the end exam consists of a very evenly distributed assignment of 90% pastry and 10% bread. We did make some what we call pistolets, a typical Belgian round bread roll with a crispy crust (due to plenty of steam injected during baking) and soft inside. These are heavily yeasted rolls. I had to sneak in some kind of sourdough somewhere so the salt-and-rosemary sprinkled focaccia was, to me, the tastiest thing we produced. Of course, the jury disagreed. We got our diplomas anyway but I wouldn’t dare to dream of opening a dreadfully boring average Belgian bakery where the yeast, questionable bright yellow looking margarines called “superior butter”, and pudding flows and flows.
It turns out that Week of the Eclair is organised by Puratos, a big industrial supplier raw bakery materials. I wonder if all bakery participants are Puratos clients as well? I know our local bakery, where I got the sticker from, is, as I regularly spot the Puratos truck restocking them. The initiative is a Belgian one—I doubt it that French people really need such a week to promote the éclair. Just walk into a random bakery in downtown Paris and you’ll be mesmerised by the unique shapes, forms, colours, and tastes of their éclair offer. Meanwhile, here in Belgium, most bakers offer just one: the classic chocolate top-coated one with vanilla pudding filling.
There goes my stomach again… Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off to get my éclair fix.
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