Paris-Brest
WITH WHIPPED GANACHE
A famous French dessert, made of choux pastry with craquelin, garnished with whipped ganache, and decorated with praline paste and caramelized hazelnuts.
This circular pastry, a reminder of the bike wheel, is created in 1910 to commemorate the Paris–Brest–Paris bicycle race at that time. The recipe described here is modified. The original recipe is made with praline flavored mousseline cream. You can find it here.
RECIPE
- Preheat your oven at 250°C.
- Put the water, milk, diced butter butter, sugar and salt in a cooking pan and put over medium heat.
- When butter entirely melts, reduce the heat and add flour.
- Mix well with a wooden spoon.
- Keep stirring until the mixture dries out. It might take 3 to 4 minutes. This is an important operation to make a perfect choux pastry.
- Remove the pan from heat and keep stirring energetically so that the dough cools down.
- Add the beaten eggs one by one: this means that you add the first egg, mix well until it totally gets into the dough, then you add the next one.
- Cover a cooking plate with parchment paper and form the famous circular shape of your Paris-Brest.
- Decorate with slivered almonds or place craquelin over the shaped dough (recipe below).
- Turn off the oven
- Bake the choux pastry in the turned off oven for 15 minutes.
- Turn the oven on at 180°C and bake for 20 minutes. Never open the oven door.
- Turn off the oven, open it and let your Paris-Brest cool down inside.
- Cream the butter with brown sugar.
- Add the flour.
- Spread the dough between two parchment papers and shape the discs that will be placed over the Paris-Brest.
- Freeze for 1 hour before use.
- Roast the almonds and hazelnuts for 10 minutes in an oven set at 160°C.
- In a large pan, mix water and sugar and bring to a boil.
- After about 2 minutes of boiling, add the roasted nuts.
- Mix well and gently until the nuts and well covered with sugar.
- The mixture will turn white and hard. It’s part of the process
- Keep stirring and mixing until the sugar melts again and turns to caramel.
- When the nuts are well coated with caramel, remove from heat.
- Spread immediately over a parchment paper and leave to completely cool.
- Crush coarsely the caramelized nuts then mix in the mixer until smooth and creamy.
- Prepare your gelatin: rehydrate the gelatin sheets in water or dissolve the gelatin powder in 10g of water.
- Heat 110g of double cream and add gelatin.
- Add the white chocolate, previously melted.
- Add 55g of double cream and the praline paste.
- Mix well with a hand blender.
- Cover with a cling film. The film should be in contact with the ganache.
- Refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
- Whip the ganache for some minutes until shiny and smooth.
- Put the whipped ganache in a piping bag.
- Cut the baked choux pastry after it has completely cooled down.
- Put a thin layer of praline paste in the bottom of your choux pastry.
- Garnish the Paris-Brest with the whipped ganache.
- Decorate with some praline paste and caramelized hazelnuts.
