Food Jitsu

“Pate’ a choux” is a fancy [Read: French] for a cream puff base. It’s also the same kind of dough used for éclairs and other forms of tasty goodness. A few months back, I held a dessert-themed Food Club [Think: Fight Club, but with edibles and no blood… unless it’s steak.] The whole point of Food Club is to “cook outside of the box,” meaning that the dish you bring to Food Club is something you haven’t made before.

The cool thing is, when faced with the task of creating something new, Food Club participants start doing their homework. The research behind each recipe is immense only because there’s eleventybillion recipes for X dish, and one brain to discern [guess?] what the happy medium could be.

This past Food Club, I went the opposite route and went for the Cream Puff while dreaming about Beard Papa cream puffs. If you haven’t had one of those. Seriously try it the next time you’re in NYC or LA… Anyway, the cream puff is basically a dollop of pate’ choux, and is then filled with custard/cream/pudding/etc. Simple, right? Most definitely. The surprise and awe that I created something this… pretty… and tasty bewildered my sensibilities and forced me into a touchdown dance in the kitchen. My friends were accommodating; and also surprised that I could pull any kind of pastry off.

“Holy shit Nowell. You baked something!”

Yep. I did. And  it tasted great after being filled with custard and dunked in powdered sugar.

It was kind of intimidating attempting something with such a name. Pate’ a choux: it sounds important. It sounds grand. And at the time, it sounded kinda difficult.

“I’m going to attempt a pate’ a choux.” It sounds like a high-dive routine.

But it’s just a name for a technique and method to cook flour in a certain way to get a specific result. I think it’s an American-English-speaking thing. The moment something is given a “fancy” name in another language, it becomes an event, and no longer fundamental. Hell, it becomes “fancy!”

The same thing applies to martial arts. For the sake of ego protection, I’ll use the term X-tech to refer to any technique that transcends the different arts. A punch is a punch. A kick is a kick.

Right? Some times.

Well, to some, it’s completely wrong. I’ve run into countless martial artists who strongly believe their version of X-tech is the golden ideal of all fighting and will ninja-fy the world and all aggressors. The simple truth: it’s a fundamental concept, shared by the rest of the world, and other arts since we all generally have the same biological layout.

A lot of arts/delivery systems seem to fall along the lines of general strategy, created by folks that had a need for a certain strategy, found that it worked isolated in that strategy, and then decided to teach it as Fighting Truth to people who believed that X-art would work for them.

That translates into very specific names for X-tech and a disdain for variation or deviance from X-tech.

But what if the situation calls for X+1tech? You come up a bit short in terms of effectiveness, right?

So it all comes back to fundamental basics, practicing what works with your own tech in a live manner, and see what works for your body type and skill level. Spar. Work in a functional way, instead of listening to someone tell you what he thinks is right or wrong.

Come full circle to the pate’ a choux. Here’s the fundamental recipe I used direct from cooks.com:

CHOUX PASTRY     

3/4 c. water
6 tbsp. butter, cut up
3/4 c. all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp. salt
3 lg. eggs

Place water and butter in medium saucepan. Bring to a full boil over medium heat. Boil until butter is just melted. Add flour and salt. Stir vigorously until dough forms a ball and leaves the sides of pan (about 1 minute). Remove from heat. Let stand 2 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing thoroughly after each addition. After last egg is thoroughly incorporated, mix vigorously 30 seconds longer. Shape dough as directed in recipe.


Okay. That’s the fundamental recipe to make the dough, which can be lumped onto a cooking sheet and made into cream puffs, piped into little tubes to create éclairs, or deep fried to make beignets. The idea is that there’s a fundamental base for everything, and that the little tweaks that surround it may not be the end-all, be-all for the concept, whether it’s fighting, cooking, or balloon-animal making.

The end result, once you realize it works, is rewarding as it is useful to your interests.

Enjoy!