French Fridays with Dorie - Paris-Brest

Today´s recipe for the French Fridays with Dorie group is the famous French dessert pastry “Paris-Brest”.

The Paris-Brest is a circular-shaped French confection, made of choux pastry, filled with a cream filling, and garnished with almonds. In 1910, the pastry was invented by Louis Durand, a pâtissier who had founded his own bakery in 1907. Louis Durand was inspired by the bicycle race Paris-Brest-Paris that took place for the first time in 1891. To this day, the “Pâtisserie Durand” in Maisons-Laffitte (in the Île-de-France region in north-central France) still exists and is still operated by members of the family Durand. The original recipe for the Paris-Brest is still guarded as a family secret - Louis Durand is the pâtissier pictured above.

Pierre Giffard (May 1, 1853 – January 21, 1922) was a French journalist. He created the 1,200 kilometer bicycle race in 1891 when he organized the Paris–Brest–Paris event for his newspaper  called “Le Petit Journal”. The race took place for the first time on September 6, 1891 and from then until today, it was promoted as “Paris–Brest”. It is now established as the oldest long-distance cycling road event. Le Petit Journal described it as an "épreuve", a test of the bicycle's reliability and the rider's endurance. Riders were fully self-sufficient, carrying their own food and clothing and riding the same bicycle for the duration. Participation was restricted to Frenchmen and 99 of the 207 participants finished the first race. Charles Terront was the winner of the first race in 1891, he won in 71 hours and 22 minutes - he is the cyclist on the cover of "Le Petit Journal" pictured above.

So, onto the recipe. First you start by making a basic choux pastry like you would for cream puffs. You will need whole milk, water, unsalted butter, a bit of sugar, salt, flour and eggs. The dough has to be cooked (or as we say "burnt")  before it can be baked. To get the circular shape, you will need to draw the outline of a circle on parchment paper and pipe three rings along the outline. One outside ring, one inside and the third one on top of the two bottom rings. Now it is time to bake.

Literally translated we call cream puffs “little wind bags” ("Windbeutel") because of all the air bubbles in the finished pastry – the French call them “little cabbages” ("choux") because of their shape. Although I used to make cream puffs on a regular basis, I had not prepared them in a while but I remembered a trick that I learned from one of my favorite bakers. Make sure to place a bowl of steaming hot water at the bottom of the oven, to create some steam – that way the pastry rises better. And never, ever open the door of the oven before the pastry is fully baked, otherwise it will deflate, just like a flat tire on a bicycle.

Be that as it may, the cake baked up nicely, I split it in half, and after it had cooled completely, I decided to fill it with lovely softly whipped cream because my taste testers prefer that to vanilla pastry cream.

I decided to drizzle the caramelized, slithered almonds on top of the pastry while they were still soft. The sweet almonds are nice as a topping on this pastry as the cake itself is not very sweet and since I did not add much sugar to the whipped cream either.

Overall a very big success, no Paris-Brest left. I will definitely keep this recipe in mind for future invitations. It looks a bit intimidating at first but it in fact it is rather easy to prepare if you follow Dorie´s wonderful recipe.

To see how much the other members of the French Fridays with Dorie group enjoyed today´s recipe, please click here.

If you happen to own Dorie Greenspan´s book “Around my French Table”, you will find the recipe for “Paris-Brest” on pages 475-6.