Hi! Very welcome back to Le Gourmet TV. Today, we're going to be making pastry cream to put into chocolate éclairs and it's also a base for a couple of other things that we're going to make along the way as well. So, we'll get ready to it and I've got a heavy bottom pan and to that, I'm going to add four cups of milk and one split vanilla pod and that just goes in. Put this on to low heat, we just want to bring this to a simmer, you don't want to scorch it, you don't want to boil it.

While that's heating, into a bowl, I have five egg yolks, two whole eggs, six tablespoons of cornstarch and that's what's really going to thicken this mixture up and a cup of sugar and we just want to whisk this together and you want to whisk it really well, you want to get a real pale yellow color from it

Okay, so our milk is up to temperature and this is the point that often freaks a lot of people out. You need to pour a little bit of a hot milk into the egg mixture, moving the egg mixture really quickly, stirring it constantly to bring the eggs up to temperature, so that they don't cook and hardened right away. It's really not as daunting as it seems, rather than spilling milk all over the countertop. So, with the whisk in one hand stirring, just slowly stirring a little bit of the milk. And once you've got the eggs up to temperature and it doesn't seem like they are going to cook and break, you then pour that into the milk mixture, again whisking constantly. Now what we do on medium heat, stirring it pretty much constantly, over the next three minutes, this is going to come up the temperature and then all of a sudden, it's just going to thicken and you are going to know that it's done.

So, it's right about three minutes and as you can see, it's getting very thick at this point, not quite ready yet but it will happen really quickly and you want to make sure that you stir it a lot at this point because you don't want it to stick to the bottom and scorch, especially in the edge of the pot here.

So, there we go. We've got it to a boil, it's really thick and it's time to pour this out into a bowl. First though, you do want to remove the vanilla bean, we'll just get that off on to a plate here, and then pour this right into a bowl.

Now, we'll cover our pastry cream with plastic wrap, pushing the plastic wrap deep into the bowl, so that it touches the surface. You don't want a skin to form on the top of this. Let it cool down, put it into the fridge. You can keep it for up to four days and it is the base for other recipes, but we're going to be putting it first into some éclairs.