Via television, I recently heard about Greater Lowell high school's excellent looking culinary program. Word has it that lunches run from roulades of chicken to sirloin steak, all served with a free dessert for roughly $6-7 dollars.

I've blogged before about how important it is to teach kids about food in school. Obviously, Lowell high school's program is inappropriate for a general school - but just imagine how fantastic a school with an up-to-date "home economics" curriculum backed up by a running student kitchen and garden would be. And not because I want to impose my tastes on kids. But because teaching taste, rather than food-from-packaging, is the way I think we can teach people to be healthy later on.

I'm going to make a point of heading out to this high school before the year ends. The school's efforts deserve support.

I'm continuing my quest to learn Jacques Pepin's great book, La Technique. Today, it's Pate a choux, Technique #147. Finished product: Eclairs and Choux

Eclairs, the finger shaped pastries filled with cream, only recently were passed by opera, the butter-cream rich cakes, as my favorite dessert. So many of my most lasting memories of Paris are undergirded by the memories of one eclair or another - whether it was eaten in a hurry on my way through the beautifiul, homogenous, streets of the city, or in a leisured moment with some take-away espresso in thos funny disposable plastic cups their cafes use.

But for years, I didn't know how one actually made Eclairs, or got the cream inside. Years ago, for example, I imagined that eclair dough must be fried. Or that it was baked, but had to be hollowed out after baking.

It turns out, as I discovered a few years ago, eclairs are made of pate a choux, one of the "mother doughs of french pastry making", in the words of Pepin. The dough itself puffs up to provide the paradigmatic airiness.

What's even stranger is the technique involved in making the dough. First, the (relatively minimal) butter is melted in water, and then the flour added to the pan. The dough (called the (panade) is mixed and cooked until dry - as you can see from this picture, the dough is dry when a white film develops on the bottom of the pot. You then leave the panade to cool slightly, and then beat in the eggs one by one, until smooth. The resulting dough is soft - like a mayonnaise more than anything else.

The dough is emptied into a pastry bag, or a piping bag made of paper (I'll cover this in the next post), and piped into fingers or small rounds, like this. The eclairs are baked, and left to dry and cool in an oven cracked open slightly for an hour - this is important, otherwise the things might fall. They look good baked - and would have looked even better if I actually had a pastry bag.

Finally, with the cream made beforehand (scalded milk, sugar, and vanilla, mixed with flour and cooled) piped into small skewer made holes on the bottom, and topped with chocolate (I found that the chocolate sauce is much better made by melting chocolate, then adding a little cream and hot water to dilute, rather than by diluting from the beginning), they're ready to eat. Yum!