If the Choux Fits

Sometimes the whole course of an artist's life can change at the whim of a deli manager: That's what happened to Stacy Sowinski, the Twin Cities' grande dame des éclairs one fateful day when she was toiling in the bakery at the Wedge Community Co-op and also attending art school at MCAD. "One day the deli manager came back and he was like, 'Have you ever made an éclair?' Had I ever made an éclair? No. He left. But the minute he left, I got the cookbook out, found the éclair recipe, and thought, well, I'll try it. Disaster. Runny custard. Pastry that wouldn't puff. All I thought was: Who was the French guy who had this bright idea? There is no way this will ever work. But I just stuck with it, and it worked out."

It worked out, until it exploded: In 1996 Mpls.St.Paul magazine gave Sowinski's éclairs rave reviews and, says Sowinski, a big centerfold spread: Suddenly she was making 400 éclairs a week.

Now, for those of you who don't know, an éclair is a fussy bit of professional work. Nearly any ding-dong can throw together a muffin, but an éclair requires a bit of bravery: It's made by fearlessly throwing a lot of flour into a lot of boiling buttered salt water, stirring that up, and adding whole eggs one by one until a sticky, sticky paste forms: choux pastry (pâte à choux or cream-puff paste). Bake oblongs of that choux paste, and the eggs make it puff up into a dome; then all you have to do is split it, fill it with custard or pastry cream, paint it with chocolate, and there you are: ten bites of lush, rich, eggy, springy heaven.

Order one of Sowinski's éclairs ($2 to $3.25) and you'll get something she's been fussing over professionally for years and years: She left the Wedge back in 1997 and rented out the kitchen from midnight to 8:00 a.m. at the old Café Wyrd and just labored over her éclairs, which she sold to the Wedge and Lakewinds Natural Foods--where they can still be bought. (Consider that for a moment: That western, desolate, crisply maintained strip of Lake Street with the wind whipping off Lake Calhoun. Consider the groan of the snowplow at 4:00 a.m., the stagger of party drunks all summer. "I was so by myself: Just mano a mano with the puff.")

Mano a mano with the puff. For years.

"It's really kind of trippy," notes Sowinski, who talked to me on the phone as she rang up coffees and pastries for the customers at her south Minneapolis coffee shop and éclair palace, Sweetski's, which opened last spring. "I just started doing it because someone wanted me to do it. Two hundred and fifty thousand éclairs later, I'm still doing it, and still liking it. In some ways it is like art; you're just using a different medium." Can éclairs be seen as thousands of little $2 flour-and-butter sculptures? "I don't know if I'm fooling myself," notes Sowinski. "One of my friends says, 'You're an artist. Just accept the fact that whatever you devote yourself to is your art.'"

For example, consider the humble paper clip: "When I was doing art, I was bending paper clips," says Sowinski. "Pick up a paper clip and they're all the same, but unbend it and it's a line--how many different things can you do with a line? You can do anything with it. Make anything. Pâte a choux? It's the same thing. Paper clips, lines: Same thing. I don't know. On one hand, I feel really good that I have the opportunity to make this thing that so many people love and can have in their lives so easily. On the other hand, people get really obsessed and angry when we run out. They yell. Then I think: I never want to make an éclair again."

These people, they should not yell. For one thing, tomorrow is another day. Sunrise, sunset. Come back tomorrow, and there might even be a whole new flavor in the pastry case. Sowinski does vanilla éclairs every day, but she has a whole range of seasonal flavors: Right now there are slightly spicy pumpkin éclairs filled with a pale orange custard with just enough pumpkin-pie flavor to create intrigue; before Christmas there will be eggnog éclairs, vanilla custard shot through with fresh-grated nutmeg; and next spring, fresh strawberry éclairs! So there you have some reasons not to yell.