Mon Petit Choux

"Mon petit choux?" My little cabbage? While this pastry has a silly nickname and an intimidating real one, "Choux à la crème," it is more feasible to make than its fancy French names suggest. In fact, it is really only a cream puff. Even so, my experiences making cream puffs in the past have always failed. Since the filling is easy, it was always the shell that made my efforts go awry. My cream puffs were often more like cream flats-- they either sagged after I took them out of the oven, or they were tough and never rose at all. However, after reading the highly-detailed recipe in my cookbook How to Cook Everything, I thought that I should give it another try.

First, I started as always by cooking the dough on the stove. The ingredients for this are simple: butter, flour, eggs, a dash of salt, and water. My only problem with this in the past was knowing when the dough was "done," and overcooked dough could have been part of the reason for my flat pastries. The cookbook helped me with this issue by saying that after I combined the ingredients and brought them to a boil, I should "stir constantly until the mixture pulls away from the pan and forms a ball, about 30 seconds" (Bittman 942). To me, this meant to turn off the heat and stop cooking once the dough was no longer very sticky, and once it formed a ball without being purposefully pushed into one. The timing of an approximate number of seconds was also a helpful guide. When my dough came off of the stove, it had the perfect texture as was ready for the next steps.

The cream puffs weren't perfectly
round or particularly pretty, using my 
spoon-and-plop method. But, that was 
the gentlest way of handling them, 
and I decided that I'd rather them be 
imperfect and soft, than round 
and tough or flat.

Cooking the dough for cream puffs is always followed by beating in eggs using an electric mixer. I put my dough ball into the stand mixer, and added eggs one at a time. Unfortunately, this was another step that I had not previously known when to stop for. Thankfully, the cookbook suggested that I "stop beating when the mixture is glossy and try to handle the batter minimally from here on out" (Bittman 942). I followed its advice and turned off the mixer once the dough had an eggy shine to it (before, I had always mixed until it dried up a bit). The author's tying-in point about not touching the dough too much after mixing made perfect sense with this. It meant that the dough should just be handled gently in general, in order to rise when baking. This was key knowledge for forming puffs to put into the oven later on. This time, I scooped up the dough with a round spoon and just plopped the dough onto the pan, instead of overhandling them in attempt to make them perfectly spherical. When my cream puffs actually puffed when baking, it was mainly thanks to this step and one other one.

That other step was the author's, which was to prick the baked puffs once they came out of the oven in order to release steam (Bittman 942). I never would have thought of steam being why my puffs flattened on the occasions that they did rise in the oven. However, it is logical that the weight of condensed water from the steam would pull down my puffs. Following the book's advice, I poked a hole in each of my puffs with a knife, and they finally stayed "puffy."

Successful, puffy cream puffs

Once my cream puff shells were successfully baked, filling them and completing them was a snap. I am so glad that I used How to Cook Everything to help me with all of the struggle points in my baking. After many failed trials, I actually made choux à la crème! They are absolutely delicious, and I will definitely be making them again. Now that I've perfected the cream puff shell, I'm hoping that next time I can fill them with a more complex cream. This time, I used whipping cream that I sweetened and added vanilla to. Do you know of another type of cream puff filling? Do you have any ideas on different flavors of filling, or how to get those flavors? Please comment below! (Also, Merry Christmas!)