Cream puffs are many different things to many different people. To some they are a vessel for pastry cream, a shell to be filled, coated and devoured in one greedy mouthful. To others, they’re best cut in half and filled with strawberries and whipped cream. To the minimalists among us, they should be served fresh out of the oven, unfilled and sprinkled with pearl sugar.
No matter how you take yours, all cream puffs start out as pâte à choux, pronounced shoe (choux is french for cabbage, obviously) — not to be confused with puff pastry, or pâte feuilletée (because some doughs go by their french names and others just don’t. Don’t worry about it.)
Pâte à choux is a pretty basic mixture of water, butter, flour, and eggs. Once the first two ingredients are brought to a boil, in goes the flour. The resulting paste is stirred on low heat until it comes together in a glossy ball and just begins to coat the bottom of the pan. Eggs are mixed in one at a time off the heat, et voila!
(Well, this might be the only part that requires a bit of work if you don’t have a stand mixer. As you add the eggs and mix by hand, the dough will seize up into little strands but just keep mixing until it comes together into a glossy, sticky ball. Only then should you add the next egg.)
Unlike most desserts that seem impossibly fancy and invariably elicit a gasp of admiration, this one requires no stand mixer, no whisk, scarcely even a spatula. The dough is ready in about 5 minutes flat, and once you get the hang of piping them, your choux can make it to the oven in another 10 or so. Unfortunately, you cannot control the speed at which they bake, no matter how many times you have made them.
The warm dough can be piped into delicate little mouthfuls, or heaped into monsters the size of a grapefruit. They can also be piped into oblong shapes, but then you’ve got an eclair on your hands. But I digress — none of this matters as much as the miracle that happens when they hit a hot oven: they balloon into light, airy treats with a hollow center and a beautifully crisp and golden outer shell (provided you’ve remembered the egg wash).
The main leavening agent at work here is the steam that’s created in the oven. The water and eggs contribute a relatively large proportion of liquid to the dough, all of which turns to steam and causes the dough to expand and rise. As the dough expands, the egg proteins stretch to the point of breaking, leaving a hollow center. The proteins in the outer layer create the pastry’s structure once they’ve set. A word of warning: never open the oven door before your choux have risen. The sharp drop in temperature might cause the proteins to collapse, or keep them from separating at all, leaving you with a sunken choux and a doughy center (which, granted, isn’t the worst thing in the world).
You can find a classic pâte à choux recipe here. In my experience it works just as well with 1 cup flour, 1 cup water, 1 stick butter, and 4–5 eggs.
