Pâte à Choux

Pâte à choux, which is roughly translated as “cabbage dough”—no doubt a reference to the way a small mound of it looks when baked—is made by adding eggs to a stiff mixture of flour and liquid, called a panade. Panades have long been used to hold together old-fashioned stuffings, quenelles, and forcemeats. When destined for dessert, pâte à choux is piped into various shapes onto a sheet pan with a pastry bag (or, with more difficulty, spooned out) and baked. Once the dollops of choux pastry puff up, you can cut them crosswise in half and fill them with crème Chantilly (sweetened whipped cream flavored with vanilla) to make cream puffs. Or you can bore a little hole on the bottom of each puff with a fluted pastry bag tip and pipe in ice cream to create profiteroles, which make a delicious dessert, especially when topped with chocolate sauce. You can also pipe the pâte à choux into the shape for éclairs—essentially, elongated cream puffs—bake them, and fill them with pastry cream. Éclairs are usually topped with fondant, sugar that’s cooked to the soft-ball stage and worked on a pastry marble. But I prefer a stiff dark chocolate sauce, which is less sweet.