The Pâte à Choux Method or the “Pre-Cooked” Method

The pâte à choux method is also known as the pre-cooked method because the flour is pre-cooked before the batter is baked. Pâte à choux is an item that seems to suffer from an identity crisis. Some say it is a dough (though it is too loose to be a dough), while some say it is a batter (though it is too dense to be a batter). It will refer to it as a batter in this book, because it has more of the qualities of a batter than those of a dough. I hesitate to utilize the pre-cooked term for this method because there are other pastry preparations that are precooked but have nothing to do with choux, such as coconut macaroons and Florentine cookies. Because of this, it will be referred to simply as the pâte à choux method.