Choux pastry (pronounced shoe pastry) or pâte à choux is a light French pastry dough.
It is directly translated to mean cabbage paste, but why? When baked, the pastry puffs up with little crinkles and ruffles, resembling tiny cabbages.
Made of only butter, eggs, flour and water, it employs a high moiisture content during cooking to puff it up. To make it, butter is boiled with a water/milk mix where flour is eventually added to it and beaten, followed by eggs.
The mixture is then piped out in rounds or in an elongated shape. At this stage, choux pastry can be shaped to make a variety of products.
During baking, water is released in the form of steam and blows out the protein and starch in the paste. The heat from the oven will then cause the choux to set into a hard empty shell. Once cooled, the pastry is pierced to let out the steam.
The bulk of the pastry is made up of eggs, which acts as a leavening agent and allows the pastries to puff up during baking. There is no longer any need for chemical or biological leavening to produce a feather-light pastry.
The large cavity within is then filled with cream. Imagine a golden and crisp exterior paired with a soft, light, and airy center. A beautiful marriage of textures indeed.
It is common in European and European derived cuisines, where it is used to make profiteroles, croquembouches, éclairs, religieuses, French crullers, beignets, St. Honoré cake, Parisian gnocchi, dumplings and gougères.
Thus, by mastering the choux pasty recipe, you essentially have one foot in the door to the delicious world of pastry-making.
