Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

Choux pastry

 
Food and Nutrition: choux pastry

chou pastry

Light, airy pastry, invented by the French chef Antonin Carême (1783-1833), used in éclairs and profiteroles. The batter is pre-cooked in a saucepan, then baked. The name comes from the French for cabbage, chou, because of the characteristic shape of the cream-filled puffs.

Search unanswered questions...
Enter a question here...
Search: All sources Community Q&A Reference topics
Food Lover's Companion: choux pastry
Top

[shoo] Also called choux paste, pâte à choux and cream-puff pastry, this special pastry is made by an entirely different method from other pastries. The dough, created by combining flour with boiling water and butter, then beating eggs into the mixture, is very sticky and pastelike. During baking, the eggs make the pastry puff into irregular domes (as with cream puffs). After baking, the puffs are split, hollowed out and filled with a custard, whipped cream or other filling. Besides cream puffs, choux pastry is used to make such specialties as éclairs, gougère and profiteroles.

Wikipedia: Choux pastry
Top
Choux pastry swans
Mixing choux pastry dough for beignets
Piping out the dough for beignets

Pâte à choux is a light pastry dough used to make profiteroles, croquembouches, eclairs, French crullers, beignets, St. Honoré cake, Indonesian kue sus, and gougères. It contains only butter, water, flour, and eggs. In lieu of a raising agent it employs high moisture content to create steam during cooking to puff the pastry.

Choux pastry is usually baked but for beignets it is fried. In Austrian cuisine it is also boiled to make Marillenknödel, a sweet apricot dumpling; in that case it does not puff, but remains relatively dense.

History

A chef by the name of Panterelli invented the dough in 1540, seven years after he left Florence, along with Catherine de' Medici and the entirety of her court. He used the dough to make a gâteau and named it Pâte à Panterelli. Over time, the recipe of the dough evolved, and the name changed to Pâte à Popelin, which was used to make Popelins, small cakes made in the shape of a woman's breasts. Then, Avice, a pâtissier in the eighteenth century, created what were then called Choux Buns. The name of the dough changed to Pâte à Choux, as Avice's buns resembled cabbages – choux in French. From there, Antoine Carême made modifications to the recipe, resulting in the recipe most commonly used now for profiteroles.[1]

References

  1. ^ Juillet, Claude (in English). Classic Patisserie: An A-Z Handbook. Butterworth-Heinemann. ISBN 075063815X. 

External links


 
 

 

Copyrights:

Food and Nutrition. A Dictionary of Food and Nutrition. Copyright © 1995, 2003, 2005 by A. E. Bender and D. A. Bender. All rights reserved.  Read more
Food Lover's Companion. Food Lover's Companion. Copyright © 2001 by Barron's Educational Series, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Choux pastry" Read more