Choux pastry, or pâte à choux (pɑt a ʃu), is a light pastry

Pastry

Pastry is the name given to various kinds of baked products made from ingredients such as flour, sugar, milk, butter, shortening, baking powder and/or eggs. Small cakes, tarts and other sweet baked products are called "pastries."...

 dough used to make profiteroles, croquembouche

Croquembouche

A croquembouche or croque-en-bouche is a French pastry, a pièce montée that is often served at weddings, baptisms, and first communions. It is a high cone of choux filled with pastry cream that can be dipped in chocolate bound with caramel, and usually decorated with threads of caramel, sugared...

s, éclairs, French cruller

Cruller

A cruller, or twister, is a twisted and usually ring-shaped fried pastry. It is traditionally made of dough somewhat like that of a cake doughnut, often topped with plain powdered sugar; powdered sugar mixed with cinnamon; or icing...

s, beignet

Beignet

A beignet in the U.S. is a pastry made from deep-fried dough, much like a doughnut, and sprinkled with confectioner's sugar, or frostings. Savory versions of beignets are also popular as an appetizer, with fillings such as maple or fruit preserves....

s, St. Honoré cake

St. Honoré Cake

St. Honoré Cake is named for the French patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs, Saint Honoré or Honoratus , bishop of Amiens.This classic French dessert is a circle of puff pastry at its base with a ring of pâte à choux piped on the outer edge...

, Indonesian kue sus, and gougère

Gougère

A gougère, , in French cuisine, is a baked savory choux pastry made of choux dough mixed with cheese. There are many variants. The cheese is commonly grated Gruyère, Comté, or Emmentaler, but there are many variants using other cheeses or other ingredients. Gougères are said to come from...

s. 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

Baking

Baking is the technique of prolonged cooking of food by dry heat acting by convection, and not by radiation, normally in an oven, but also in hot ashes, or on hot stones. It is primarily used for the preparation of bread, cakes, pastries and pies, tarts, quiches, cookies and crackers. Such items...

 but for beignets it is fried

Frying

Frying is the cooking of food in oil or another fat, a technique that originated in ancient Egypt around 2500 BC. Chemically, oils and fats are the same, differing only in melting point, but the distinction is only made when needed. In commerce, many fats are called oils by custom, e.g...

. In Spain and Latin America, churro

Churro

A churro, sometimes referred to as a Spanish doughnut, is a fried-dough pastry-based snack that has disputed origins. Churros are also popular in Latin America, France, Portugal, Morocco, the United States, Australia, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands. There are two types of churros in Spain....

s are made of fried choux pastry, sugared and dipped in a thin chocolate

Chocolate

Chocolate is a raw or processed food produced from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree. Cacao has been cultivated for at least three millennia in Mexico, Central and South America. Its earliest documented use is around 1100 BC...

 blancmange

Blancmange

Blancmange is a sweet dessert commonly made with milk or cream and sugar thickened with gelatin, cornstarch or Irish moss, and often flavored with almonds. It is usually set in a mould and served cold. Although traditionally white, blancmanges are frequently given a pink color as well...

 for breakfast. In Austrian cuisine, it is also boiled to make Marillenknödel, a sweet apricot dumpling

Dumpling

Dumplings are cooked balls of dough. They are based on flour, potatoes or bread, and may include meat, fish, vegetables, or sweets. They may be cooked by boiling, steaming, simmering, frying, or baking. They may have a filling, or there may be other ingredients mixed into the dough. Dumplings may...

; in that case it does not puff, but remains relatively dense. They are sometimes filled with cream and used to make cream puffs or éclairs.

History

A chef by the name of Panterelli invented the dough in 1540, seven years after he left Florence, along with Catherine de' Medici

Catherine de' Medici

Catherine de' Medici was an Italian noblewoman who was Queen consort of France from 1547 until 1559, as the wife of King Henry II of France....

 and the entirety of her court. He used the dough to make a gâteau

Cake

Cake is a form of bread or bread-like food. In its modern forms, it is typically a sweet and enriched baked dessert. In its oldest forms, cakes were normally fried breads or cheesecakes, and normally had a disk shape...

 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

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

. From there, Antoine Carême

Marie-Antoine Carême

Marie Antoine Carême , known as the "King of Chefs, and the Chef of Kings" was an early practitioner and exponent of the elaborate style of cooking known as haute cuisine, the "high art" of French cooking: a grandiose style of cookery favored by both international royalty and by the newly rich of...

 made modifications to the recipe, resulting in the recipe most commonly used now for profiteroles.

External links

• Bigne’ (Pâte à Choux (choux pastry)) with illustrated instructions