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Dessert

Cream Puffs

A pastry made from a dough of water, butter, flour, and eggs, filled with a sweet custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cream Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the choux dough

  1. Boil the water and butter together.

  2. Stir in the flour and set aside to cool.

  3. When cool, stir in the beaten eggs.

Bake the puffs

  1. Drop spoonfuls onto pans, spacing them apart.

  2. Spread the white of one egg over the puffs.

  3. Bake until golden.

  4. Once baked, open the puffs on the side.

Make and add the filling

  1. In a saucepan, combine 1 egg, sugar, 1 tablespoon flour, and boiling milk.

  2. Bring to a boil, then cool before filling the puffs.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Gives the dough structure once it is stirred into the hot butter and water mixture.
Eggs
Add moisture and structure, and help the dough puff and set as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the dough, and helps it stay tender.
Water
Turns the butter into a steaming liquid so the flour can be cooked into the dough.

The step that matters

Stir in the beaten eggs after the dough cools. If the dough is still hot when the eggs go in, they can scramble and the dough will be too loose to hold its shape and puff properly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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