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Baking

Choux Pastry

A basic pastry dough made from flour, butter, water, eggs, and cornflour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Choux Pastry

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the flour, salt, and cornflour together in a bowl.

Make the dough

  1. In a saucepan, combine the butter and water and bring to a boil.

  2. Once boiling, stir in the flour mixture.

  3. Cook until the mixture leaves the sides of the saucepan.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter 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
Provides the starch and structure that holds the dough together.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the dough and softens its texture.
Eggs
Add moisture and structure, helping the pastry puff and set as it bakes.

The step that matters

Cook until the mixture leaves the sides of the saucepan. Cooking the paste drives off moisture and gelatinizes the starch so it can hold its shape. Undercooked paste is wet and can collapse or turn soggy when baked.

“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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