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Dessert

Cream Puffs

A choux pastry puff filled with a sweet mixture of sugar, flour, egg, and milk.

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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the choux dough

  1. Boil water and butter together.

  2. Add flour and stir until smooth.

  3. Cool the dough.

  4. Add eggs one at a time, stirring until smooth.

  5. Drop spoonfuls far apart on a baking sheet.

  6. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes.

Make the filling and assemble

  1. Mix sugar, flour, and egg for the filling.

  2. Pour the filling mixture into boiling milk and flavor to taste.

  3. Cool the filling mixture.

  4. Cut puffs open and fill with the mixture.

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

Butter
Melts into the boiling water to add fat and richness to the dough.
Flour
Gives the dough structure once it is cooked with the boiling liquid.
Eggs
Bind the dough and provide the structure and rise that puff the shells.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that the custard-style filling thickens in.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the filling.

The step that matters

Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes. Steam from the water in the dough must expand the shells while the structure sets. Opening the oven early can cause the puffs to collapse, so they should stay undisturbed until done.

“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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