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Dessert

Cream Puffs

Cream puffs are small pastries made from a dough of water, butter, flour, baking soda, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour 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 ↓

Cream Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 375°F (190°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a saucepan, combine boiling water, butter, and baking soda over medium heat.

  2. Once boiling, stir in the flour quickly until well combined.

  3. Remove from heat and stir with a wire potato masher until cool.

  4. Add the unbeaten yolk of the egg and mix well.

  5. Gently fold in the unbeaten egg white and mix until just combined.

Shape and bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto an ungreased baking sheet, spacing them 1½ inches apart.

  2. Bake at 375°F (190°C) for 25 to 30 minutes until golden.

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 + flourtop 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).

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
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture in the baked puffs.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and gluten that give the dough structure to hold its shape.
Egg
Adds moisture and binds the dough, helping the puffs set and hold their structure.
Boiling water
Provides moisture that turns to steam in the oven, helping the puffs expand.

The step that matters

Cool the dough before adding the egg. If the dough is still very hot when the egg goes in, the egg can partly cook and scramble, and the batter will not emulsify smoothly. Cooling it until just warm keeps the mixture smooth and lets it hold its shape and rise in the oven.

“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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