Skip to main content
Dessert

Petit Choux

A light pastry made from flour, butter, water, sugar, eggs, baked into small puffed cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Petit Choux

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the dough

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

  2. Once boiling, stir in the flour and caster sugar.

  3. Cook over medium heat, stirring until the mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan.

  4. Remove from heat and beat in the eggs one at a time.

Pipe and bake

  1. Transfer the mixture to a piping bag and pipe onto a greased baking sheet.

  2. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for about 1 hour.

Fill and finish

  1. When done, open the sides of the cakes and fill with preserves or whipped cream.

  2. Coat with glaze icing.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

All-purpose flour
Its starch and proteins set into the structure that holds the puffs' shape.
Eggs
They add structure and moisture, and their steam helps the puffs rise in the oven.
Butter
Melted into the boiling water, it adds fat for tenderness and richness.
Caster sugar
It adds sweetness and helps the shells brown.

The step that matters

Cooking the mixture until it pulls away from the sides of the pan. Cooking dries the flour paste and gelatinises its starch so it can hold its shape and trap steam. Undercooked paste is wetter and may collapse or fail to puff.

“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.

More cream puffs recipes

Boston 12Chocolate 3 See all 281 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes