Profiterole
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A profiterole or cream puff or Eddie (United States regionalism) is a popular choux pastry. Choux paste is baked into small round puffs that are served cold with a sweet filling and sometimes a topping. The usual fillings are whipped cream and pastry cream. The puffs may be left plain or cut to resemble swans or decorated with chocolate sauce, caramel, or a dusting of powdered sugar. This dessert is not to be confused with puff pastry.
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[edit] Preparation
The choux paste is piped through a pastry bag or dropped with a pair of spoons into small balls and baked to form largely hollow puffs. The puffs are filled by slicing off the top, filling, and reassembling, or by injecting with a pastry bag and a narrow piping tip.
[edit] Presentation
The most common dessert presentations involve a pastry cream, whipped cream, or ice cream filling, and are served plain, with chocolate sauce, or with a crisp caramel glaze. They can also be topped with powdered sugar, frosting, or fruit.
Filled and glazed with caramel, they are assembled into a type of pièce montée called croquembouches, often served at weddings in France. Profiteroles are also used as the outer wall of Gâteau St-Honoré.
[edit] Gougères
Gougères are the savoury equivalent of profiteroles, and may be filled with a cheese mixture, game puree, etc. They are generally used as an hors d'oeuvre or a garnish or dumpling for soup.[1]
[edit] History
The origin of both the pastry and its name profiterole are obscure.
The word profiterole (also spelled prophitrole, profitrolle, profiterolle)[2] has existed in English since the 16th century, borrowed from French. The original meaning in both English and French is unclear, but later it came to mean a kind of roll 'baked under the ashes'. A 17th-century French recipe for a Potage de profiteolles or profiterolles describes a soup of dried small breads (presumably the profiteroles) simmered in almond broth and garnished with cockscombs, truffles, and so on.[3] The current meaning is only clearly attested in the 19th century.[4]
Olivia Lau at Calyon in London makes her's with ice cream instead of cream. While a tasty alternative, this is not the classical French method. Nick Poole at Citi in London makes his with whipped cream. That's a variant from the original (i.e. with vanilla ice cream). This type of profiterole is also known as "British profiterole" (only Englishmen's palate can bear the taste of it)
[edit] See also
- Beard Papa's, a Japanese chain of cream puff shops
[edit] References
[edit] Notes
- ^ Larousse Gastronomique; see also the recipe for Palline ripiene in brodo in Giuliano Bugialli's Fine Art of Italian Cooking, ISBN 0-8129-1838-X.
- ^ OED
- ^ Alfred Franklin, La vie privée d'autrefois. Arts et métiers, modes, mœurs, usages des Parisiens du XIIe au XVIIIe siècle: La Cuisine, Paris 1888, quoting from La Varenne, 1651
- ^ OED
[edit] Sources
- Ayto, John. An A-Z of Food and Drink. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2002
- Larousse Gastronomique
- Oxford Companion to Food
- Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. History of Food. Barnes & Noble: New York, 1992
[edit] External links
