**Pâte à choux** is a versatile dough that can be used to make lots of different kinds of pastries—it’s a creampuff dough! And it’s really not that hard to make. Pâte à choux has been around since the mid 16th century. It was named pâte à choux because of the resemblance of profiteroles to cabbages.
This gif covers the dough only—in the future I’ll try to get one up about piping and baking it, but there just wasn’t enough space to do all of that in one gif.
**Source**: Video taken from [Helen Rennie]( and then edited slightly by me for brevity and clarity in the gif format.
Pâte à choux
1/2 cup water (120g)
1/2 cup whole milk (120g)
1/2 tsp table salt or 1 tsp Diamond Crystal Kosher (2.8g)
1 stick unsalted butter at room temp (113g), cut into 8 pieces
142g unbleached all-purpose flour, sifted (1 cup scooped and leveled, then sifted)
4 large eggs (200g), beaten with a fork in a liquid measuring cup with a spout
Put the water, butter, salt and sugar into a medium saucepan and set over medium heat. Once the mixture comes to a boil, remove from heat and stir in all of the flour at once. Return to the burner and raise the heat to medium-high. Continuously stir the mixture with a wooden spoon until it dries out, around 5 minutes. You will know it is done when the dough leaves a film on the bottom of the pot—but make sure you stir it continuously because you don’t want it to brown.
Put it in the food processor and let it stand for a minute or two. Then turn it on for 10 seconds to let the steam escape before you pour in the eggs. Pour in the eggs in a steady stream and process for 10 seconds. Scrape down the bowl and process for 30 more seconds. When it looks like creamy mashed potatoes, it’s done! Now it can be put straight into a piping bag to make profiteroles, eclairs, churros, gougères, etc.
**Please note**: You do not need a food processor for this! You can do it by hand, or with a standing mixer or hand mixer. But this is an easy way to do it, so I thought it would be useful.
Update: for anyone curious, I made a [follow up on how to pipe it into cream puffs!]
Spicey Ricey
Yummy :: Culinary :: Recipe