Pate a Choux
1 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup water 5 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1/8 teaspoon salt 1 egg Heat butter and water to boiling point, add Gold Medal flour, all at once, and stir vigorously until mixture leaves the sides of pan; remove from fire, cool, add egg unbeaten, and stir until well mixed. Let paste stand for one-half hour, then drop small pieces from tip of teaspoon into hot, deep fat, fry until crisp and brown; drain on brown paper. To be served in clear soups.
A single-egg batch of choux paste, fried rather than baked, to float on clear soup as a garnish. It comes together in about ten minutes plus the resting time.
- YieldThis makes a few dozen very small puffs, enough to garnish several cups of consomme. The dough swells considerably in the fat, so keep the pieces small.
- Weigh the flourFive tablespoons of flour is about 1.5 oz / 40 g. Spoon-and-level rather than scooping, or the paste will be too stiff to hold the egg.
- Dry the panadeThe hinge of the recipe is "stir vigorously until mixture leaves the sides of pan" — keep it over the heat a full minute or two after it balls up, until a film forms on the pan bottom. Wet paste gives dense, greasy puffs.
- Cool before the eggCool the paste to warm, not hot, before beating in the egg, or the egg will scramble. One large egg is the right proportion here; add it in two or three additions and beat smooth each time.
- RestingThe half-hour rest lets the flour hydrate and the paste firm up so it will drop cleanly from a spoon. It is not a leavening step and can be shortened if the paste is already stiff enough to hold its shape.
- Fat temperature"Hot, deep fat" would be somewhere around 360-375F. Below that the puffs soak; much above it they brown before the centres set and collapse. Fry in small batches for a few minutes, turning them as they puff and rise.
- DrainingBrown paper meant grocery wrapping paper. Use a rack or paper towels — modern printed or recycled paper is not for food contact.
- ServingAdd the puffs to the bowl at the table, not to the pot. They soften within a minute or two in hot broth. They can be fried an hour ahead and re-crisped in a 300F oven.
Choux paste — flour cooked into boiling liquid and butter, then loosened with egg — is a French pastry base generally traced to the sixteenth-century Italian and French court kitchens and standardised in the nineteenth century, when it became the foundation of éclairs, profiteroles and gougeres. Its appearance in the soup chapter of a flour-milling company's cookbook reflects a long convention of garnishing clear soups with small starchy shapes: profiteroles, quenelles, marrow balls, custard royale cut in dice. A well-clarified consommé was a point of pride in turn-of-the-century American cooking, and a scattering of tiny puffs proved the broth was clear enough to be worth looking at. Frying rather than baking them is the quicker household route, and it produces a crisper shell that survives a few moments in hot liquid.