How To Make Profiteroles

We’ve all had profiteroles right? Little sweet bombs of choux pastry filled with whipped cream and drizzled all over with chocolate sauce. Sounds so good! The French call them choux a la creme, which I think is a wonderful phrase that whips up a wonderful image of these little beauties.

Don’t they just look so good!

However, although we have all tried profiteroles, and all love them, hardly any of us have ever made them. There is a general misconception that this fantastic French export is very difficult to make and should be left to the experts. This is simply not the case. Anyone can make these.

Don’t get me wrong, the recipe for profiteroles is not as easy as, say, the recipe for toast. With a little care, however, and following some useful tips, making profiteroles for your next dinner party is well within your grasp.

I’m now going to walk you through how to make profiteroles but please take a good note of the Top Tips at the end. If you follow these I promise your profiteroles will look as good as those above.

1. Get your ingredients ready

If you’ve read any of my previous posts you will know that I’m a big stickler making sure all the ingredients are measured out and prepped before the cooking starts. This is more critical than ever when making choux pastry as there are some critical tasks that need to be done fast. One sure fire way of ruining your profiterole pastry mix is not being ready with an ingredient when needed.

Get your choux pastry ingredients together…

And your ingredients for the chocolate sauce…

OK, now we can start cooking…

2. Make the choux pastry

To make the choux pastry, firstly take the flour, salt, and sugar and mix together. Now sieve this mixture and ensure that you have no lumps of flour whatsoever. You can sieve it into a bowl or onto some baking paper. It doesn’t matter which but the sieved mix need to be ready to be added to the pastry mix quickly and all in one go.

Next, pour the water into a medium saucepan and add the butter. Put this on a low heat and bring to the boil.

Now add all of the flour, salt, and sugar mix quickly to the boiling mixture. Take the pan off the heat and beat the flour mixture into the water and butter mix vigorously and as quickly as you can. The mixture should turn into a ball of dough. This normally takes around 2 minutes of beating. The dough should look like this:

Next, with the pan still off the heat, beat the eggs but in separate bowls. You should have four separate bowls with four separate beaten eggs. Now, add one of the eggs to the dough and stir in. To start with it will feel like the egg and the dough will not mix together and pan will look something like this:

After a minute or so the eggs and dough will come together and look like this:

Do this with each of the eggs remembering not to add the next egg until the previous one is fully mixed into the dough. The mixture is ready when it easily falls off the wooden spoon when tapped on the side of the pan.

3. Piping the profiteroles

Firstly, grease well a large baking tray. I tend to use butter and just use some of the butter wrapper to spread a light film of butter all over the base of the baking tray. Next, fix a 1 cm plain nozzle into a good quality silicon piping bag and add the choux pastry mix to the bag.

Now pipe swirls of 3-4 cm wide onto the tray. Remember that the choux buns will double in size when baked so make sure there is enough room between each bun so they don’t touch when baking.

If there are any peaks on any of the choux buns after piping just wet your finger and press then down.

Now place the tray into a pre-heated oven at 200C / 180C Fan and bake for around 20 minutes. They should be golden brown in colour when done.

4. Make the chocolate sauce

The chocolate sauce is very simple to make. Firstly pour the water into a saucepan and break the chocolate into small pieces and add to the water.

Now turn on a low heat and melt the chocolate into the water. Once melted at the sugar and the butter.

Now keep stirring until the butter has melted and the sugar has dissolved into the chocolate. There you have it. Chocolate sauce. Leave this to cool while you finish off the profiteroles.

5. Finish the profiteroles

By now the profiteroles should be just about done. As soon as they are out of the oven, take each one and pierce a small hole in the base of each profiterole bun. This is to release the steam from inside the bun. If you don’t do this then when the steam cools it will turn to water and make the profiterole soggy.

Next, whip the cream. Add a little vanilla essence if you like and then spoon the cream into the piping bag. Using the smallest plain nozzle you have pipe cream into each profiterole through the hole you made in the base.

Now simply serve the profiteroles in a large dish, or as single servings and pour the cooled chocolate sauce all over. There you have it. The finished, perfect profiteroles.

6. Top Tips

a) Sieving the flour, salt, and sugar

It is imperative that the flour has no lumps in it so don’t be afraid to sieve more than once if you are unsure.

b) Adding the flour

This is probably the most critical stage. You need to add the flour all at once and immediately beat all ingredients together hard. If not the batter will become lumpy and the pastry will be of poor quality.

c) Adding the eggs

Make sure the choux dough has cooled a little before adding the eggs. The eggs should mix in and make the dough a silky pastry. If you add the eggs to the mix when it is too hot the eggs will scramble and the pastry will be ruined.

d) Piping the choux buns

Leave enough space between the piped buns to allow for them to double in size when baking and not touch.

e) Pierce the base of each profiterole bun

As soon as the profiteroles are done and out of the oven pierce a small hole in the base of each bun. This will release the steam from the bun and stop the profiteroles from going soggy.

OK, that’s it my Foodie Friends. I hope you enjoyed this and your profiteroles turn out wonderfully. As usual, I’d love to hear any comments or questions so just use the comments section below. Also, let me know if there is anything specific you’d like me to cook next. I’m happy to take on any challenge ????.

Thanks for reading and until next time…Steve.