A short field guide to the puff family
- Classic cream puff: a plain choux shell filled with whipped cream or pastry cream and dusted with powdered sugar. This is the version sold at many American bakeries and state fairs.
- Profiteroles: smaller puffs, often filled with ice cream and served with warm chocolate sauce at restaurants, or with pastry cream at bakeries.
- Craquelin choux: a puff baked with a thin disk of butter, sugar and flour on top, which cracks into a crisp, cookie-like shell. Japanese-style cream puff shops made this format widely popular in the US.
- Paris-Brest: a ring of choux filled with praline cream, created to honor a bicycle race between Paris and Brest.
- Saint-Honoré: a French cake of puff pastry, caramel-dipped cream puffs and piped cream.
- Zeppole di San Giuseppe: Italian choux pastries, fried or baked and filled with custard and a cherry, sold around St. Joseph's Day on March 19.
Fillings: whipped, custard or diplomat
The filling decides the character of a puff. Whipped cream is light and airy but only lasts a few hours before weeping. Crème pâtissière is rich and stable, flavored with vanilla, chocolate or coffee. Diplomat cream, pastry cream lightened with whipped cream, is what many people mean when they say a puff tastes perfect: creamy but not heavy. Japanese-style shops often fill with a soft custard-and-cream blend and offer seasonal flavors like matcha, ube, black sesame, strawberry and pumpkin.
A good shell should be crisp and dry, not eggy or doughy, and should feel heavy with filling. Many bakeries fill puffs to order for this reason.
Ordering a croquembouche
The croquembouche is a cone of cream puffs stuck together with caramel and wrapped in spun sugar, the traditional celebration cake in France for weddings, christenings and first communions. It is also increasingly popular at American weddings and holiday parties. Most bakeries need at least one to two weeks of notice, and the price depends on the number of puffs, often in the range of $2 to $4 per puff. Because caramel softens in humidity, a croquembouche is assembled the day of the event and should be served within a few hours.
Price and care
Single cream puffs usually cost about $2.50 to $6, and boxes of mini puffs are popular for dessert tables. Keep them refrigerated and eat whipped-cream puffs within a day; custard-filled puffs hold slightly better. Frozen unfilled shells can be recrisped in a hot oven for a few minutes. Japanese-style shops often bake shells in the morning and fill them at the counter as you order, which is why the craquelin top still crunches when you bite it. If you are buying for a party later in the day, ask whether the shop will pack the shells and filling separately.
