Chouqeuttes

This is a Viennoiserie type of small bite-sized portion of choux pastry that is sprinkled with pearl sugar or can be covered with chocolate chips, and sometime filled it with custard, mousse or dipped into chocolate too. Chouqeuttes originate from Vienna  and the French took it to their home and shared it.  Sometime I topped it up with some cheese, make a savoury version, a bit naughty I fill the chouqeuttes with little thick cheese sauce as well and served as starter for my dinner party, my guests loved it and asked for more!

This is the pastry that agaist all the traditional pastry making rules. Hot crust pastry, one of those vey easy to make at home. You will be surprised when it turn out perfectly.

Here is a little story about this Viennoiserie, French for ‘Viennese specialties are baked goods made from a yeast leavened dough in a manner similar to bread, or from puff pastry, but with added ingredients (particularly eggs, butter, milk, cream and sugar) giving them a richer and/or sweeter character, approaching that of pastry. The dough is often laminated. Viennoiseries are typically eaten at breakfast or as snacks.

Examples include croissants, Vienna bread and its French version the baguette viennoise, brioches, pain au chocolat, pain au lait, pain aux raisins, chouquettes, Danish pastries, bugnes, and chausson aux pommes.

The popularity of Viennese-style baked goods in France began with the Viennese Bakery opened by August Zang in 1839. The first usage of a related expression appears to be in 1877: “pâtisseries viennoises” by A. DAUDET, Le Nabab, I, p.251.

Pâte à choux is a light pastry dough used to make profiteroles, croquembouches, eclairs, French crullers, beignets, St. Honoré cake, Indonesian kue sus, and gougères. It contains only butter, water, flour, and eggs. In lieu of a raising agent it employs high moisture content to create steam during cooking to puff the pastry.

Choux pastry is usually baked but for beignets it is fried. In Spain and Latin America churros are made of fried choux pastry, sugared and dipped in a thin chocolate blancmange for breakfast. In Austrian cuisine it is also boiled to make Marillenknödel, a sweet apricot dumpling; in that case it does not puff, but remains relatively dense. They are sometimes filled with cream and used to make cream puffs or eclairs.

A chef by the name of Panterelli invented the dough in 1540, seven years after he left Florence, along with Catherine de’ Medici and the entirety of her court. He used the dough to make a gâteau and named it Pâte à Panterelli. Over time, the recipe of the dough evolved, and the name changed to Pâte à Popelin, which was used to make Popelins, small cakes made in the shape of a woman’s breasts. Then, Avice, a pâtissier in the eighteenth century, created what were then called Choux Buns. The name of the dough changed to Pâte à Choux, as Avice’s buns resembled cabbages – choux in French. From there, Antoine Carême made modifications to the recipe, resulting in the recipe most commonly used now for profiteroles.