A coworker invited me to go to a cooking class at Whole Foods here in Austin. His wife was going and I invited my friend Gary. Well I'm not the most sophisticated cook...so I quickly discovered that I was way out of my league! We were making a meal and each couple was given one recipe to produce for the meal.
Gary and I were assigned profiteroles. I had never heard of them before and Gary was equally baffled. The recipe didn't even have a picture so I wasn't even really sure exactly what I was making. We were in a kitchen with about 6 or 8 professional quality stoves and one couple at each stove. My coworker and his wife were at a stove far away at the other side of the room. Our instructor gave us the recipe and told us where we could find the ingredients. Since this was Whole Foods, the ingredients were top quality.
However, the instructor did not tell us anything about using the stove or our cooking task. I was used to my stove at home, but this stove had controls that were quite complex and totally new to me. Gary kept looking to me for cooking expertise, and I tried my best to dredge up my best cooking judgement....but we ended up being a comedy of errors. After struggling for about an hour we were finally finished with our masterpieces.
Through some sort of miracle, the profiteroles turned out to be quite tasty. The other couples enjoyed theirs and the entire meal was wonderful. However, our struggles that evening will stay in my memory forever.
So you can imagine what went through my mind when I saw profiteroles on the menu. I had to try them. This probably makes me sound quite naive...like I never see profiteroles on menus...but usually when I eat at restaurants, the main course is so filling that I don't even pay attention to which desserts are on the menu. For some reason, on this lovely evening a few weeks before Christmas, I looked at the desserts and found the word profiteroles staring back at me from the menu.
Well as you can see from the picture above, the profiteroles were lovely! The choux pastry was filled with peppermint ice cream. I was in heaven with the peppermint titillating my tastebuds and the pastry providing my stomach with that wonderful feeling of fullness.
Just Hungry has a nice discussion on making choux pastry. This is not just the pastry used for profiteroles, but also for eclairs and beignets.
You can watch Le Gourmet make the pastry on YouTube. I found this very helpful after struggling through my first attempt at making profiteroles. Once the pastry is made, you can cut it in half and put a creme or sauce or ice cream between the halves.
Martha Stewart has a wonderful profiterole recipe with a raspberry filling.With just a small amount of effort you can easily make profiteroles with a variety of fillings.
Through profiteroles, I have found that seeing pictures and reading recipes before cooking helps me prepare unfamiliar recipes!
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