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A profiterole (), chou à la crème (), also known alternatively as a cream puff (US), is a filled French choux pastry ball with a typically sweet and moist filling of whipped cream, custard, pastry cream, or ice cream. The puffs may be embellished or left plain or garnished with Ganache, caramel, or a dusting of powdered sugar.
Savory profiterole are also made, filled with pureed meats, cheese, and so on. These were formerly common garnishes for soups.Prosper Montagné, Larousse Gastronomique, 1st edition, 1938, s.v. The various names may be associated with particular variants of filling or sauce in different places.
Filled and glazed with caramel, they are assembled into a type of pièce montée called , often served at in France and Italy, during the Christmas holiday in France, and are served during important celebrations in Gibraltar. Profiteroles are also used as the outer wall of a St. Honoré cake.
In the 17th century, profiteroles were small hollow bread rolls filled with a mixture of , truffles, artichoke bottoms, mushrooms, pieces of partridge, pheasant, or various poultry, accompanied by garnish. They could also be served in a soup.Société française d'étude du XVIIIe siècle (1995). 9782862720708, Université de Saint-Etienne. . ISBN 9782862720708
François Massialot in Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois (1698) gives several recipes for profiterole soup, with fillings of minced ham and poultry on a stew of mushrooms, asparagus, artichoke bottoms, rooster crests, sweetbreads, and truffles. The profiteroles are made of bread dough.
Joseph Menon in his Traité de cuisine (1732) and François Marin in Les Dons de Comus (1750) give other examples of savory recipes while keeping the same principle.
The profiteroles we know today, using choux pastry, were created in the 19th century.
Jules Gouffé in his Livre de cuisine (1870) explains that a profiterole is a small choux pastry. Gustave Garlin in Le Cuisinier moderne (1887) mentions profiteroles filled with cream and glazed with chocolate or coffee, worked to be smooth and shiny.
A widely-repeated legend claims that choux pastry, the key ingredient of profiteroles, was invented by the head chef to the court of Catherine de' Medici. But this is a 19th-century invention.Bienassis, Loïc; Campanini, Antonella (6 December 2022), Brioist, Pascal; Quellier, Florent (eds.), "La reine à la fourchette et autres histoires. Ce que la table française emprunta à l'Italie : analyse critique d'un mythe", La table de la Renaissance : Le mythe italien, Tables des hommes (in French), Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, pp. 29–88, , full text retrieved 5 October 2023.
The pastry cook's art of choux pastry began to develop around the 17th century. The patissier Jean Avice developed the pastry further in the middle of the 18th century and created choux buns, with the dough becoming known as 'pâte à choux', since only choux buns were made from it. In the 19th century, Antoine Carême developed the recipe used today.
The Wisconsin State Fair is known for its giant cream puffs.
In Hawaii, coco puffs (not to be confused with Cocoa Puffs) made by Liliha Bakery are a popular dessert. They are filled with chocolate Custard and topped with a frosting known as "chantilly" (similar to German chocolate cake sans coconut and nuts).
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