Profiteroles Au Chocolat

Profiteroles au chocolat are the dessert that built half the bistros in Paris. Crisp pâte à choux shells, hollow inside and golden on the outside, get split in half, stuffed with cold vanilla ice cream, then drowned under a ladle of warm chocolate sauce. The contrast of hot and cold, crisp and creamy, is what makes them feel like restaurant dessert magic.

The choux pastry itself is the technique to nail. Boiling the butter and water before dumping in the flour, then drying out the dough on the heat for a minute, is what creates the steam-driven puff in the oven. Adding the eggs one at a time and beating each in fully gives the dough its glossy, pipeable consistency. Bake hot, then leave them in the cooling oven with the door cracked so the insides dry out completely. A wet center collapses.

Make the shells in advance and freeze them. They thaw in minutes and crisp up beautifully in a hot oven, which means dinner-party dessert prep takes about as long as scooping ice cream.

Pro Tips

• Weigh the flour and butter if you can. Choux is one of those recipes where the wet-to-dry ratio matters and volume measures vary too much.
• The dough is ready when it pulls away from the sides of the pan in a single mass. Stop drying it out the moment that happens.
• Pipe even rounds with a piping bag and large round tip. Uneven sizes mean uneven baking.
• Don’t open the oven door during the first 30 minutes. A blast of cool air will collapse the rising puffs.

Variations

• Swap vanilla ice cream for coffee or hazelnut for a more grown-up flavor pairing with the chocolate.
• Drizzle with caramel sauce instead of chocolate for a profiterole sundae crossover.
• Fill with whipped cream or pastry cream for a non-frozen version closer to French cream puffs.