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Chouquette is a French pastry made with a simple dough of flour, butter, water, and eggs. It can be topped or filled with various ingredients and is often served as an afternoon snack. The cooking process is crucial for a good result, and traditional chouquettes are sprinkled with coarse sugar. It’s a staple in French pastry shops and bakeries and is usually sold in paper bags by weight. When served as a dessert, it can be filled with custard or mousse.
A chouquette is a traditional sweet French pastry that is often served as an afternoon snack. Made with a simple dough, a chouquette can be topped or filled with numerous ingredients. Regardless of the flavors used, the cooking process is considered to be the most important part of preparing this delicacy.
In France, dinner often occurs very late in the evening; the last meal of the day is rarely before eight and most restaurants don’t open until this time. Pastry shops and bakeries are often an exception and chouquettes are a staple in these types of establishments. They’re usually sold in paper bags, by weight, and are meant to pack one until dinnertime.
Chouquette is made from a very simple dough, known as choux, with just four ingredients: flour, butter, water and eggs. The steam created by the moisture in the dough is what causes a chouquette in the oven without yeast or other yeasts. Despite the amount of fat in the dough, this steam makes the finished product very light and airy while still being full of flavour.
Traditional chouquettes are usually made with baked choux chips sprinkled with very coarse sugar. In many cases, the chocolate chips can add dough in addition to the sugar. Coarse sugar is often considered essential for making a traditional chouquette; the French use a pearl sugar, which often looks like sprinkles or small disks, for snacking.
When this pastry is served as a dessert, it can be filled with a custard or mousse. The custard, made with milk, eggs and sugar, can be flavored with lemon or vanilla. The mousse, made with whipped cream and eggs, may have chocolate, sugar, or fruit added for flavor. The mousse or custard is usually pushed into the center of the choux before it is cooked, and the dough rises around the filling as it cooks.
Regardless of the flavors used in a chouquette, the cooking process is extremely important and can make the difference between a good pastry and a bad one. Because chouquette relies on steam to rise, it’s very easy to deflate when still hot. Therefore, most bakers recommend allowing the chouquettes to cool slowly in the oven, rather than removing them immediately after they are finished baking. Once the cooking time is up, the oven is turned off and the door is broken; this allows for a little more cooking time, thus helping to remove some of the flavor from the egg, allowing a chouquette to cool slowly and retain its texture and shape.
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