pâte à choux
- noun
- /ˌpæt ə ʃu/
- Specialized
:
masa choux
- Pâte à choux is a key ingredient in making pâte à choux éclairs filled with cream.
Examples
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To prepare a dessert for the party, she decided to bake pastries from pâte à choux.
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Choux buns are, as you may expect, pâte à choux puffs cut in half to make tiny buns.
Blog text (21) -
After mixing the ingredients, the chef piped the pâte à choux onto the baking tray.
Synonyms
1
1.0
A soft mixture of flour, fat, and water used as a base for pies and tarts
1
7.9
A light dough used to make desserts like éclairs and cream puffs
A smooth mixture of flour and eggs that rises into light hollow shells for sweet or savory fillings
A light dough used to make hollow pastry shells for fillings
How Light
Surface Forms
Morphology
pâte + à + choux
This is a French culinary borrowing whose parts literally mean 'dough (pâte) for (à) choux'; the overall sense (a light pastry dough used for éclairs and cream puffs) is compositionally related to those constituents. However, it relies on French grammar and specific culinary knowledge of what 'choux' denotes, so a B1 learner who only knows the literal words may not predict the specialized pastry sense without prior exposure.
Etymology
Pâte à choux comes from French and uses the words pâte ('dough') and choux ('cabbage'); bakers piped the dough into small round shapes that looked like little cabbages, so they called it 'cabbage paste'. That's why the name is used for the light dough that puffs up into hollow cases you can fill.