FOOD: Gnocchi Parisienne with roasted pumpkin and sage butter.
There’s no denying that I love the versatility of choux pastry. Once the technique is mastered it is the key to so many dishes.
First, there is the baked version, well known as the basis for cream puffs, eclairs, Paris-Brests and profiteroles. Add a little cheese to a basic choux pastry recipe and you can bake beautiful gougère.
Once you’ve had enough of baking choux pastry, you can heat up the deep fryer and start deep-frying it for a completely different result. What you have now is a beignet. As in all tangled webs of derivative techniques, you have at least one delightfully named specialty. My favourite in this group is a light, sugary, deep-fried puff of pastry poetically named pets de nonnes, or “nun’s farts”.
Then there is the third way of cooking choux pastry – poaching it. From this we get the lovely gnocchi Parisienne. It is the only version of choux pastry that’s cooked thrice, not twice. Once the choux base is made, it gets poached and cooled. It then can be reheated in several ways. This gives the dish the capacity to suit different seasons.
In this recipe I bake it with roasted pumpkin, moisten it with a brown sage butter and garnish it with parmesan curls. It is equally delicious if it is baked smothered in napoli and béchamel sauces.
Once the grey pall of winter has lifted and there are spring greens aplenty, it is gorgeous just tossed in a pan with peas, broad beans, asparagus tips, chervil, chives and a tiny hint of cream. And as spring gives way to summer, toss with cherry tomatoes, basil and tomatoes for a delicious warm-weather supper.
I think the basic technique of choux pastry is a prime example of why cooking never loses its shine for me. It reminds me of the continuous mirror images that fascinated me as a child, a constantly repeating effect. But with choux it is always tumbling and turning and becoming something slightly different
• but equally delicious.