Enjoy a cream-filled pastry on National Cream Puff Day! Dessert and pastry lovers alike get to celebrate this delicious French creation on January 2.
- Originating in France, cream puffs are also known as profiterole and choux a la creme.
- Borrowed from the French, the word “profiterole” has existed in English since 1604. The “cream puff” has been found on United States restaurant menus since around 1851.
- The original meaning in both English and French is unclear, but later it came to mean a kind of roll “baked under the ashes”.
- They originated in the 1540’s when Catherine de Medici’s pastry chef created the baked puffed shells for Catherine’s husband, Henry II of France. Although both the pastry and its name profiterole initially came from France, profiteroles are one of the main national dishes in Gibraltar.
- The record for world’s largest cream puff, weighed 125.5 pounds. It was created August 11, 2011 at the Wisconsin State Fair by Dave Schmidt and Team Cream Puff.
- The Wisconsin State Fair is known for its dairy bakery that has been producing cream puffs during the fair since 1924.
- Charlie Kremer was the association’s first president in 1922, and the original cream puff recipe came out of his family’s bakery, Cramer’s Bakery, on Milwaukee’s South Side.
- The formula of making those delicious cream puffs hasn’t changed much in 95 years of it’s usage.
- The largest serving of profiteroles is 243 kg (535.737 lb) and was achieved by Carnevale Airolese (Switzerland), in Airolo, Switzerland, on 7 March 2019. A team of 21 people prepared the largest serving of profiteroles in about 2 hours and 15 minutes.
- According to some cookbooks, a chef by the name of Pantarelli or Pantanelli invented the dough for profiterole in 1540, seven years after he left Florence with Catherine de’ Medici and her court. He used the dough to make a gâteau and named it pâte à Pantanelli.
- From there, Antoine Carême made modifications to the recipe, resulting in the recipe most commonly used now for profiteroles.
- Cream puffs are not always as sweet as the names alludes. Choux pastry with savory fillings inside are not unheard of.
- In the thirteenth century, before the cream puff is believed to have been introduced, chefs in France and southern Germany were already baking puff pastries filled with mixtures of different cheeses
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