Nothing of Crying

I hope you’ll tune in to NPR’s All Things Considered tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day, to spend a little time with host, Michele Norris (in the background) and me as we make pate a choux in her wonderful Washington, DC kitchen and turn the dough into cream puffs and gougeres, my all-time favorite cheese puffs. 

If you miss the segment — you might just be having a turkey dinner when it airs — you can download the audio from the All Things Considered site after about 7 pm ET tomorrow.

As many of you know, I think of baking as magical, since what goes into the oven usually doesn???t give you even a slim hint of what will come out.  But among all the sweets that surprise me by their transformations, none seems as startling ??? or more magical ??? than cream puffs.  Make the dough, spoon small mounds of it on a baking sheet, slide it into the oven and sit glued to your oven window for a few minutes.  George Lucas couldn???t have created animation any more riveting than what you???ll see as the heat of your everyday oven causes the dough to puff and puff, grow round and, minute by minute, get lighter and lighter, until the puffs??? delicate shells are stretched to their limit, their custardy interiors are hollowed out and the balls look as though they???re light enough to lift off the sheet and go bouncing and bobbing around the oven.

Easy chocolate cream pie

Of course, if all they were was interesting, cream puffs would be nothing more than a lively science experiment.  What saves them is the indisputable fact that they???re delicious as well as fun to make, unusually versatile ??? they switch hit from both sides of the sweet-savory divide ??? and a classic in the French pastry canon.

Called pate a choux, or cabbage dough, a reference to the look of the puffs when they???re baked, the dough became celebrated when Marie-Antoine Careme, the early 19 th century chef who almost single-handedly created French pastry as we now know it, used it to make ??clairs, a treat that remains elegant to this day.

Scroll down for the recipes for basic cream puffs and gougeres, savory cheese puffs most closely associated with the Burgundy region of France, but beloved around the world and especially chez moi. 

If you’ve ever been to my house for drinks, th