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Passover profiteroles with strawberries

Time50 minutes
YieldsMakes about 2 dozen profiteroles
Passover profiteroles with strawberries
(Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times)
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When I was in high school in a suburb of Washington, D.C., my friend Debbie Weisz gave me a recipe for Passover rolls that she’d written on a three-by-five card. My mother and I were intrigued by the idea of rolls for Passover, and so we made them together. These rolls became part of our family’s Passover recipe repertoire.

The dough for these Passover rolls is fast and easy to make. It’s a cooked dough made by mixing matzo meal or the more finely ground matzo cake meal into a nearly boiling mixture of water, butter and salt, and then cooking it briefly. Last eggs are beaten into the dough off the heat.

That recipe card traveled with me when I moved to Jerusalem, and then to Paris, where I realized during lessons at the Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne cooking school that the dough for our Passover rolls was similar to pâte à choux – the dough used to make cream puffs and éclairs. The only difference was that our Passover dough was made with matzo meal instead of flour, which is forbidden during Passover.

Once I understood that this was a variation of the classic dough, I began to use it to make French pastries for Passover. I prepared Passover cream puffs and filled them with whipped cream, pastry cream, or mousseline cream — pastry cream enriched with butter. Sometimes I drizzled the filled puffs with chocolate sauce to make profiteroles.

Usually pastry cream is made with flour or cornstarch, but since many avoid both during Passover, we thicken our pastry cream with potato starch. Cream puffs filled with coffee walnut mousseline cream, then topped with honey and walnuts have become Passover favorites of ours.

For a Passover appetizer, we prepare savory choux pastry by beating cubes of flavorful cheese into the dough to make gougères, another French specialty. Gougères are delicious filled with a mixture of sautéed mushrooms and leeks or with ratatouille, but you could instead fill these cheese puffs with popular American sandwich fillings like egg salad or tuna salad.

And for a Passover brunch, you might like to fill plain puffs with that ever-popular Jewish American combination — lox and cream cheese.

Faye Levy is the author of five books on Jewish cooking, including “1,000 Jewish Recipes” and “Jewish Cooking for Dummies.”

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Chocolate sauce

1

To make the chocolate sauce, in a small, heavy saucepan, combine the chocolate and water over low heat, stirring often, until the chocolate is melted and smooth, about 3 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in the butter and vanilla. This makes 1 cup chocolate sauce, which will keep, covered and refrigerated, for 3 to 5 days. Rewarm before using.

Chantilly cream

1

In a large chilled bowl, whip the cream with the sugar and vanilla at medium-high speed until stiff. Refrigerate the whipped cream until ready to use, or up to 30 minutes.

1

Cut the strawberries in thick slices lengthwise; you will have about 4 cups. Put them in a large shallow bowl and sprinkle them with sugar. Mix gently. Refrigerate them until ready to use, up to 30 minutes.

2

Using a serrated knife, carefully cut off the top half of each puff and reserve this part as a “hat.”

3

Fill the puffs: Using a pastry bag fitted with a large star tip, pipe the whipped cream generously onto the bottom of each puff, allowing the cream to show at the sides. Top with a layer of strawberries, allowing the berries to extend slightly over the edges. Pipe another layer of whipped cream over the berries. Set the pastry hats on top.

4

Drizzle the tops of the profiteroles with chocolate sauce. If the sauce becomes too thick to drizzle, reheat it over low heat, stirring, until it becomes more fluid.

5

Garnish each chocolate-drizzled puff with a pinch of minced pistachios.

To make the profiteroles pareve, use nondairy whipping cream in the filling and margarine in the chocolate sauce. If you cannot find kosher for Passover vanilla extract, vanilla sugar can be substituted.