Chicken Profiteroles

Homemade profiteroles with a chicken filling can be made in several parallel stages. Since chicken fillet needs time to cook and cool, start with the filling. You can use not only fillet but also dark meat, thighs and drumsticks, or take all the meat off a whole boiled chicken. My daughter and I decided to boil only the fillet.

Pour 1.5-2 l of cold water into a pot. Add a pinch of salt, just a little. I recommend adding 2-3 bay leaves, a few black peppercorns and allspice berries, and a clove or two. Put the fillet in the water and set the pot on the heat. Simmer the chicken over low heat for an hour, which is enough to make the meat tender. Don’t pour off all the broth. Keep 1-2 cups. You will need it to make the filling juicy and moist.

Peel a couple of onions and chop them finely. Heat vegetable oil in a frying pan and fry the onion in it. To keep the onion sweet through the caramelization of its sugars, don’t rush the frying. When fried slowly, the pieces of onion gradually lose moisture, turn a pleasant golden color and become very tasty. This gives the profiteroles a lovely aroma, since chicken goes wonderfully with well-browned onion.

While the chicken for the filling is cooking, let’s make the choux dough. It’s easy if you have all the ingredients. Unlike dough for éclairs, this one is made with water only, with no milk. Pour 0.5 l of water into a pot and add 100 g of real butter. Heat the water until the butter melts. Add a pinch of salt. Heat until it just begins to boil.

Reduce the heat to the minimum. Next, add the sifted flour. Stirring the mixture with a mixer or a spatula, pour in the flour, breaking up any lumps. This is the “scalding” of the dough, the process that gave it its name. Take the pot off the heat and keep stirring so the dough becomes as smooth and glossy as possible. A few small lumps don’t matter. They will stay anyway and won’t affect the quality of the finished profiteroles.

The eggs must be mixed into the choux dough. This is an important step that calls for care and attention. It’s very hard to say in advance how many eggs you will need. For this amount of dough we usually use 5-6 eggs. Stir the dough until it cools down a little, otherwise the eggs will curdle. Then, without stopping stirring, add the eggs one at a time. Add the rest of the eggs in turn until the dough becomes glossy and stops sticking. Mix until completely smooth. It will be dense and a little stretchy, not sticky at all.

Profiteroles for soup are traditionally the size of a walnut, or a little bigger. It’s easy to shape the balls with two spoons. Scoop up the amount of dough you need with one spoon and smooth the surface with the other, forming a round lump. There is absolutely no point in aiming for geometric precision.

Carefully slide each ball of dough from the spoon onto a baking sheet. You don’t need to grease it or line it with paper, but if you like, brush it with a drop of vegetable oil. The lumps of dough don’t need to be smooth, they can be a little ragged. Heat the oven to 210-220°C. Bake the profiteroles for 15-20 mins, going by the color of the dough. As soon as they start to turn golden, take them out.

While baking, the choux balls expand because of the steam and air heated inside them, and their surface smooths out. Large hollows form inside, which are easy to fill with puree or stuffing. Note that the baked balls can sink as they cool and lose their shape, so don’t put off filling them.

While the baked shells cool, make the filling. Put the boiled chicken fillet through a meat grinder twice. Add the cooled fried onion to the bowl with the meat. Salt the mixture and pepper it well. Chicken fillet filling tends to be a little dry, so add some of the chicken broth left from cooking the fillet. Don’t add too much liquid, or the filling will make the dough completely soggy.

All that’s left is to fill the choux balls with the chicken stuffing. You can do this with a piping bag or an ordinary plastic bag. Put some of the filling in the bag. Make a small hole in a baked choux ball and squeeze the filling into it. The amount of stuffing in each ball can vary, but fill them generously and tightly, because it tastes better.

To keep the dough from getting soggy, fill the profiteroles right before serving. Then the balls will be slightly crisp. Although, as it turned out, they are perfectly edible even the next day. To serve, put 2-3 washed and dried lettuce leaves in a small bowl. Place the chicken-filled homemade profiteroles on top. Sprinkle with finely chopped herbs or green onion.

If you like, the filling can be made dry, which keeps the dough crisp for longer. You can also fill them with meat or mushrooms, or with mashed potatoes (very tasty), or with liver pâtés , or game pâtés. Serve as a standalone appetizer or as an alternative to bread with first courses.