Profiteroles are the perfect home dessert and guaranteed to please everyone, from small children to grown adults. And once you master the dough for profiteroles you can easily make several other classics like a feather-light beignet, gougères, and crispy potato puffs known as Pommes Dauphine.

This might start as a bad joke, but I promise it isn’t. I was making ‘Nun’s Farts’ yesterday, the more colorful name for feather-light deep-fried beignets, and was struck by how diverse the dough actually was. It got me thinking about the differences between how a chef and a home cook approach cooking. Chefs learn to multi-task many different preparations (mise en place) in order to be ready for service on any given day. Home cooks, while they may multi-task to get through their busy days, generally make one dish to feed their entire family. Most home cooks I have watched tend to make each dish from start to finish.