One of New York’s Most Surprising Desserts is a Baseball-Sized Cream Puff

Allow me, for a moment, to help you envision this dreamy cream puff. The first of its two fillings is a deeply roasty banana cream that tastes like if Laffy Taffy cost $100. The team at PDF turns whole roasted bananas into a thick puree by cooking the fruit down with a dry caramel and blitzing it in a food processor. “There’s not a lot of liquid, so the starch in the banana tightens it up,” explains Russell. With cream, eggs, and white chocolate, the puree becomes a custard (the fat in the chocolate helps the custard set, eliminating the need to use gelatin); when salted and folded into whipped cream, the custard becomes what’s known as creme diplomat.

Sour orange caramel (the second filling) and a crispy craquelin round out the pastry. The caramel is made with the surprisingly sour juice of Seville oranges, sourced from citrus farmers in California; in every PDF cream puff I’ve eaten (three, which may mean I need to relax), it has dripped delightfully onto the plate when I cut into the pastry. Craquelin is a “cookie” topper you may recognize from the likes of melon pan and conchas. In the oven, as the pastry puffs and expands, the craquelin round relaxes into a drape over the domed exterior, then bakes into a crisp, crackle-y finish.

When telling me about the cream puff on the phone recently, Russell said the word “comforting” more times than I could count. It’s true that it’s hard not to feel taken care of with big bites of choux pastry in your mouth, but I don’t think I would have made the jump from bananas—which strike me as utilitarian—to comfort food on my own. But the flavor has a personal history for Russell, one that explains his affection. 

“My mom loves to make bananas foster,” he said. “When I was a kid it was her favorite thing to do. She’d turn the lights off in the kitchen and make a big flambé. So whenever our family got together, we always had caramelized bananas on ice cream. It was a flavor that existed in my palette subconsciously before professional cooking, those dark notes of banana. As a cook, you tend to think about your cooking experience [when looking for inspiration]. But caramelized banana is a flavor that supersedes that for me.” For those of us lucky enough to nab a spot at PDF for dinner (and stay for dessert), that sentiment makes it to the plate.