Le Petit Chou – Indulgent Pastries

Le Petit Chou – Introduction

Le Petit Chou is a welcome addition to the Launceston coffee and pastries scene.

Petit Chou is a pleasant venue and a nice place to sit while enjoying a professionally made pastry (by a Frenchman) and a very good coffee.

You can order from the blackboard menus or you can peruse the pastries in the display cabinets and simply point to the one you would like to try.

The chef specialises choux pastries including chouquettes filled with a custard mixture and usually covered in an icing of some variety. These chouquettes require a lot of work. First, is making and baking the choux pastry which requires a deft touch. Then there is the custard for inside and the toppings which make them look attractive.

Just to explain how complex some of the additions are, one of the chouquettes on display the day we were there was a hazelnut-based choux pastry. This one had hazelnut diplomat crème which is comprised of a pastry cream, gelatin and whipped cream combined and topped with praline.

There was also a white chocolate and strawberry version as well as coconut and lime as well as a number of others, including various eclairs to continue the choux pastry theme.

There were also a number of savoury choux pastries in the form of gougère (which we love making) presented in a variety of ways. There were also savoury croissants and rich, black forest cakes.

According to their Web site one of the owners, Noémie, comes from Rodez in central France (where we once enjoyed a lunch at the museum in a restaurant run by the famous Michel Bras). The other owner and pastry chef is Prosper who comes from the West Coast near Bordeaux (where we are heading to on our trip to France this year).

Now we need to talk about the coffee. To accompany these delightful pastries there are some good coffee options. They source their beans from Lottie Lane in Hobart which is a very good roaster of beans as they do not over roast, but rather favour a medium roast which allows the desirable flavours in the beans to shine through.

We enjoyed the Petit Chou espresso (for the caffeine hit) and a follow-up filter coffee (long black) here. Both were very good.

We are looking forward to a return visit.

We have also included this venue in our story about the vibrant coffee scene in Tasmania here.

You can see some better photos of the pastries on their Web site here.