By now, most of you have probably heard about Beard Papa — and if you haven’t, let me explain: Beard Papa is a chain of pastry shops that basically specializes in cream puffs. That’s it.
Simple.
So what’s up with the name? Personally, I think “Beard Papa” sounds like the name of a pimp. But I digress.
Apparently, there is an explanation to the strange moniker – you can find that here, on the official Beard Papa webiste. It’s a flash animation, and it’s kind of cheesy, but..well, you can judge for yourself.
Okay, back to the story. I was out driving around Aiea with a friend of mine, and we passed by one of the Beard Papa stores — this one, attached to a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf coffee shop, near Don Quijote. We decided to stop in, and try some.
We bought three “regular” cream puffs, filled with a vanilla custard.
One of the unique things about this place is that they fill the cream puffs to order. That is, they bake the pastries, and then fill them when you order them; to keep it fresh, they say. So that you get the best product, they tell you. Sounds logical. Okay, I’ll buy that. So my friend orders and pays for them (thanks for treating!), and we watch as the guy behind the counter picks up the empty puffs, and attaches them to a cream pump. If you’ve ever seen those westerns where people pump water from a well, this device they use is similar to that. Except it pumps custard instead of well water.
We head on over to the Coffee Bean side to sit down, and we pull them out of the package. Each cream puff is individual wrapped in small paper pockets. The puffs themselves looked good. Golden brown pastry, lightly sprinkled with powdered sugar — firm to the touch, and quite aromatic. There’s something wholesome and cozy about the smell of fresh pastry.
Some cream puffs, like the ones at Costco for example, are more pastry than filling. Beard Papa’s is sort of the opposite of that. These were all about the filling. You bite into one of these things, you’re going right through the pastry, and into the good stuff. The custard was light, and creamy. Not too sweet, really. And it wasn’t so light as to be watery, but it wasn’t so heavy as to be a pudding. Very good.
The puff pastry itself was thin, it wasn’t what I would consider lightweight. It was crunchy on the outside, and flaky on the inside, but substantial enough to contain the custard, and offer up it’s own textures and flavors. Apparently it’s made up of Choux pastry, and a pie crust mix, which gives it the one-two combination of shell outside/flaky inside.
It did get a bit messy. There was lots of custard in each puff, but that’s a good thing. There’s nothing like buying a pastry and finding out you just got ripped off because there wasn’t enough filling. Not a problem here.
And Beard Papa offers a bunch of different kinds of fillings, including Chocolate, Caramel, Green Tea, Strawberry, and Coffee.
We didn’t get to try any of those, but that just gives us an excuse to go back and get some.
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