Results - Gougères

Gougères are French for yum!* I thought I would do the smart thing and only make a half serve of the recipe. You know, there’s only Daz and I and I don’t want to be tempted with too many cheesy puffs lying around the house. I know that’s a common problem people could face, so I don’t want to subject myself to it. With these delicious puffy, cheesy clouds of joy Daz and I set a new record. They were all eaten before I even finished taking photos of them. Thats really impressive!! And then came the wave of sadness...no more cheese puffs to snack on.


This has got to be the easiest top 100 recipe I’ve tried so far. It seriously couldn’t be similar, prepare your ingredients, add them together in the assigned order, bake and eat. And yet I still managed to stuff it up!!


The recipe calls for diced gruyere, so that’s what I did. But when I added it to the hot flour/butter/egg mixture the cubes of cheese weren’t melting like I had expected them to. Did I cut them too big? Did I fiddle and fumble too long and my mixture was now too cold for the cheese to melt? The recipe said nothing about chunky pieces of cheese in it. So I thought I would stir the mixture a little more. Still no difference. Ok, I’ll just spoon them onto the tray, cross my fingers and hope they’ll rise.....and thats what they did. But even better than that, the chunky pieces of cheese melted and then went all crispy and caramelised so in every gougère you would have a lovely big pieces of chruncy cheese...oh I’m in heaven. I totally understand now why Jacques said “Don't use other types of cheese or you won't get the right result”, its well worth the result. But I think my over mixing prevented my puffs from “cracking” like Jacques. A small price to pay, but I wont be making that mistake again!


My other issue was that the puffs took alot longer than 25 minutes to cook. More like 35 minutes, in the end I took them out because I was frustrated by the wafting smell of cheese throughout my house making me extremely hungry, so they weren’t quite as dark as I would have liked. But that had absolutely no impact on the deliciousness of them!

What I really love about this recipe is....no piping bag!!!! Usually with choux pastry you have to pull out the old bag and leave half of the mixture stuck to the side of your implement. Not in this case, all you need is a trusty spoon......oh oh....which means there are much more finger licking opportunities! Bonus score!


Now I’m really looking forward to the next challenge of my three course Jacques Reymond meal. By the way I’m glad I’m having other meals in between the courses, that way there’s no chance of me starving, considering I’m only cooking one course every couple of days.


I’m definitely going to be making these again, although next time I’m going to fill them with crab!!!

*Not actually French for yum.....that's petit miam!