Gougeres Two Ways

So this is going to be an oddity of a blog entry. I’m showing pictures of one version of gougeres, but I’m going to recommend a non-depicted recipe that I made two days before. Both were done in a bit of a rush – one for a friend’s birthday party, and one for a French-themed dinner with some other friends. I only had a moment to photograph the second batch of gougeres, but I thought the first one was better.

Gougeres, if you aren’t familiar with them, are a pate a choux-based French cheese pastry. They taste rather like the most decadent cheese bread rolls imaginable. Pate a choux is the same pastry used to make éclairs and chouquettes. It’s quite the versatile combination of flour, water, eggs, and butter.

Both versions of gougeres were plenty tasty. The main difference is that version #2 deflated slightly after I took them out of the oven, whereas version #1 stayed fat, puffy, and round even after being hastily stuffed, still a touch warm, into a paper bag and thrown in the passenger seat of my car.

I’m all about fancy presentation like that.

I’m only giving one set of preparation instructions because the way you make them is the same in both cases. The only difference is in the ingredients list.

Neither gougeres counts as culinary “fail,” and I was not at all ashamed to serve gougeres #2. I’m just going to go with version #1 in the future because they achieved a greater stage of perfection.

Version #1 was based on my chouquette recipe. Version #2 was lightly adapted from this Jacque Pepin recipe.

Gougeres:

Ingredients for Gougeres #1 (my favorite)

1 cup water
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into chunks
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup flour
4 eggs
dash cayenne pepper (optional)
1 ½ cups coarsely grated gruyere cheese

Ingredients for Gougeres #2 (depicted, also good but with deflationary tendencies)
1 cup milk
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into chunks
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup flour
4 eggs
dash cayenne pepper (optional)
1 ½ cups coarsely grated gruyere cheese

Preheat oven to 400. Bring your chosen liquid, salt, and butter to boil. Stir flour rapidly into water and mix until the flour pulls away from the sides of the pan. I turn the burner to low and leave it on until the dough pulls away, but some recipes don’t include that step.

Let the dough cool slightly, about five minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, stirring after each addition until incorporated. The dough will look really ropey at first, but vigorous stirring will bring everything together.

Stir in the gruyere.

Use either a pastry bag, a Ziploc bag with a hole cut into its corner, a spoon, or (confession: this is what I did) your hands to drop 1-2” blobs of dough onto an exopat or parchment paper-lined baking sheet.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until puffy and lightly browned. Pull from oven and prick each gougere with a toothpick to let the steam out. Turn the oven off, but return the gougeres to the oven, with the door propped open, for another few minutes. This will help prevent the middles from becoming gooey.

Makes about 2 dozen either way, although it really depends on the size of your globs of dough. The good news is that even if you’re inconsistent like me, they all seem to bake at about the same rate.

Printable recipe here.