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.