Whole Grain Gougères

Hi Loyd,

Those are very tasty looking little gougere!

I'm sure you would have been fine without the baking powder though. Pate Chou is fairly reliable for puffing if the formula and particularly the procedure are followed. Adding the eggs slowly and incorporating them completely before adding the next one is the most important step as this is where the leavening comes in.  With gougere I find better results if the chou paste is a little stiff before you add the cheese, as the extra fat from the cheese makes the paste a bit slack. Also you don't want to have your paste any warmer than room temp, a bit lower is better, so that the cheese doesn't break/melt when you add it to the paste. I've found they come out a little higher and crisper done this way. As for a filling, the one I usually opt for (if available) either fresh crab or shrimp with or without a mayo type dressing and fresh herbs, but I wouldn't turn down duck liver pate either. Nice to see a post on Gougere, thanks!

Franko

Loyd,

Me thinks you eat very well at your house!  

These look scrumptious and so easy to do.  A nice bit size treat to pack along on a busy day....something my teenage daughter would like to munch on since she is always on the run now...

Janet

but they look like cheesy goodness.   I'm sure you could just eat those all by themselves.  -Varda

well I'd call them cream puffs, which is what my mother called them, of course with the addition of cheese one needs to change the name a bit I suppose.

The hardest part of the whole thing is adding the eggs one at a time and mixing until they are fully incorporated before adding the next. My shoulder aches for hours aftewards. But its so worth it.

She said to make sure they are crispy to prick each one with a paring knife as you take them off the cookie sheet, it lets the steam inside out, and they don't get moist again and sog! She made a cream to put in them, and filled them and served with strawberries, but you can use anything to fill them, I have a recipe for them made with smoked Gureyre cheese which I want to try. They really don't need to be filled, but any nice creamy filling would be good.

She varied the size too, putting a teaspoon of the paste on the sheet, or a tablespoon and cooking to suit, the larger sizes would be good for a more savoury filling I would say, with the sweet filled ones being small bites.

they looked lovely in the picture so I read the recipe and realized they were simply cream puffs with cheese added. The vent was from another article, although I do remember my mother stabbing hers, but she never gave me that direction when she gave me the recipe, so maybe it was something she did and didn't think to pass on. She just used a very thin bladed paring knife and sliced a slit in the top third and let them cool. Then she used the slit to fill them with the custard cream she made. Or in later years, the cream from the can that whips up as you spray and looks neat! She did enjoy that convenience.

Ingredients

Instructions: Note: these are essentially my mother’s cream puffs doubled and with the cheese added.

Preheat the oven to 375 ° F, line a baking sheet with parchment paper or spray it well with non-stick spray.

Place the water, butter and salt into a saucepan and bring it to the boil, then reduce the heat to moderate and add the flour all at once and beat until the mixture pulls away from the side of the pan.

Transfer the mixture known as pâte à choux to a bowl and beat in the eggs one at a time. If the batter is too stiff add another egg. (How you know its too stiff is beyond me, and I always did the eggs in the pot.)

Stir the Gruyère into the mix and drop by tablespoons about 1 inch apart onto the baking sheet. Bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown.

These would be delicious on their own, or split and filled with a savoury mixture such as the bacon and mushroom pie filling.

Mom’s recipe is half the size and is a lot of work, and she made them smaller dropping teaspoons of dough on the sheet and filled them with cream filling or whipped cream.  It made about 3 or 4 doz from the half sized recipe.

This was in a Canadian Living magazine a couple years ago, and I will add mom's recipe as she cooked it differently.

Note: mom only used large eggs for anything, and felt small or medium to be a waste of money.

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 425 ° F.

Add the butter and salt to the boiling water in a saucepan; bring back to the boil. Add the flour all at once, stir vigorously with a wooden spoon (to keep from scratching the enamel) until the mixture forms a stiff ball. Keep pan on the heat til it reaches the ball stage. Remove from the heat and add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition until the mixture is stiff and breaks from spoon. When cool, drop mixture from tablespoon onto lightly buttered or non-stick sprayed sheet. Bake in hot oven 425° F oven for 15 minutes reduce the heat to 375° F and bake for 25 minutes more. Split the cooled puffs, and fill with whipped cream or vanilla sauce, for small puff and if you make them bigger by dropping larger amounts on the sheet, fill with creamed meat or vegetable.

Mom never filled them with the meat mixture, but you could use any of my fillings for the appetizer tarts, except the cheese one, unless you wanted to use it anyway. It just wouldn’t be smoothly filled from baking.

She started hotter and lowered the temp, you can put lots on a cookies sheet as they don't puff outward much, leave around an inch between them, and they will bake up well. These are nice with a cream filling (vanilla Bavarian type filling) and a strawberry placed into the slit. Golden delcious crispy bite with creamy filling and strawberries, she also use whipped cream, and loved the stuff from the store that came in the can and had a nozzle they worked great to fill the puffs.