Gougères for Book Club Dinner

Parmesan Cheese Gougères

This week our book club got together for the final meeting of the year. We went to a friend's house and she said beforehand that she wanted to make dessert.  I usually bring dessert, so I decided to find an appetizer I could bake. Not sure how, but I thought of Gougères. I'm glad I did!  They're a favorite of my sister's so maybe I was channeling her. 

The Gougères recipe is very simple: Pâte à Choux with added cheese, piped into small rounds and baked. But it's also very exacting!  I've made Pâte à Choux many times before, using Sally's Bake Blog's recipe. Here is that recipe.

But I couldn't find the gougères recipe I've used before in my baking binder, so I started taking a look at other websites. I decided to combine Brown Eyed Baker's recipe and King Arthur Baking's recipe, using Parmesan cheese since that's what I had at hand.  But when I started cooking the dough, it wasn't coming together into a ball as described in these recipes.  I started getting confused about how long to cook it for, how to stir it, etc.  I felt like things weren't very clear.  

I decided to look further and was delighted to find this video by Helen Rennie of helenrennie.com that provides a much more detailed explanation of how to make pâte à choux.  Thorough, in depth and precise for great results!  Based on this experience and on what I learned from Helen Rennie I ended up writing my own recipe.  Here it is:

Cheese Gougères / Pâte à Choux

120g milk

120g water

3/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp black pepper

1 stick butter, cut into 8 pieces

142 grams bread flour

230 grams eggs (4-5 eggs) 

4-6 oz cheese (a dry cheese like Swiss, Gouda, Parmesan, Emmental, or even Cheddar)

Combine milk, water, salt, pepper and butter and bring to a full boil over medium heat.

Remove pot from heat and add the flour all at once. Stir to combine. 

Place the flour mixture back on the stove and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes. There should be enough heat that after 1 minute you hear a slight sizzling noise, but not so much that you start to see browning at the edges of the pot.  Actively move the dough, smashing against the bottom of the pot, moving it in the pot, and flipping it over. The purpose is to remove as much moisture as possible so that you can add as much egg as possible in order to get the most "lift" in the pastry.

After 5 minutes of cooking, remove from heat and place the dough in the bowl of a stand mixer.  Wait 5-10 minutes, until the dough cools down and registers below 215F on an instant-read thermometer. Every so often while it cools, mix for a few seconds using the paddle attachment.

Add eggs, one at a time, while mixing on low. After each egg addition, mix on medium for 30 seconds, then add the next egg. Make sure each egg is incorporated before adding additional egg.  Use 4 eggs minimum and as much as possible up to the 230 grams. Add the cheese and mix until the dough looks smooth, shiny and "pipeable". Ideally it should drop down from the paddle in a "V" shape, but that may not happen because of the cheese. 

Line 2 baking sheets with parchment and lightly brush with water to create steam, which will help the gougères rise. Preheat oven to 425F.

Using a piping bag fitted with a 1/2 tip, pipe mounds of dough up to 1.5 inches in diameter.  Leave 2" in between the gougères. If the gougères come to a point and you don't like that, use a wet finger to smooth down the top.  You can use egg wash or not, sprinkle grated cheese on top or not.

Bake for 10(15) minutes at 425F then, leaving the gougères in the oven, lower the temperature to 350F. Bake for an additional 15-20 minutes, watching the gougères through the oven door.  They should be a deep golden color all over.  The additional baking time at the higher temperature, and the variable baking time at the lower temperature, are based on the size of the gougères and on other factors such as the oven, humidity, etc. Do NOT open the oven door at all during the baking time!

Cool 5 minutes and serve.

In order to get 230 g of eggs, I actually ended up using 5 large eggs. I whipped them up with a fork in a measuring cup, and tried to use math to portion out how much egg to add at a time. But as often happens when I try to apply math, things didn't work out. I added the amount that I had calculated was one egg, then saw that the measuring cup containing the egg mixture was now half empty! This made me flustered, and I forgot to increase the mixing speed to medium after incorporating that egg, and each subsequent egg addition.  Perhaps because of this, I ended up having a lot of leftover egg, almost an entire egg's worth.  I knew it was time to stop because the mixture was starting to look like fatty chunks.  I then threw in the cheese and mixed and put it in a piping bag.  

I got about 45 small gougères piping about an inch-wide circle with a domed top. I couldn't get any pictures of the process, because this was all done at the last minute after messing up the first batch of dough, which I ended up getting rid of and starting over.  I had one more sheet of gougères to bake when the time came to leave the house. I lowered the oven temperature to 350F and asked R to let them bake for a half hour and then take them out.  He did so and I tried them the next day. I could immediately tell the difference between that batch, and the previous batches that had baked at 425F for 10 minutes. Those were definitely lighter and fluffier.  I don't think the snafu with adding the eggs affected these gougères so much so that anyone would find fault with them. 

With both batches I personally thought there was too much cheese in each bite. Maybe if using a milder cheese like Swiss or Emmental 6 oz would be a good amount, but when I make them again I pan to use 5 or maybe even 4 oz of cheese per batch of choux pastry.  I think that would yield gougères with a more balanced taste.  Aside from that the balance of salt and pepper was very good, and using bread flour, as Helen Rennie suggests, is a vast improvement over pâte à choux with all-purpose flour.  Some recipes call for using an egg wash, but I don't like that idea for me at this point because the color from the egg wash might prevent me from knowing when they are done.  Many recipes also suggest sprinkling grated cheese on the gougères after piping them. I don't like that idea though. I think the cheese would burn at the high starting temperature, and I just don't think they need more cheese.

The gougères I was taking to the book club dinner barely had time to cool before I had to put them in a medium Pyrex container and get going. I was worried they would get mushy from steam but that didn't happen, maybe because the car was cold, or maybe from the bread flour.  When I got there everyone was excited to see these hors d'oeuvres and everyone tried them.  My friends liked them and whatever was left over after dinner people were happy to take home.  That made me very happy!

Our book club had a wonderful evening. The book we were discussing was Petit Pays, by Gael Faye. I truly enjoyed this book, more than many of the books we've recently read. And dinner was wonderful. Here is what we ate: 

Appetizers; Cheese and crackers, Gougères, Goat cheese Mini Tarts with Beets and Guacamole Topping.

Dinner: Hachis Parmentier, Greens and Beet salad, Roasted Vegetables.

Dessert: Parfaits au Grand Marnier (a kind of ice cream in a ramekin) and Chocolate Truffles

And a variety of wines. I had two glasses of rosé, not supposed to but also not sorry!

It was a great evening, a great baking learning experience and I'll definitely make gougères again soon, maybe over the holidays.