Gougères by Casu Marzu

Recipe by: Casu Marzu Uploaded by Drimble Wedge

I've been meaning to try my hand at choux pastry, and I didn't feel much like anything sweet tonight. Instead, I found a recipe for gougères in Ratio, and decided to take a swing at it.

At its simplest, choux is just 2 parts water:1 part butter:1 part flour:2 parts egg.

Easy, right? I hope so.

This is what we get out of the above ratio (plus cheese):

• 8 ounces of water
• 4 ounces unsalted butter
• 4 ounces AP flour
• 8 ounces of eggs
• a bit of pepper
• a bit of nutmeg
• I used about 6 ounces of cheese. In this case, a mix of parm, 7yo cheddar, and some gruyere I needed to use up.

I strongly suggest having your mise en place right at hand ahead of time, since everything moves quite fast in this recipe.

The next couple steps were a flurry of activity, and I kinda forgot to take photos.

First, you melt the butter into the water, and let it come to a rolling boil. When the water/butter mix comes up to a boil, add the flour and mix like a fucking madman. MIX MIX MIX MIX MIX MIX OH GOD MIX, JESUS CHRIST MIX FASTER!!

Okay, now it should be a shiny, goopy, pasty dough that is forming around your spoon. Keep stirring and cooking the flour ball for another minute or so to cook the rawness out.

Dump the dough ball into a bowl and let cool for two minutes or so.

Add a bit of the egg and mix. It's gonna look a bit curdled, something like spaetzle at this point.

Keep mixing.

Keep mixing. It will come together sooner or later, as long as you keep at it. Repeat until all the egg has been added.

Add your cheese, pepper, and nutmeg.

Mix again.

Get a piping bag, a couple of spoons, or a small ice cream baller and toss onto a pan. It is preferable to use parchment under the gougères, but I just greased the pan with a bit of veg oil, which leads to a bit more browning on the bottoms. Not a big deal.

Toss the pan into a 450F oven for 10 minutes. Drop the temp to 350 for another 15-20 minutes, until the tops are nice and golden brown.

They should look like this. A handy tip is to poke the tip of a sharp knife into the sides of the gougères and leave em in the now shut off oven to help dry the middles out.

And there you have gougères.

The same ratio can be used to make profiteroles, doughnuts, all sorts of delicious things. :)