FFwD - Gougeres

Welcome to the very first of French Fridays with Dorie (or FFwD)! Thanks to Laurie for setting up this new group. You can find out more about FFwD (and join yourself!) here. We will be cooking from Dorie's new book, Around My French Table.


This month, Dorie herself has chosen the recipes. First up, she logically chose the first recipe in the book - gougeres, or cheese puffs. Gougeres are a savoury choux pastry, similar to profiterole dough. Because it is an authentic French cheese, I used Gruyere in my cheese puffs. It was certainly on the pricey side, but at least I can say that I have tried it. I also flavoured half of my gougeres with pink peppercorns, because I saw this done on another blog, and I had had unused pink peppercorns in the cupboard for ages. I liked the addition of the peppercorns - the pepper and the cheese went well together, and had a bit more zing.


Unfortunately, my gougeres weren't particularly puffy. I put this down to two things - first, after the addition of five eggs, I had a very sloppy dough that couldn't be spooned out, so I added extra flour; second, my oven tends not to be as hot as it should be, as I found that when I baked the second batch at a higher temperature (ie without turning the oven down from 425F or gas mark 7), they puffed much better.


Regardless, the end result tasted delicious - although my gougeres were fairly flat, they were like pleasant cheese biscuits, and they quickly disappeared at work.


To check out how the other members of FFwD went with their gougeres, check out the FFwD blogroll.