Cheese Puffs (Gougères)

 These marvelous little treats are much simpler than they look, and would be equally at home on a party appetizer table or with a simple dinner of soup! 

They were originally a wheat-flour recipe, so that would work fine; I used Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free 1 to 1 Baking Flour, and that worked just fine too.

One thing you are going to want to do is have everything measured out - grate your cheese, measure your flour - have everything measured out in little bowls before you start heating anything on the stove. Everything goes together QUICK, and you don’t want to lose too much water to evaporation, once you start.

My recipe said you could play around with this a bit - try other hard cheeses in place of the Gruyere, try other spices as add-in’s, that sort of thing - but I haven’t done any of that yet! Let me know if you do, and I’ll go back and edit them in, if they turn out well for you. 

COMING BACK FOR EDITS: I made a double batch with aged white cheddar, some garlic powder, and a few shakes of parsley. They were MARVELOUS! 

Cheese Puffs

• Ingredients

• 1/2 cup 

  water

• 4 Tbsp. 

  butter

• 1/2 tsp. 

  salt (I used regular table salt so I could measure exactly)

• 1/2 tsp. 

  granulated sugar 

• 1/2 cup 

  all-purpose flour

• 2 

  large eggs

• 1/2 cup 

  freshly grated Gruyère

• 
  

Preheat oven to 400° and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

• 1. In a medium saucepan, combine water, butter, salt, and sugar, and bring to a boil. Add the flour all at once and stir with a wooden spoon until a smooth dough forms. Continue to cook until dough pulls away from the pan and forms a ball, and a film develops on the bottom of the pot, about 2 minutes.
  2. Transfer dough to a bowl and continue to mix with a wooden spoon to cool slightly, 1 minute. Beat in eggs, one at a time, mixing until smooth and fully incorporated after each addition. (You’re supposed to stop mixing once the dough is thick enough that it falls slowly when lifted with a spoon. That never happened for me.) Fold in Gruyere.
  3. Use a small (2 teaspoon capacity) cookie scoop to create small, inch-wide mounds on prepared baking sheet, about an inch apart. (I needed some pan spray on my fingers and the cookie scoop for this.) Top with more gruyere and bake until puffed and golden, 20 to 25 minutes.

Yield: 15 cheese puffs, about 60 calories each