Gougeres (aka Cheese Puffs) @LucyBurdette

LUCY BURDETTE: This is another recipe from Dorie Greenspan, although I think the same directions can be found in many cookbooks, from Mastering the Art of French Cooking all the way to The Joy of Cooking. I remember my mother making these puffs for parties. She was a plain cook, but this was one of her fancy company dishes. She would stuff them with tuna fish or maybe shrimp salad and serve them as hors d’oeuvres. Hayley Snow's mother Janet also served puffs like this at a funeral reception in A DISH TO DIE FOR.

Mom with party food

There are so many ways to riff on this recipe, but I decided to make this simple for the first time. But they turned out so well that I will definitely be making again, probably leaving out the cheese so I can serve them as profiteroles (stuffed with ice cream and drizzled with hot fudge sauce.)

Dorie makes a double batch of these and freezes half of them before baking to have on hand for drop in visitors. She is a consummate entertainer!

Ingredients

1/2 cup whole milk

1/2 cup water

8 tablespoons unsalted butter

1/2 teaspoon fine salt

1 cup all purpose flour

Five large eggs, room temperature

1 1/2 cups a.k.a. 6 ounces coarsely grated cheese (Gruyere is traditional but cheddar or other cheese is fine too)

Preheat your oven to 425 and line 2 baking sheets with parchment.

In a medium pan, bring the milk water salt and butter to a rapid boil. Turn the heat down and add the flour all at once and stir vigorously for a few minutes. 

At this point, you can either move the batter to a KitchenAid mixer with a paddle attachment, or try using an old fashioned mixer, or mix by hand (as I did.) Add the eggs one at a time and beat well until each egg is incorporated into the dough. 

Beat in the grated cheese.

Scoop the dough into rounds on the prepared baking sheets. (A cookie scooper is perfect for this job.) You want about a tablespoon of dough for each puff, leaving 2 inches between the puffs so they can rise in the oven.

Slide the trays into the oven, turn the temperature down to 375. Bake for 12 minutes, then rotate the pans top to bottom and back to front. Bake for another 12 to 15 minutes until the puffs are golden.

Served hot or at room temperature and watch them leap off the plate!

A DISH TO DIE FOR, #12 in the Key West food critic mystery series, is now available wherever books are sold

About A Dish to Die For:

Peace and quiet are hard to find in bustling Key West, so Hayley Snow, food critic for Key Zest magazine, is taking the afternoon off for a tranquil lunch with a friend outside of town. As they are enjoying the wild beach and the lunch, she realizes that her husband Nathan’s dog, Ziggy, has disappeared. She follows his barking, to find him furiously digging at a shallow grave with a man’s body in it. Davis Jager, a local birdwatcher, identifies him as GG Garcia, a rabble-rousing Key West local and developer. Garcia was famous for over-development on the fragile Keys, womanizing, and refusing to follow city rules—so it’s no wonder he had a few enemies.

 When Davis is attacked in the parking lot of a local restaurant after talking to Hayley and her dear friend, the octogenarian Miss Gloria, Hayley is slowly but surely drawn into the case. Hayley’s mother, Janet, has been hired to cater GG’s memorial service reception at the local Woman’s Club, using recipes from their vintage Key West cookbook—and Hayley and Miss Gloria sign on to work with her, hoping to cook up some clues by observing the mourners.

But the real clues appear when Hayley begins to study the old cookbook, as whispers of old secrets come to life, dragging the past into the present—with murderous results.

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