Tare that bitch (courtesy of Johnson)

Look at these suckers. Granted, that bottom right picture is a bit dark, but what they hey, it was 11 PM at night....

In case you couldn't tell what those are, those are choux pastries!! I made some cheesy puffs, a.k.a. gougères (try pronouncing that in a German accent, it's fun) awhile back for a couple of reasons. First, Pinky and I had scheduled a dinner at Fogo de Chao for Baltimore restaurant week, and my mind was pre-salivating in anticipation of eating those delicious Brazilian cheese puffs. Mmmmmm (and the meat, but also the cheese puffs). And two, I'd watched every episode of the oddly awkward American Baking Competition, in which final contestants were challenged to make choux towers. It looked pretty simple on the show....but I suppose there's a lot of room for error. Error don't scare me though.

Anyways, taking these two reasons into account, it seemed like there was finally a worthy project for me to slave over in the kitchen. Suspicions confirmed. Gougères aren't that difficult to make, but timing and precise measurements of ingredients are essential for the correct puff and texture. If you don't measure and put in the right ratio of flour to water, the pastries may be too dense. So pull out the scale and tare that bitch like no tomorrow. If you under-cook the pastries and pull them out before the timer rings, they'll fall flat and taste squishy inside....which is what I did with my first batch (woops). Conclusion, wait for the damn timer to go off instead of rushing the process. Also, don't peek in the oven or the hot air will rush out and they'll fall flat too. Last word of warning. You've got to pay attention to the salt content, because mine puffs turned out way too salty. I've adjusted for this in the recipe by instructing the use of unsalted butter. I also think the cheese I bought was on the saltier side, so salted butter really didn't help my case (double woops). Anyways...don't do those things. Yeah.

Bacon, Scallion, and Parmesan Gougères

makes about 15 medium sized puffs

125 ml water
40 grams of unsalted butter
70 g all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 big pinches of ground black pepper
2 large eggs, cracked and sitting in a bowl
1/2 C of parmesan cheese
2 stalks of scallion, chopped finely
baco-bits, or even better, real chopped bacon

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. The trick in this recipe is work quickly. It seriously only took me only 10 minutes to assemble everything, so make sure you have all your ingredients on hand.

Melt the butter, water, salt and pepper on the stove in a medium sized pot, until barely simmering. Turn the flame down to low, and dump in the flour, quickly stirring it all together until it comes into a sticky lump (it's okay if there is still dough sticking to the pot, totally fine). You can cook the dough a bit (or not), not sure it matters. Once in a sticky lump, take the pot off heat and let the dough cool until you can touch it with a finger without screaming in pain or pretending to be stoic in front of your boyfriend.

Have your wooden spoon or spatula on hand. Once the dough is cool enough, and working quickly, pour one egg into the dough and stir vigorously. Seriously, stir vigorously so that the egg doesn't cook. The dough will look broken and lumpy at first, but keep stirring quickly until it looks smooth again. Then add the second egg and stir it in vigorously again (same method). When finished, the dough should be sticky and smooth, almost batter like.

Add your scallions, bacon and preferred amount of cheese to the batter, erg, dough. Then using a ziplock or piping bag (which I don't have so hurrah for ziplocks), squeeze out your puff pastries in little circles onto a pan and top with whatever you'd like. Bake for 10 minutes at 425 then turn down to 375 and cook for another 20 minutes at least.

Remove from the oven and let sit for a bit (the ultimate test, will they deflate?). And that's it! I'm sure you could modify this recipe to sweet things or fill them, but pretty much, choux pastry is a great blank slate. You can make eclairs, sweet choux pastries, choux towers, and gougères. It's mostly a win-win, but I found that after eating two puffs, I didn't want anymore. I just wanted Brazilian cheese puffs!

Granted, these gougères totally did not satisfy my desire to eat pao de queijo. Gougères are French and not the same as their delicious Brazilian counterparts, in fact, if one were to do a side by side comparison of the two, they would find the flavors and textures to be entirely different. This is because pao de queijo consist of an entirely different kind of flour than gougères, more specifically, tapioca flour versus all-purpose flour....but I didn't have tapioca flour on hand. You do with what you can find in the pantry sometimes. Pao de queijo another day, I guess.