Recipe of french gougères

kitchenbrocante
Apr 15, 2023
3 min read

Updated: Sep 25, 2024

The small gougères are one of my favorite homemade appetizers, plus you can easily freeze them (the raw dough) to have them on hand in no time freshly out of the oven.

"This Burgundy specialty has an authentic charm and appeals to everyone with its little cheese taste. The gougères go well with all the aperitifs from red wine to champagne, including the Spritz and the Americano !"

I share my recipe with you here with a few tips to succeed every time and save time.

It is simply a choux pastry with cheese, I recommend you to prepare it with the hard cheese of your region, it works very well with gruyère, comté, emmental, beaufort, cheddar, etc ...

Especially do not add salt to the preparation because the cheese already contains a lot!

I recommend you make a large quantity and freeze some of it in the form of small raw balls. Once frozen and hard, you can gather them in an airtight bag in the freezer. You only have to cook them directly frozen in the hot oven and they will be even more beautiful, because it is the thermal shock that allows the dough to swell in the oven.

Recipe of gougères :

- 200 gr milk

- 200 gr water

- 100 gr butter

- 200 gr flour

- 6 eggs

- 200 gr grated cheese

- black pepper

- nutmeg

In a saucepan, bring the milk, water, and butter to a boil. Add the flour out of the heat and mix well. Once the flour is well integrated, return to low heat without stopping to stir with a spatula, until the dough forms a uniform ball that does not stick to the pot (about 3 min).

For the next step, if you’re lucky enough to have a blender (as kitchen Aid or slow-speed hand blender) but of course you can do it by hand. Add the eggs one by one, the egg must be perfectly incorporated into the dough before adding the next.

Finish by adding ground pepper and nutmeg with 150 gr grated cheese (save some for decoration).

The dough is ready.

At this step, you can keep the dough in the fridge for up to two days, in a bowl with a lid.

Preheat the oven to 180°c, preferably without rotating heat.

Form balls of the desired size (everything is possible: from the mini gougère, to the giant gougère to share ... it will just have to adapt the cooking time according to the size) on baking paper or directly on the oven tray just lightly greased (If you grease the tray too much, the gougères may not rise).

Finish with a little grated cheese on top of each gougère and bake immediately as the dough must be very cold to swell.

The cooking time varies depending on the size, between 15 and 30 min.

Do not open the oven door during cooking. The gougères are cooked when the color is golden, so turn off the oven without opening it and wait 10 min oven off before taking out your tray to prevent them from falling.

Obviously they are better the same day.

To your aprons now !