Puffy cumin gougères!

Note: French version is on my other blog: La cuisine de Babeth
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Have you ever read French cheese puffs, aka gougères, recipes? Most of them seem really complicated and surrounded by an urban legend: leave them sit in the turned off oven for 10 minutes at the end of cooking time. And like any of those urban legends they spread like butter! The vector here: internet. The curse is: your gougères would go flat.

No way!

I'm more a type of girl who takes shortcuts and does experiments. I did remove my gougères at the end of cooking (few times already, I'm scientist afterward), bad girl! I know :-) But I proved what I wanted to demonstrate, urban legend: My gougères were plumpy and puffy.

I even checked with the Boss and it's not in his book either.

Their puffiness is as magic as the madeleines roundness.

Emmental and cumin French cheese puffs:
Ingredients: (for about 30 gougères)
-1 cup of grated emmental (or Swiss cheese)
-1/3 of a cup of milk
-1/3 of a cup of water
-4 eggs
-3/4 of a stick of butter
-3/4 cup of all-purposed flour, sifted
-1/2 teaspoon of grounded cumin
-1 pinch of Guérande fleur de sel (substitution:Kosher salt)

Directions:
1- Pre-heat the oven at 350F.
2- Combine the milk, water and butter in a saucepan, bring them to boil.
3- Remove from heat, add flour, cumin and salt all at once. Stir quickly with a wooden spoon.
4- Return the saucepan to heat for few minutes, the ball of dough will separate from the sides. (It will dehydrate the dough a bit)
5- Remove from heat and add one by one the eggs, stir well after each one.
6- Add the cheese, keep stirring.
7- Line a baking sheet with parchment paper (find some eco-friendly, unbleached, ones at your favorite organic store, or reusable silicon one). With 2 tablespoons make small balls ( as big as a walnut).
8- Bake for 25 to 30 minutes until golden.
-> keep them up to a week in the fridge, up to a month in the freezer.

Note: you may have notice the cool Polaroid vintage look of my picture? I've been playing for a while with a cool (and free!) software called poladroid.

Cool as my childhood magic tree toy.