Home › Desserts › Cheese Straws
Cheese Straws
Roll Puff Paste - trimmings will do for this purpose - one eighth inch thick. Sprinkle with salt, cayenne pepper, and grated cheese. To keep these ingredients on the paste, pat and fold in three layers. Roll again, spread, fold, and roll as before. Cut in strips half inch wide and five inches long.
The recipe assumes you already have puff paste on the counter and know how to bake it, so the two things it omits — oven heat and time — are the two you need most.
- Oven and timePuff paste wants a hot oven: 425F for 8-12 minutes, until the strips are puffed and evenly browned. Cheese scorches faster than plain pastry, so watch the last two minutes.
- Trimmings are the pointThe recipe itself says trimmings will do, and scraps left after cutting patty shells or vol-au-vents were an obvious source for them. Re-rolled trimmings rise unevenly and twist as they bake. Frozen all-butter puff pastry works in their place.
- Which cheeseThe recipe just says "grated cheese"; in books of this period that generally points to a dry aged cheese such as Parmesan or a hard cheddar. Anything moist or young will weep fat and make the layers soggy. Grate it fine so it disappears into the folds.
- The folding is not decorativeThe two rounds of sprinkle-fold-roll are what keep the cheese from sliding off and burning on the sheet. Press firmly with the rolling pin so the cheese is laminated inside rather than sitting loose on top.
- Cayenne quantityNone is specified. A scant 1/8 teaspoon of cayenne and 1/2 teaspoon of salt for a batch made from about 8 oz of pastry gives the sharp finish these were meant to have.
- Keep it coldCheese softens the butter in the paste and the dough warms fast under handling. Chill the strips on the sheet for 15 minutes before baking or they will slump instead of rising.
- Yield and servingTwo dozen or more straws from about 8 oz of pastry, depending on how much is lost in re-rolling. They are best within a few hours of baking; a brief return to a 350F oven revives them.
Cheese straws belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian savoury course — the small salted dish served after the sweet, particularly in English dining and its American imitations. Their appearance in a Lowney's book is a matter of thrift as much as fashion: a cookbook published by a chocolate company still had to teach a household to use up puff paste trimmings, and straws were one way to do it. The pairing of cheese with cayenne in baked pastry is generally traced to English cookery of the mid-nineteenth century, where hot pepper was the standard corrective to the richness of a hard cheese.