Home › Sandwiches › Cheese Puff Balls
Cheese Puff Balls
Cheese puff balls, while a little troublesome to prepare, will repay one for the time spent in their manufacture. Stir together five tablespoonfuls of Parmesan cheese grated, five tablespoonfuls of flour, a saltspoonful of salt and a pinch of paprika. Have ready on the fire a large cup of boiling water, into which three dessertspoonfuls of butter have been melted. Into this turn the flour and cheese mixture, and as it boils, beat for several minutes. Remove the saucepan from the fire and let the contents get thoroughly cold. Then add three unbeaten eggs and beat all hard for twenty minutes. Drop (several inches apart) heaping teaspoonfuls of the mixture upon greased paper in a baking pan and bake for twenty minutes. These puff balls must be eaten as soon as baked, as they fall if allowed to stand.
This is cheese choux paste — pâte à choux with grated cheese worked in — baked as small puffs. The hinge is the eggs: they must go into a paste that has been cooked dry enough to hold them, and the puffs must not be opened to the air until they are set.
- The old spoon measuresA saltspoonful is 1/4 teaspoon. A dessertspoonful sits between a tea- and a tablespoon, roughly 2 teaspoons, so three of them come to about 2 tablespoons of butter. "A large cup" is unspecified but read it as 8 fl oz.
- The flour-to-water ratio is lowFive tablespoons of flour to a cup of water is much thinner than standard choux (which uses about a cup of flour to a cup of water). Add flour until the paste pulls away from the pan sides in a mass and leaves a film on the bottom; a slack paste will spread rather than puff.
- No oven temperature is givenBake at 400-425F. Twenty minutes is right for teaspoon-sized puffs; do not open the door in the first fifteen or the steam that lifts them escapes and they collapse.
- Twenty minutes of beating is not neededAdd the eggs one at a time and beat each in fully before the next. A stand mixer with the paddle does the whole job in three or four minutes; by hand, allow five.
- Cooling the paste "thoroughly cold"This is insurance against scrambling the eggs. Cooling until the paste is merely warm rather than hot is enough, and a slightly warm paste takes the eggs more smoothly than a cold, stiff one.
- The cheeseUse freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Gruyere, not the dried shelf-stable tub, which usually carries an anti-caking agent and will stiffen the paste. Hold back a little to scatter on top before baking.
- Greased paperParchment on a sheet pan, no greasing required. Space the mounds well apart as directed; they roughly double.
- Yield and servingYield depends on how heaped the spoonfuls are. The warning is accurate -- they soften within minutes, so bake them to come out as the guests sit down, or split and dry the shells briefly in a low oven to revive them.
These are cheese puffs of the kind known in Burgundy as gougeres, where they are served with a glass of local white wine. The base is pate a choux, the twice-cooked paste -- boiled on the stove, then baked -- which French pastry cooks had standardized by the earlier nineteenth century and which is traditionally traced back to sixteenth-century Italian cooks in France, though the attribution is legend rather than record. The author's frankness -- "a little troublesome to prepare" -- is characteristic of the period's better cookbooks, which assumed a reader who would weigh effort against effect before committing an afternoon to it.