Les Petits Chefs make gougères

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while now, you’ll know how much I love choux pastry! It’s a French classic – great for sweet and savoury applications and one of my favourite adult classes to teach. People love how easy this pastry is to make but even more, they love how impressive it looks when it’s baked and the reactions from friends – “YOU made that?” It’s one of those things that looks way harder than it actually is – my personal favourite kind of recipes!

I know that kids love making choux too (we’ve made chouquettes and profiteroles before in club with me and some of them were lucky to work with Chef Suzanne Baby at the Gallery Grill) so I mean, obviously this type of recipe is perfect for my cookbook, right? I’ve been working to perfect my choux recipes over the summer and am about *this* close to having them ready for external testers so when the it was suggested that the Petits Chefs make a dish for a reception for a visiting school inspection committee, I knew that I wanted to make gougères with them. Cheesy puffs – what could be better?

The recipe for choux is fairly easy – melt butter into your liquid (milk or water):

Add your flour all at once…

Stir, stir, stir…

Meanwhile, grate your cheese…

Add your cheese to the choux pastry…

And pipe or spoon them out…

While they bake, clean up your workspace and practice saying “Would you like a gougère? It’s a cheese puff made from choux pastry.” and attempt not to make cheesy (pun not intended) jokes about “shoes” 😉 (Hey, the boys ARE 10-14 so, t’is the age!).  Around 25-ish minutes later…

Absolutely perfect gougères!

Full disclosure – there was also a tray of not perfect ones – we dubbed them “cheese buns” – we’re not sure what happened there. The boys’ pastry was very liquidy – not sure if in the business of the afternoon I didn’t measure their flour properly (I normally let them measure everything but time was really tight and I had to prep while they were still in class) or if they just didn’t need the fourth egg (sometimes due to a variety of factors you don’t need all the eggs otherwise it makes the pastry too runny) but in any case it was soupy. I rescued it a little by adding a bit from each of the other two bowls of pastry to thicken it up a little and it was ok to spoon out onto the trays but baked up a little flat. The boys didn’t care too much and they were content for those ones to be their reward for all their hard work. The perfect ones were served up to a crowd of admiring adults who were impressed to hear the boys had made them!

I always say set the bar high and kids will rise to the challenge. Nothing proved me more right than this past Monday. Kids are fearless in the kitchen – we can all learn a lot from their “can do” attitude!