Pate a Choux: Cheese Puffs

As we saw last time with Profiteroles, common things to do with choux paste is to bake it and fill it with something sweet. But if you noticed, there's no sugar in the choux paste itself, and pate a choux works just as well in savory applications. As a general rule, I prefer the savory applications, and this one is no exception.

Before you make your choux, grate up some cheese (cheddar and parmesan here) and measure up your spices (in this case, the King Arthur Flour recommended dry mustard, chile powder, black pepper, and paprika):

Make a batch of the pate a choux, and take it to the point just after mixing in all of the eggs:

Now stir in the cheese and spices. Prepare your pans and pastry bag just as before, and preheat your oven to 425°F. You'll want to use a pretty wide pastry tip for this, unless you did a good job grating up the cheese. If you have cheese hunks in there that are larger than your pastry tip, then you'll have to stop every so often to clear out the tip with a fork or skewer. So you know.

You have a couple of options on shapes. You can do the same puff shape we did with the profiteroles, or you can make a more rectangular shape.

If you're making the rectangular shape, it's probably a good idea to do a double-thick version, especially if you want to make a really, really long cheese straw.

What you don't want to do is to put both cheese puffs and cheese straws on the same pan, as you see in the photo above. They cook at different rates based on their surface area-to-volume ratio, so you will be unhappy with the results if you try that. You can do short straws and long straws at the same time without any trouble, though, because while one is longer than the other, they have essentially the same shape exposed to the oven, so they'll cook at essentially the same rate.

You'll also note that you don't need a pastry tip, you could just cut a corner off of a zip-top bag and do it that way. If you have a star-shaped pastry tip, though, you can get the wavy lines on the surface of the sticks.

If you are baking cheese puffs, then bake for 15 minutes, reduce the temperature to 350°F, and bake for another 10-15 minutes. You want them to look golden brown and delicious. When they are ready, turn the oven off, open the door a crack, and let them sit in the oven for 10 minutes or so until they look dry.

If you are baking them as straws, bake at about 15 minutes at 425°F, then turn off the oven, open the door a crack, and let them sit like that for 5 or so minutes. When you are done, you should have something like:

These are very tasty, and you will almost certainly eat them all up immediately. It is safest if you have friends around to help you eat them, as this makes a lot of cheese puffs.

Oh, and if this isn't enough spicy, cheesy goodness for you, well, you can fry them instead. It's pretty standard frying behavior, so check out making potato chips for tips on that. Heat up a good frying oil to 350°F and drop spoonfulls of the batter into the oil. Don't overcrowd the pan. These will float, so you'll need to flip them when they are brown on one side. When it's brown on the other side (and this should take 5-10 minutes for both sides combined), then remove with a spider or similar. Let cool on paper towels or, as is standard whenever we fry, use a jelly-roll pan, line the bottom with paper towels, and put a cooling rack upside down on top of it. Let the fried puffs cool on that, and enjoy.