Easy Fancy French Cheese Puff Recipe

How to make it

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• Grate first.
• Draw forth your emmentaler from the refrigerator, let it sit on the counter for 30 minutes or so to soften, then grate 1.5 cups into a woven bowl. Set aside.
• Into your dutch oven (or large stove-top pan), placed upon a burner set to high heat, pour 1 cup milk, 4 tablespoons butter, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Grind the pepper shaker four to five times. Stir until this mix comes to a boil.
• As soon as a boil is reached, immediately add 1 cup all-purpose flour, all at once. Quickly reduce heat to medium. Stir steadily with wooden spoon until brew solidifies and becomes a ball that leaves the sides of the pan and clings tenaciously to your spoon (generally 1-2 minutes). Remove dutch oven from heat.
• Add to the dough-ball two eggs, cracked at the rim of the dutch oven. Stir eggs thoroughly into the dough ball, until the dough is smooth and well-blended.
• This is the wearying part of the recipe. Lots of work for upper arm muscles here. And just as soon as you get it smooth and well-blended with these two eggs, you have to add two more eggs, and stir again, while your arms cry out in protest, asking “where are the servants?”
• When you’ve successfully added all four eggs to your now very smooth and well-blended dough, fetch your emmentaler bowl, and deposit from it about 4/5 of the cheese, into the dutch-oven dough. Stir well to blend the cheese.
• At this point reach down and pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees.
• Then get yer baking sheet and grease well. (Easy-greasing tip: just take a fresh cube of butter from out of the refrigerator, peel back the paper, and run the butter by its head the length and breadth of the baking sheet.)
• Using a large spoon, plop 6 or 7 equal portions of dough lumps onto the baking sheet, using about four-fifths of the dough. Leave breathing room between each lump, as they’ll expand once they reach the oven.
• Know that the dough is sticky, and you might have to coax it off the spoon with your fingers.
• Next, take a small spoon and scrape up from the dutch oven the remaining one-fifth of the dough, in 6 or 7 even portions, to be applied as little “hats” set directly atop the dough lumps.
• Once this is accomplished, sprinkle the remaining 1/5 of the emmentaler upon the tops and sides of the dough lumps. Bits of cheese will try to fall onto the sheet; retrieve them, and attempt to press them gently or firmly into the sides or tops of the lumps. You will not fully succeed. Some cheese shreds will insist on sticking to the sheet. Let them.
• Now stick the sheet into the center of your oven. Bake for exactly 55 minutes, or until puffs are lightly browned and crisp. (Ovens that insist on working like a nuclear reactor, like mine, probably require only 45 minutes) A good way to test is to “knock” on both the tops and sides of the puffs; if firm in both spots, remove, she’s done.
• Let cool for a couple minutes, then remove from sheet with a metal spatula, worked gently but firmly beneath the puffs. If some of the bottoms stick, no worry: happens to me frequently.
• Can be kept for quite a while, but these people truly taste by far the best immediately after emerging from the oven.