Experimental gougères

Conclusion: Good but a little bit boring. Insufficiently savory. Insufficiently hollow, maybe try water instead of milk or combined, add flour more slowly and cook more thoroughly instead of all at once and quickly. Needs more salt, onion, maybe garlic and definitely more heat. Consider a filling.

Update: The gougères for the party were made with much better cheese than the trial pictured above, with diced scallion and a good deal of cayenne. They were delicious and a bit addictive. However, they were inexpertly made. The thing is, several inexperienced helpers appeared to assist with the preparation for the fundraiser. In this case, I overestimated their cooking-fu and I really should have paid closer attention to what they were doing. The problem was, there simply was not enough room in the kitchen for everybody to fit and I was tired of wedging in just to position my body where I needed to be placed for side-by-side direction so I relied on verbal instruction. That wasn't good enough. As it turned out the dough was slightly too loose which I discovered to late to fix so the gougères didn't puff into balls and they baked too flat, although they did puff hollow. A mere few tablespoons additional flour would have fixed the dough sufficiently but that would have had to be done at the stove top before the egg and cheese was added. Also, the second assistant who was out of sight did not spoon them onto a sprayed surface or a Silpat so they tended to stick to the foil when baked. There were so many we used up all the oven trays and relied on double foil as ersatz baking trays. A simple spray would have prevented that. These two simple oversights, loose dough and unsprayed surface caused the gougères to be misshapen and some torn from the foil. (One assistant asked sincerely if we could spray them after they were baked. Ha ha ha) Still, they were delicious and that didn't prevent them from being devoured.