Sunday, March 17, 2024

Potato Custards: or, Sometimes the mundane things are the strangest

Ever wished your mashed potatoes had more dignity?

Potato Custards
½ cup mashed potatoes*
½ cup milk
1 egg
½ tsp salt
1 pinch mace

Heat oven to 350°. Grease five or six individual custard cups. Or, coat a cupcake pan with cooking spray.
Thoroughly whisk everything together. Or, if using fresh potatoes that still have a few lumps in them after mashing, drop all the ingredients into a blender and let it run until everything is perfectly smooth.
Pour into the prepared pans, filling them about two-thirds full. Bake until they are firm and puff up, about 15-20 minutes.
Serve warm.

*Instant mashed potatoes are fine.

Source: Ask Mrs. Wilson, Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, July 7 1919, page 12

This comes to us from Ask Mrs. Wilson, gently yet firmly taught the Philadelphia newsreading public how to cook things the domestic-science-approved way. But Mrs. Wilson did not pretend that everyone with a copy of the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger had bottomless grocery budgets. Only a few months before today's column, Mrs. Wilson ran a recipe for a one-egg cake in response to a spike in egg prices. Today, Mrs. Wilson ran an entire recipe of exclusively potato recipes for the benefit of those of us on a tight budget.

Ask Mrs. Wilson, Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, July 7 1919, page 12

However, the first line of her article about potatoes hasn't aged as well as the recipes: "This nutritious tuber is said to have saved the Irish people from famine...."

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, July 7 1919, page 12

Mrs. Wilson may have an incomplete understanding of then-recent history, but she treads on sounder footing further down the page when she says "Boiling potatoes in their jackets will cause the potato to lose about 2 percent of its nutritive value, while peeling before cooking causes a loss of 14 percent." In other words, Mrs. Wilson endorses our practice of finger-picking the skins off of cooked potatoes instead of spending long irksome hours with a potato peeler. She confirms this in her directions for edible potato cups (for containing salads): "Boil medium-sized potatoes in their jackets. Cool and then peel."

All of this brings us to today's recipe: potato custards. It was the only unusual recipe on the entire page. While some of the other recipes are a little different than today (the potatoes au gratin uses white gravy instead of cheese sauce), the custard recipe was the only one that I literally couldn't imagine what it tasted like. Therefore I had to make it.

Mrs. Wilson directs us to mash the potatoes and force them through a sieve. This ensures that are mashed potatoes are perfectly smooth. But we at A Book of Cookrye had a much easier way to ensure spud perfection: use a box of instant flakes.


After you have either mashed or reconstituted your potatoes, the recipe is pretty simple: add the rest of the ingredients and get out a whisk. That little smattering of brown powder floating on top of our mixture is the only expensive part of this recipe: a pinch of mace. 

We haven't used mace for anything since the snow muffins, and the canister had long since disappeared. Much of it got used up when I said "I'm not using this anyway" and added it to cinnamon toast. I considered substituting nutmeg for mace since we already have it (nutmeg and mace come from the same plant), but decided that I should probably do this recipe correctly. This involved purchasing and paying for a (small!) shaker of mace.


Recipes like this make me wish stores had dispense-it-yourself spices, the same way a lot of them let you bag and price your own peanuts. It would be very helpful for those of us who want a single teaspoon of a spice we will never use again.

After a quick stir, our potato custards looked like an unusually pale cake batter.


I decided to bake the custards in miniature pie pans because it seemed cute. I also noticed at this point that there was no sugar in these custards. While I am no stranger to savory custards, the omission seemed odd. And so, I sweetened one of the custards and baked the other exactly as written. (The sugary spud custard was bad. So we don't need to mention it again.)


I have to credit Mrs. Wilson with this: every single one of her recipes I've tried has worked. Whether the potato custards were any good remained to be seen, but they behaved perfectly in the oven. Like our pumpkin tarts, they even puffed into nicely-shaped domes when they were done. Apparently ingredients are never unruly when Mrs. Wilson is in charge. 


These were the most formal mashed potatoes I've ever made. They had the exact texture of a really good cheesecake, but they tasted like mashed potatoes. It was like we subjected a cheesecake to a flavor transplant. The mace was an unexpectedly good addition. If you take nothing else from this recipe, try adding a pinch of mace to your mashed potatoes. 

If you have ever wished your mashed potatoes were more presentational and dignified, this is the recipe for you. No more must your mashed potatoes be sloppily presented in whatever splattered shape they landed on the plate. 

Today's potato custards seemed typical of Mrs. Wilson's recipes: fancier-looking than than I would have ever bothered with, but without adding any extra ingredients to the grocery list (aside from the mace, which will probably follow me from spice shelf to spice shelf until the end of time). In full disclosure, I definitely noticed the absence of butter in these, so you may want to add a bit to the recipe. But with that said, this is not a bad way to serve mashed potatoes.

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Herbed Spaghetti: or, This is why we are all obsessed with pasta

Sometimes, the best things are simple and buttery.

Herbed Spaghetti
1 pound thin spaghetti
4 to 6 cloves garlic, pressed or finely minced
3 tbsp olive oil
½ cup butter, melted
1 cup fresh herbs, chopped (chives, parsley, dill, green onion tops)
Salt to taste

Cook the spaghetti in salted water until done.
While the spaghetti is cooking, saute the garlic in the oil until golden. Remove from heat. Add butter, herbs, and salt.
After draining the spaghetti, toss it with the herbs. Serve immediately. Serves 6.

    Herbed Pasta with Mushrooms:
Quarter all ingredient amounts. Instead of spaghetti, use pasta shells, corkscrews, or any other noodle shape that is suitable for mixing with other things. (With spaghetti or any other string-type pasta, the mushrooms will never quite mix in.)
After the garlic is golden, add 8 oz of sliced mushrooms to the frying pan. Saute the mushrooms until done. Then slowly add about 2 tablespoons of flour to thicken the pan juices, stirring very fast to prevent lumps. Stir in the butter, and when all is melted, remove from heat.
Mix with the hot, drained noodles and serve immediately.

Note: If you're not serving the spaghetti directly out of the pot, put it in the serving bowl before adding the herbs. That way, none of the herbs cling to the pot and get left behind.

Source: The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

This recipe appears in a community cookbook with no one's name underneath it. I find the unsigned recipes in compilation cookbooks the most interesting. Why would anyone send a recipe and not want credit for it? Or do anonymous recipes happen when the Cookbook Committee feel like something should not be omitted from the book, even if no one sent it in? Perhaps someone in a Committee (always capitalized) meeting said something like "No one sent in herbed spaghetti? That shows up at every summer social!" and wrote the ingredient list out on the spot.

At any rate, this seemed like as good a time as any to try out this knife I got for Christmas. Its premise of operation looked intriguing, although the eagle on the handle is a bit much for me. I don't like my kitchenware to look like it's headed to a political rally.


Questionable iconography aside, I was a bit leery of the wooden cutting board that came with it. It seemed like it would not do well with my "shove everything in the dishwasher" approach to kitchen management.

I was going to cut up the herbs in small batches. Then I decided that the best way to test this thing was to overload it. Realistically, I need to know how well a kitchen device holds up to moderate-to-severe misuse before deciding whether it should permanently move into the kitchen. And so, I crammed all the green stuff into the bowl that came with this thing. It looked unexpectedly photogenic.

The bowl may not appear overloaded, but that's because the knife is weighing the herbs down.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well this thing worked. In a surprisingly short time, it reduced all our lovely fresh herbs to green confetti. It was like using a food processor without having to clean all the plastic parts later.So while this isn't something I can't live without, I won't rush to re-gift it either.

Countertop toys aside, here is where we get to the real fun of the recipe: adding enough garlic to weed out unworthy men. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think garlic bread is a relationship test.) You should know two things. One, I put in exactly as much garlic as the recipe calls for, and no more. Two, I quartered the entire recipe- garlic included. My eyes literally watered (that is not a complaint) while I stirred this.


The rest of the recipe is agreeably straightforward. We are supposed to melt the butter before we stir it in, which makes sense if you're not quartering the recipe. By the time you've melted an entire Junior League's worth of butter, the garlic already in your pan will have burnt. But  after quartering the recipe, I figured this small piece of butter could melt in the pan quickly enough. For those making the recipe in its original amounts, a whole stick of butter may seem excessive and also stereotypically southern. But keep in mind that said butter is going onto an entire pound of spaghetti. (It's still a lot of butter, though.)


Lastly, we add in the herbs. I noted that the recipe has you adding them at the absolute very end of the recipe. I guess our greens would go black and slimy if they cooked in the butter for more than a few seconds. The main thing to note is that ever since weed got upscaled to cannabis, I can never look at a pan of green stuff in oil the same again.


Our herbs shrank a lot in their short time in a hot pan. I wasn't expecting them to be reduced to such a small pile on top of the noodles.

Reminder: this green pile started out as enough herbs to fill a medium-sized salad bowl.

After stirring our herbed spaghetti together, it looked like I thought it would when I first decided to make it. It also smelled every bit as wonderful as I hoped.


I wasn't expecting to like dill in this, but I put it in anyways because someone (again, the recipe has no one's name under it) thought it was good enough to add here. Also, I've only ever encountered dill in pickles, and was curious to see what happens when dill gets separated from cucumbers. It was really good here, and I would definitely add it when making this again.

In short, this recipe is as good as it is simple. It's one of those recipes that seems too easy to bother writing down, just like few people need to consult instructions when making cinnamon toast. But I hadn't thought of making spaghetti with fresh dill and would never have done it had I not seen this written down.

Since I had a lot of extra dill and parsley in the refrigerator, I made herbed spaghetti again as soon as the garlic smell from the last batch got out of the house-- which took an unexpectedly long time. A house is never drafty when you need it to be. 

I couldn't help thinking that the recipe would be fantastic with few mushrooms in it. Because it's almost impossible to stir large things like sliced mushrooms into spaghetti (they always separate out and end up in a pile at the bottom of the pot), I used pasta shells instead. That way, everything would mix together.

And so, after the garlic had become a golden brown but before adding the herbs, we filled the frying pan with fungus. This led to a problem I should have seen coming: the mushrooms exuded a lot of juice. I didn't want to drain it off and throw it out (in part because I'd be pouring away the precious roasted garlic with the mushroom fluid). But I didn't want a puddle of mushroom-water at the bottom of an otherwise exquisite plate of pasta. 


And so, muttering to myself that no Italians were watching anyway, I stirred in enough flour to turn our mushroom water into a sauce that would stick to the noodles. I should note that the mushroom gravy tasted even better than I anticipated because it drew out the flavor of the garlic the entire time the mushrooms cooked. I hadn't even added our herbs yet, and this was already turning into something divine. The rest of the recipe was just as easy as last time: dump the herbs into the pan, pour everything onto the noodles, and serve. 

It's the best pasta I've had in ages. I cannot recommend it enough. Obviously, the herbs are open to variation.  But I strongly suggest trying fresh dill among the greens you choose. 


 

Friday, February 16, 2024

Aunt Angie's Unrivaled Pizzelles

Aunt Angie's Pizzelles
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
½ tsp anise extract
¾ cup sugar
¾ cup butter or margarine, melted and cooled*
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder

Sift flour and baking powder together, set aside.
Beat eggs and flavorings until foamy. Gradually add sugar, beating the whole time. Beat until very light. Slowly pour in the melted butter, beating the whole time. Stir in the flour just until mixed- do not overbeat.
Spoon batter into middle of the a hot pizzelle iron brushed with melted shortening. Use a knife to push batter off of the spoon. Bake until the steam stops coming out, about 60 seconds. Remove with a spatula.

*Add ¼ tsp of salt if butter is unsalted.
The original recipe says to remove with a fork, but that did not end well for me.

Let's say you just bought a pizzelle iron but you have no idea how to make them. And let's further say it's the 1970s, which means you can't go online and find a recipe. And unlike us here at A Book of Cookrye, you didn't run off with your Italian ex's family's recipes. Fortunately for you, your new pizzelle iron has a recipe on a sticker applied to its handle.

A pizzelle iron with a recipe on its handle recently popped up in my Ebay suggestions. You may think I'm about to show a picture of this iron on my countertop and admit that I bought it, but I am financially immune to the allure of future waffle irons. However, before the iron went to a more willing buyer, I nabbed the recipe off the listing because you just never see appliances that have their own recipes stuck onto them.


That's a bit hard to read, so let's do a bit of photomanipulative magic to help our eyes.

PIZZELLE RECIPE. 3 eggs, beaten. 3/4 cup sugar. 3/4 cup melted butter. 1-1/2 cups flour. 1 tsp baking powder. 1 tsp anise seed or lemon peel. Add ingredients in order listed, mixing well after each. Spoon batter into middle of each section [of the iron].

I had to try it. Practically every kitchen device in existence comes with suggested recipes in the instruction manual, but I've never seen one printed on a sticker and applied to the thing itself. The closest equivalent I can think of are those cute ceramic pie pans and casseroles with recipes painted in the middle. I had to see if Rival's pizzelles were any good.

While we're making this recipe, it was a perfect time to try a near-identical one from my ex's family.

I don't know who Aunt Angie is. I never met anyone named Angie when I was introduced to the family. But her recipe is the same as the one off the Rival handle except she used a smidge more flour and an extra spoon of baking powder. I wonder if she happened to buy the same pizzelle iron and then improved the recipe a bit.

We began the pizzelle recipe as they seem to always go: whipping our eggs and sugar until they look like an unusually fluffy batter. When we slowly poured in the melted butter, things started to look a bit curdled under the beaters. I have not seen this in any pizzelle recipe I've made heretofore (granted, I've only made two).

 

Upon raising the beaters, we found a surprisingly good facsimile of icing. It may be a little bit curdled, but doesn't it almost look like you could squirt big blobs of it onto cupcakes?


At this point, we get to the only place where Rival and Aunt Angie diverge: Aunt Angie uses a smidge more flour and baking powder than Rival does. And so, because I am thorough, our batter got bifurcated and some surprisingly mathematical things ensued.


Here are the two recipes in their complete, ready-to-bake state. They look nearly identical in pictures. But if you prodded them with a spoon, Aunt Angie's was just a little bit firmer while the one that came off the Rival pizzelle maker was floppier.

Rival's on the left, Aunt Angie's on the right.

And so, having gotten the iron heated up, the paper splatter-catcher laid on the counter, and the shortening melted and ready to brush, it was time to cook the Rival recipe. I'm not a pizzelle expert (I only started making them two months ago), but this dough seemed a lot runnier than any pizzelle I've made heretofore.

Rival's pizzelles cooked faster than the other recipes I've made. I think it's because there's so much sugar in them compared to everything else. The sugar browned before I was ready with a spatula. Rival's pizzelles were also a lot more fragile than the others I've made. I accidentally nudged one and it dropped a few shards of itself.


The Rival pizzelles weren't necessarily bad, but I was not impressed. They were a little too greasy from an excess of butter. This culinary misfire made me feel a bit of sympathy for anyone who bought a Rival pizzelle iron and made the recipe printed on it, year in and year out. Think of all those years of subprime pizzelles!

I thought the recipe needed just a little bit more flour to be just right. And conveniently enough, we had another bowl of batter that had a little more flour in it. It was Aunt Angie's turn at the iron.  While we're making these, I have to point out that after getting helpful advice from Fante's Kitchen Shop in Philadelphia, I switched from cooking spray to melted shortening and a brush. I have to repeat how astounded I am at what my chemist friend described as shortening's "uncanny nonstick properties more comparable to Teflon than a natural oil." This thin, wispy thing (and every single one like it) fell right out of the shortening-coated iron intact.


Moving back to the pizzelles, Aunt Angie's recipe is what Rival's wishes it could be. Here are the two side-by-side. You can see that Rival's recipe was just a little bit more perforated and not quite as nice.


Aunt Angie's recipe may be a near-exact copy of the one from Rival, but it had just enough additional flour to make the pizzelles near-perfect. Her recipe comes out just as I imagined pizzelles were like before I actually had one. They are light, crisp, and ever-so-delicate. I'm not sure how I could pack these to give them away unbroken, but I know that anyone I gave them to would eat them almost as fast as I would.

I don't necessarily recommend this as someone's first pizzelle recipe, but I definitely recommend making it. Because they're so delicate, they get bit tricky to lift them off of the iron. But that same fragility makes them so good to eat. They're like those impossibly fragile cookies you get at supermarkets with very upscale snack aisles. 



Thursday, January 18, 2024

La Gougère: or, The high class cheese pouf!

I've been holding onto this recipe and waiting for winter.

French Yorkshire Pudding or La Gougère Bourguignonne
4⅜ fluid ounces milk (½ cup plus 2¼ tsp)
1 oz butter (2 tbsp)
2 eggs
¾ teaspoon salt,
2½ oz flour (½ cup plus 2 tbsp)
2 eggs
1½ oz diced Gruyere or Emmenthal, divided into 1 and ½ oz
½ oz grated Gruyere or Emmenthal

Before beginning, crack one of the eggs into a small bowl. Then beat it, and set aside a small spoonful to brush onto the top.
Select a small saucepan that can handle using an electric mixer in it. (You can beat this by hand with a whisk, but if you use a mixer you'll be glad.)
Put milk, butter and salt in the saucepan. Heat slowly until butter melts and the milk boils. Toss in flour all at once. Allow to boil for a few seconds until the milk begins to bubble over the flour.
Turn off heat, insert an electric handmixer, and beat on high speed until smooth. Add the eggs one at a time, beating each time until mixture is smooth. Stir in 1 oz diced cheese. Spread mixture into buttered shallow cooking dish (mine was about 5" x 7"). Brush with the reserved spoonful of beaten egg, then sprinkle on remaining diced and grated cheese.
Set aside until it gets completely cold (you can refrigerate it to speed this up).
When ready to bake, heat oven to gas mark 8, 450°F, or 230°C. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the top is a deep golden brown.
Allow to cool for a few minutes, and serve warm.
Leftovers can be placed on an uncovered pan and reheated at 350°F (180°C, or gas mark 4).

Note: You can assemble this ahead of time and put it in the refrigerator until ready to bake. If wrapped airtight, it should keep for at least a day before baking. There's no need to bring it back to room temperature. Just take it directly from the refrigerator to the oven.

Source: Fanny Cradock via Keep Calm and Fanny On

When not wrapped in blankets and looking like an ambulatory fabric bale in the house, we at A Book of Cookrye have been recreationally baking. When it was merely freezing, we lit the stove burner and made pizzelles. When the daytime temperature dipped to 12 degrees (that's -11° for our Celsius friends), it was the perfect time to bake in a ridiculously hot oven.

It turns out that this recipe is easy to shop for. There aren't a lot of ingredients, and most of them are cheese.

I first saw this recipe on a TV show about the history of TV cooking. One episode focused on Fanny Cradock and Graham Kerr (aka The Galloping Gourmet). I skipped through all the non-Fanny parts. 

Fanny Cradock got very mixed reviews when they asked other chefs to talk about her. One person said that her cooking style was outdated although "in terms of cooking she was on the money." He gave this recipe a special mention and said he still makes it. This was immediately followed by a demonstration. 


For some reason, they didn't give any ingredient amounts or oven temperatures, but I found the directions on the utterly delightful Keep Calm and Fanny On. At first I didn't read the instructions very closely and therefore didn't know what I was getting into. It turns out that we're basically making choux paste with cheese. I was not daunted by choux paste. If you watch Fanny Cradock make it, choux paste is so easy you wonder why people reserve it for fancy foods.

As aforesaid, I didn't closely examine the recipe when I first decided to make it. It turns out that whatever a gougère is, we're not making very much of it. The beginning of our recipe barely covered the bottom of the smallest pot in the kitchen.


Although choux paste is easy to make, you want to have everything measured and ready before you start. With some things, it's no bother to pause every so often and measure out the next ingredient. But with choux paste, you need everything ready to dump into the pot when its time comes. Perhaps I was a bit excessive to pre-crack my eggs into individual bowls, but that's because I always end up fishing out eggshell fragments. (Also, sometimes I am a bit too excited about having a dishwasher to put all those tiny bowls into.)

Fanny Cradock's original instructions were to toss in the flour all at once and "beat violently." I could have gotten out a whisk, but I was taking full advantage of the power grid's miraculous avoidance of another Texas-sized failure. Even though the trees were crackling with frost and the power could go out at any minute, I let our electric handmixer beat the flour violently for me. 

 

This could be the mixer that broke Texas.

In short order, we were ready to add the first egg. As soon as our mixer resumed its assault on the Texas power grid, the choux paste entered what Fanny Cradock gracelessly calls "the globule stage."


If you've never made choux paste, I can easily imagine how you might think you failed when it looks like this. But if you keep beating it really hard (or grinding away with the electric mixer), eventually the globules give way to a smooth paste.


Then you add the second egg and it goes back to globules again. But after a long and stubborn beating (or about thirty seconds with an electric mixer), you have what almost looks like somewhat elastic mashed potatoes. Our choux paste was ready to receive the cheese.


Because I didn't know what pan size we would need, I waited until we had our choux paste before getting one out. It turned out that the smallest pan in the kitchen was just a smidge too big. But after lightly spritzing cooking spray onto the top of our cheesy choux, we gently persuaded it to reach the edges of the pan. It later occurred to me that this would probably be really good baked in a (well-greased!) cupcake pan. (Because the oven is hot enough to ignite paper, I would either use foil cupcake liners or none at all.)


In less-than-freezing circumstances, I would have felt singularly stupid to run the oven to 450° (230° for our Celsius friends) for something so small. However, I did not feel compelled to halt production of our cheese pouf as the weather got colder by the minute.

I had been debating what to do about the egg wash that we are directed to put on top. I didn't want to crack open another egg for this and waste most of it (or put the rest of it back in the refrigerator and try not to forget to use it later). But my extravagant use of tiny bowls solved my egg-use problem. Since I did an accidentally terrible job of cracking one of them and broke the yolk, I simply did a deliberately bad job of pouring the egg into our batter. The remaining egg residue was exactly enough for brushing purposes.


As a side note, between our recent pizzelle phase and the increased application of various egg washes, the single brush in the kitchen drawer has been used a lot more in the last month than its entire previous year of existence. It's already falling apart. I sometimes have to remove bristles from food before baking, and a few have stayed hidden long enough to get cooked. If I'm feeling extravagant, I may get one of those silicone brushes that you can can drop into the dishwasher.

Molting brushes aside, our cheese pouf was ready to bake in a very short time. The instructions don't mention cooling our still-warm choux paste before baking, but I watched the the Fanny Cradock episode about petits fours in which she went into a long rant about how it's absolutely essential to get your choux paste completely cold before you cook it. She says it's "the most important point, the really VITAL point" in making choux paste. 


I can also say from experience that if you don't let choux paste get all the way to room temperature (if not colder), it doesn't cook right but instead stays gooey in the middle no matter what you do. I'm going to assume that when Fanny Cradock gave the recipe, she had already introduced us to choux paste in an earlier episode. Therefore, anyone following Fanny Cradock's program (you were following the program and not picking recipes willy-nilly, right?) would know that the choux paste should cool before baking.

I should have waited to heat up the oven until the choux paste had gone completely cold. Even after putting it in the coldest part of the refrigerator, it needed 10 minutes before the last of the warmth had gone out. I felt kind of bad about running an empty oven at 450° for so long, but given the cold I didn't turn it off.

Eventually, we put our cheesy choux into the oven, wondering if it would rise at all. It looked so puny in the pan. But before it was halfway done baking, it almost looked like I'd crammed a tiny chicken into a small dish.


I wasn't prepared for our cheesy pouf to look so good. You'd think I spent hours on it instead of a minute or two with an electric mixer. That beautiful deep golden crust, the gooey puddles of cheese on top, the almost unnatural height to which it rose... I couldn't believe I made this myself.


I know that the underside of bread is rarely worth noting, but look at that beautiful golden dough interspersed with shiny pieces of toasted-brown cheese. It's like a mosaic of deliciousness.

Our entire gougère had risen to an impressive height despite the nearly cracker-thin state of the dough before baking. I really wanted to see what happened under that massive off-center mountain that rose out of the pan. It turns out, the entire thing lifted off from the bottom of the pan and made a bread-tent.


We tasted this and.... it's cheesy bread. It's the best cheesy bread I've ever had. Don't be distracted by the fancy-sounding French name, it's cheesy bread and it's also really easy to make. With that said, I want to branch out with future cheese selections. Some quick internet searching tells me that gruyère is the customary cheese (or as food snobs say, "the classic preparation"), but I want to try this with provolone or really sharp Cheddar.


After my cheese stupor wore off, I had a grim suspicion that as amazing as this was right out of the oven, it turns into a gummy sad mess as soon as it gets cold. But some poking around on the internet said that you can just put it back into the oven and reheat it. I was suspicious of that. Most of the time, when you reheat bread in the oven, it gets dried out and hardened- and no one wants that unless they're making toast. 

But emboldened by the freezing heat and telling myself that I wasn't just making up excuses to stand in front of a hot oven, I unceremoniously threw the last leftover piece of cheese pouf into the oven the next night. Our fancy French bread looked tragically undignified sitting on the baking stone that occasionally makes pita bread but mostly gets used for frozen pizzas.


To my surprise, the cheese pouf reheated really well. I won't say that it was exactly the same as when it was fresh, but it was respectably close. It didn't dry out like I feared (though it was a bit crunchier than the first time). Also, I have to note that since you reheat this at 350° (or 180°C), you can easily put something else in the oven alongside the leftover cheesy bread.

Since you need to make this early enough for the dough to completely (and I do mean completely) cool off before baking, a cheesy choux pouf is a really good choice if you have friends coming over. You can get it ready to bake at your convenience, completely clean away the mess at a leisurely pace, and let the cheesy delight wait in the refrigerator. Instead of cooking when your friends are here, you can simply put pop this into the oven and make sure you can hear the timer from wherever you are. Or, you can make this for yourself and whoever is lucky enough to wander into the kitchen when the cheese smell drifts to them.