After Chris’ comment about how his recipe called for making them a day ahead of time I started googling recipes to see what they said. While most recommended fresh from the oven one said that you can form the batter, freeze the balls, and then bake them directly from the freezer (just giving an extra 1-2 minutes cooking time).
I’ve never tried this and am curious if anyone else has. Could make prep the day of a dinner party even easier.
i’ve never done it with gougeres but there’s an entire school of pastry that says rest/refrigerate/freeze almost everything. it gives the flour a chance to be fully hydrated, releasing more sugar, etc.
aged, frozen cookie batter is infinitely better than fresh. i’d imagine this would easily translate to gougeres. at worst, you wouldn’t notice any difference and it would be so much easier to pop a few in the oven just in time.
I’d bet that the estates in Burgundy that used to serve them (maybe some still do: Maume, Georges Mugneret, Grivot come to mind…did just that: take them from the freezer to the oven. I can’t believe they bothered to make fresh dough each time.
I have frozen and re-heated cooked gougeres before and it works (for the most part) well, though not as good as fresh, but very very serviceable to have a stash of gougeres handy for spontaneous yum. I haven’t tried freezing the uncooked dough balls at least yet.- I suppose you would have to freeze them on baking sheets/parchment and then bag them… My stupid side by side freezer makes that hard.
I have frozen them both before and after cooking. I think they are better frozen then thaw before baking but I am happy to eat them either way. They are perfect with Champagne…
^ I have, and you’ll be happy too if friends come uninvited and you don’t have anything to drink with the Champagne they brought !
Seriously though, it works pretty well to freeze them. Yes, you’ll lose some flavour and the texture will not be as nice. But, they’ll still be good.
I’m also not sure you can freeze them uncooked, since there are some eggs in there (safe?).