Cheese Puffs

Wylie Dufresne is one of the most inspir­ing chefs work­ing today. We first met at Madrid Fusión in 2003, and we’ve been close friends ever since. He’s one of those rel­a­tively unsung heroes of the culi­nary world; he may not be as well known as Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adrià, but few chefs work­ing today have done as much to push the Modernist move­ment for­ward. Wylie has been deeply influ­en­tial for many chefs, myself included, because he has pushed more bound­aries in the kitchen than just about any­one else cook­ing today.

Wylie was a great help to us when we were work­ing on Modernist Cuisine. Many of the recipes in our book were adapted from, or inspired by, recipes and tech­niques pub­lished by other chefs in their own books. Wylie doesn’t have a book (at least not yet). But he gra­ciously sent us many of his recipes and worked with us to accu­rately con­vey the tech­niques behind them. Wylie also gen­er­ously donated his time to serve as an expert reviewer for sev­eral of the chap­ters, includ­ing chap­ter 13 on Thickeners and chap­ter 14 on Gels. Wylie is cer­tainly one of the better-represented Modernist chefs in our book pre­cisely because so many of his recipes have inspired Nathan, Max, and me. The recipe for Cheese Puffs below is just one small example.

–Chris Young, coau­thor, Modernist Cuisine

Water takes on a bright orange hue when infused with ched­dar cheese.

Tips and Substitutions:

For the Cheddar Cheese Water:

  • Making an infu­sion is just like mak­ing a cup of tea. Modern menus may refer to them as tisanes, tinc­tures, con­coc­tions, or ton­ics, but they are all made by steep­ing an ingre­di­ent in a liq­uid to extract the flavor.
  • We like to start with cold water, rather than pour­ing hot water over the com­po­nant when mak­ing the infu­sion. Warming them together in a low-temperature water bath infuses the fla­vors with­out risk­ing overex­trac­tion and bitterness.
  • We like the clas­sic taste of ched­dar in our cheese puffs, but the recipe for cheese water can be made with any kind of cheese, and this fla­vored water has many uses. We’ve used Gruyère water, for exam­ple, in caramels that me make for din­ners we hold at the lab.
  • Keep the infused water sealed until you are ready to use it; oth­er­wise, evap­o­ra­tion and oxi­da­tion may spoil it.

For the Thin Cheddar Cheese Sauce:

  • Simmering the cheese sauce after incor­po­rat­ing the grated cheese is cru­cial in form­ing a smooth emul­sion. If you skip this step, you risk end­ing up with a grainy, bro­ken liquid.
  • Check the pH of the cheese sauce to get some indi­ca­tion of its sta­bil­ity. The sauce in this recipe should have a pH close to 5.9.
  • If the pH is higher than 5.9, you can lower it by add addi­tional emul­si­fy­ing salts (sodium cit­rate or sodium phosphate).
  • Pour the cheese sauce into a lightly oiled mold, and refrig­er­ate it cov­ered until you are ready to use it. Covering the cheese tightly pre­vents a skin from form­ing on the surface.
  • This is a very ver­sa­tile sauce that can be served either warm or cold. You may want to make extra for use in other recipes.

For the Cheese Puffs:

  • Puffed snacks are foams that have set into solid form. The first step in mak­ing any puffed snack it to cre­ate a dense starch gel and to par­tially dehy­drate it. When the gel is deep-fried, the resid­ual water expands 1,600 times in vol­ume as it turns to steam, form­ing bub­bles in the gel that harden when cooked.
  • The most impor­tant fac­tor in whether a food will puff is its final water con­tent, which must be 12% to 14% by weight. Any less, and you don’t get much puff; there just isn’t enough water to turn into steam. Any more, and the excess water inter­feres with heat­ing the food, so the puff peters out.

Be care­ful. It is impos­si­ble to eat just one!

Whisk the cheese water into the Crisp Coat UC, Ultra-Sperse M, and salt to form a paste.

Spread the paste in an even layer on a sil­i­cone mat.

You can use a dry mat­ter ana­lyzer to mea­sure the water con­tent of your dried cheese paste. It should be between 12% and 14%.

What are you mak­ing for this year’s Super Bowl? Tell us on our Cooks’ Forum!