I wish someone would comment because I want to know the answer, too!

This is from a Food & Wine column:

Gougères freeze well. It might be fun to make extra with your club, so you can all take some home. After baking, allow them to cool completely. When you return home, spread the gougères out on a baking sheet, cover the sheet with plastic wrap and freeze them until they are firm. Then store them in sturdy plastic bags for several months.

What an interesting major your daughter has, Martha!

The recipe I’m trying from Leite’s Culinaria for Prosciutto-Grana Padano Gougeres says bake then freeze. TheKitchn.com website says freeze then bake. They go on to say that gougeres puff even better when cooked from frozen.

I may have to just run a head-to-head test. Hmmm.....

And you WILL let us all know the results of your testing, won't you?!!

Will do, roxanna!

There are a lot of things that benefit from freezing. I think there's a difference between freeze then bake, like for a few days, and freeze to store, which could be a few months. But I have no specifics for gougeres and look forward to the experiments!

I would bake, freeze, then reheat to crisp as they will be floppy from the freezer.

Life has interfered with my testing plans. DD needs an extra pair of hands for the next couple of days. Plus, I don’t have a 1 Tablespoon scoop. One has been ordered; it arrives Monday. So, my testing will have to wait until the first part of next week. Maybe while I’m twin-wrangling at DD’s I can find some Grana Padano. None was to be found here in the boonies so I was going to substitute Parmesan.

Watch this space next week for test results! ;-)

bbstx, I order my Grana Padano from igourmet.com. We live in the boonies too, where grocery choices are basics from the village grocer or Walmart (ugh.)

Thanks, edie. Our grocery situation is similar. We have a local grocery, a small “supermarket,” and Walmart. I’m sometimes surprised to find more upscale groceries at Walmart. Before the supermarket put in a cheese shop, Walmart had the best selection in cheese! However, neither has Grana Padano. If I can’t find it in the city where DD lives, I’ll give your supplier a shot.

If you can find it from a store it will probably be cheaper since shipping can be $$$. I usually wait until both my DIL & I are both just about out of everything (they have Locatelli RomanoPeccorino too!) before I order because that spreads the shipping costs out a little more.

It doesn't matter which of those cheeses you use. It won't make a difference.

If I couldn't find Grana Padano, I would substitute freshly grated Parmesan. They are very similar. I think Pecorino (my favorite cheese) would work too.

The 1 Tblsp portioner arrived over the weekend. I made the Prosciutto- Grana-Padano Gougeres today! OMG! They are so good. VERY highly seasoned with thyme, rosemary, and black pepper, not to mention the cheese (I had to use Parmesan) and prosciutto. Some of the gougeres I’ve had in the past were kinda wimpy on the flavor. These were not.

The recipe came together very easily. I cooked a dozen and froze the remainder uncooked. Of the dozen I cooked, I ate 6 for lunch with a glass of dry reisling. I’m not much on day drinking, but in the interest of being fully-informed of how the flavors paired with wine, I toughed it out.

I have 6 cooked gougeres in the freezer and some number of uncooked. In the coming days, I’ll be testing them. I discovered today that they are much better warm than room temp, although they aren’t bad either way!

Congrats!. Because of this post I'll be making some this holiday. Made many times before but has slipped the list recently.

I usually bake, slice open, stuff and freeze. Re-heat. Nice/maybe better to have the cheese and ham/prosciutto In the batter.

For a gift, a neighbor, handed over baked/frozen, with instructions to heat right away and enjoy, or pop in the freezer for tomorrow...I think best than gifting un-baked/frozen.

(my adorable neighbor just ran across the street in the rain/sleet and handed me a big chunk of gluten-free chocolate cake, lol, said, "text me how you like it"...she is testing for the holidays. Delicious. Ruined my dinner appetite. : )

They will re-heat straight from the freezer fine me thinks. Pre-baked.

What a sweet neighbor you have!

Sleevendog, putting all the stuff in the batter certainly cuts down on your work. I’ll have to fess up to cheating on the prosciutto. I bought a package that was pre-diced. If you don’t want to do that, you might ask the deli to slice it a little thicker than usual. Trying to dice paper thin slices would drive me bonkers.

I often give unbaked and frozen cookies with instructions for baking. My neighbors with small children seem to appreciate that.

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Today I baked a few of the frozen unbaked gougeres. I’ll have to say, the ones freshly prepared and fresh out of the oven were better, but only a couple of percentage points. The ones that were frozen raw seemed to have a little more resistance when I bit into them. I had read that they could form a skin while freezing, so I covered them with plastic wrap to prevent that. It wasn’t bad, and if a friend served them to me with drinks, I probably would never notice.

Sleevendog, I sliced one open today (1) to examine the texture and (2) to see how much space there is for filling. The texture leads me to believe I removed them from the oven about 2 minutes too soon. With all the cheese and prosciutto in the batter/dough, you might have been able to put an 1/8th of a teaspoon of filling in the gougere. I wouldn’t think that would be worth the effort.

Tomorrow, I’ll heat up some of the gougeres that were baked then frozen. My scales are taking a beating, but sometimes you have to suffer for science!

I skipped a day. This afternoon, I heated up the gougeres that were baked and then frozen. They are MUCH better. Those of you who told me that was the best way to proceed, please give yourselves a round of applause! Your wisdom and information is much appreciated, even if I did have to go do some testing on my own!

Excellent lab report! Thank-you.

So, regarding filling, it's kind of surprising where fillings can go. It's sort of like that parable with the rocks, sand and water. Even if you can't see an opening, if you push filling in with a pastry tube, it finds places to go, especially if it's a fairly loose filling going into a fairly open crumb. Also, with this kind of thing, if you over bake it just a tad the crumb sometimes opens up.

Regarding your results, and my own feeling that baked then frozen is always better, I'm wondering how much of this frozen dough thing is about an industrial mindset? Like they want to entice you to buy their goods with a freshly baked at home element, so they talk you into buying par baked, or frozen bread, pizza, cookie dough, etc., so we get used to take and bake (well, not me personally, finish it completely or I'll do my own from scratch), and then make and bake becomes a thing we can make at home, and we never really question whether it would be better doing it the old way by baking, cooling and freezing rather than the other way around.

Thank-you for questioning it, and experimenting and sharing your answers.

plllog, your comments remind me of a story I heard once about how brown-and-serve rolls came to be. I think it might have been on The Splendid Table. Here is the same story from Mental Floss:

Although not confined to Thanksgiving, "brown and serve rolls" are sold by the ton by various manufacturers for the holiday. They originated in 1949 when baker Joe Gregor of Avon Park, Florida tried to please his customers who wanted their rolls warm for dinner. He worked on the problem for months until he accidentally produced a batch of half-baked rolls. He left the "ruined" rolls in the oven while he responded to a fire alarm (Gregor was a volunteer fireman) and when he returned, he reheated the rolls and realized what he had produced. Gregor sold half-baked rolls to his customers to take home and finish baking before dinner. General Mills bought the process for $25,000, allowing Gregor to retire from baking. Recipes are available so that you can make your own rolls ahead of time and brown them just before dinner.