Easy Cheese Straws Recipe using ready-made Puff Pastry

Make this easy Cheese Straws Recipe for your next get-together with friends and family. These delicious pastries combine ready-made puff pastry and your favourite cheese. They make a lovely savoury nibble which is perfect to fill that gap before dinner, hopefully without spoiling your appetite.

If you’re on the lookout for an easy recipe to make flavourful, bakery-style, savoury party nibbles that are also quick and pretty to look at, then this is a recipe for you.

Why these Cheese Straws are good – a short overview

• They’re made with ready-made puff pastry. Puff pastry is a laminated pastry, it’s made up of many layers and it can be quite time-consuming to make from scratch.
• Using ready-made pastry therefore saves you a lot of time and effort.
• Using puff pastry means that your cheese straws will be beautifully light and ‘puffed’ up.
• When puff pastry cooks it becomes lovely and crispy giving you lovely bakery-style cheese straws.

What is in this Cheese Straws recipe?

The basic form of this recipe includes;

• bought, ready-made puff pastry
• cheese

The benefits of ready-made pastry

I prefer to make my own pastry; shortcrust pastry and even flaky pastry but when it comes to puff pastry I find the whole process quite long so I cheat and buy ready-made. Life is busy and some shortcuts are worth making, for me, that includes puff pastry.

• it makes the process quick
• if you buy ready-rolled it is even quicker
• you know that the pastry will always be good

A few interesting add-ins

A few things to add to the basic recipe if you wish. None of these additions is necessary but they do add a little something more.

• sesame seeds – add a nice crunch, looks pretty too.
• paprika – add a 1/2 teaspoon of paprika, and gently sprinkle over the pastry before adding the cheese. Nice flavour.
• cheese – I generally use a mature cheddar when I’m making these but use your favourite cheese. Double Gloucester gives a different colour when baked and a gentler flavour. Sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of parmesan over the cheese for another flavour note.

How to make this Cheese Straws Recipe

There are just a few easy steps to making the cheese straws.

Making the cheese straws

• Sort out the ready-made pastry. If you’ve bought it pre-rolled as a sheet, you will only need to unroll it onto your work surface. If you’ve bought the puff pastry as a block you will need to unpackage it and find a rolling pin. Roll it out into a rectangle until it is 3mm thick.
• Grate your cheese. Sprinkle the cheese over the pastry sheet and fold the pastry sheet in half. Take the short edge over to meet the other short edge, enclosing the cheese inside like a sandwich or pocket.
• Get your rolling pin. Using your rolling pin, roll the pastry out in a rectangle. Roll it out until it is 3 mm thick.
• Trim the edges. Using a knife trim the edges of the pastry to make a nice neat rectangle.
• Divide the dough into strips. Decide how wide you want our cheese straws to be and cut as many strips as you can from the sheet or rolled pastry in front of you. How long do you want the cheese straws to be? I usually have the short edge of the rectangle of pastry in front of me, I cut the straws the width of the dough and then 2cm wide as I measure along the length. This gives me between 16 to 24 cheese straws depending on how accurate I am with the cutting.

Baking the cheese Straws

• Take the baking tray. Lay the cheese straws on the greased baking try and twist them 3 or 4 times. When you’ve done this for all of the cheese straws. Sprinkle them with sesame seeds.
  • if the straws begin to unravel when you lay them out on the baking tray. Press the ends into the tray, show them who’s boss.
• Chill in the fridge. Put the baking trays of cheese straws into the fridge to chill for at least 10 minutes. This lets everything relax and you will end up with a much flakier cheese straw.
• Preheat the oven. When it is at temperature put the straws into the oven and bake for between 15 to 20 minutes. They’re done when they are golden brown.

Don’t get hung up!

Please don’t get hung up on the exact number of twists to make to your unbaked straws or how thick or how long they should be. You can make your own decisions about all these things and as long as you bake them at the right temperature and for the right length of time, they’ll be wonderful.

Possible Variations

There are a few things that you can do to these cheese straws to make them different each time you make them.

• use a different kind of cheese – I usually use cheddar but double gloucester is a nice cheese to use in these with its pretty colour.
• sprinkle 2 teaspoons of paprika over the pastry with the cheese before you fold it in half. Makes a pretty colour and adds another flavour dimension.
• spread a tablespoon of pesto over the unbaked dough and 1 cup of mozzarella cheese (1 ball drained of its whey) then carry on as before. Fold it in half and roll out again enclosing the cheese and pesto inside.
• marmite – love it or hate it, spread a teaspoon to a tablespoon of marmite over the dough and then sprinkle with your chosen cheese. Delicious.

Make them Vegan

Turn these cheese straws into cheese straws that are suitable for anyone following a vegan or plant-based diet. Buy ready-made puff pastry that is suitable for vegans, it should say on the label. Most ready-made pastry seems to be suitable these days.

Then you need to select your favourite vegan hard cheese and grate it. Sprinkle a tablespoon of nutritional yeast across the dough for additional flavour, sprinkle over the vegan cheddar and cook as per the instructions.

• Vegan mozzarella and vegan pesto – spread 2 tablespoons of the pesto across the pastry dough, and grate or tear over the mozzarella. Fold the pastry over as per the instructions and re-roll. Cut into straws and bake. These are really good!

Serving your cheese straws

These bakery-style, puff pastry cheese straws go with so many things; beer, wine… before-dinner aperitifs, snacks for nibbling. They’re extremely versatile and worth the little bit of effort to make them.

Storing

These cheese straws are best eaten fresh but they will keep in an air-tight container for up to 3 days before they get a little stale and lose some of that awesome crispness.

Make ahead for a party or get-together

Cheese straws are at their absolute best when eaten fresh but if you have a buffet, party or get-together to prepare for then it’s useful that these cheese straws can be made ahead of time and frozen.

To do this freeze on open trays and then store in a zip-lock bag until you need them.

Thaw at room temperature for a few hours and then re-crisp in the oven for up to 5 minutes to restore their lovely crispiness.

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If you like this… then you may like to try these to eat your cheese straws with

• Cheese and Bacon Turnovers – using ready-made pastry
• Simple Spicy Tomato Soup
• Creamy Cauliflower Soup
• Simple Green Pea Soup recipe
• Spicy Red Lentil Soup
• Pumpkin Soup
• Leek and Potato Soup
• Simple Corn Chowder Recipe

Why not pin this Cheese Straws Recipe – make some great snacks