Cheese puffs!

Count on chef Kris Edison Tan, the brains behind Masa Madre Bakehouse to constantly come up with fresh new baked products using puff pastry. After perfecting the croissant, from plain and simple ones with soft insides and crusty outsides to more fancy ones with colored or wood patterned skin, he “plays” with his homemade laminated dough, or puff pastry, as it is more popularly known, and comes up with more complex ideas such as Turon Croissant and kouighn-amann (a round, multi-layered sweet Breton cake originally made with bread dough but now rendered in laminated dough).

Just recently, Chef Kris introduced a Cheese Puffs series into the Masa Madre menu. He rolled out three flavors or variants of the cheese puffs, which are flaky, buttery croissant doughs shaped into rectangles with a hefty cheese filling in them, baked to a golden crisp.

One is the Cheese Puff, the original Cheese Puff the talented pastry chef created with a combination of creamy, salty and sweet flavors in the cheese filling.

Another variant is the Truffle Cheese Puff, which is exactly the original Cheese Puff but given the exquisite taste and aroma of truffle mushroom for truffle lovers. Truffle gives this variant an additional flavor of earthiness.

The third variant is Ube Cheese Puff, which brings together the no-fail combination of ube (purple yam) and cheese that Filipinos love in their breads, sandwiches, ice cream, cakes, pastries — and more! This flavor combination is always a hit with Pinoys.

These cheese puffs are now available per piece at P159 for the Cheese Puff and P179 for the Truffle Cheese Puff and the Ube Cheese Puff at the Masa Madre café located at the Cocolight Building in Bonifacio Global City (BGC), Taguig. Orders may also be coursed through a message to the social media pages of @masamadrebakehouse. Three things sparked the creation of the Cheese Puffs. First things first. Chef Kris really loves cheese. Even when he was young, he already knew how to appreciate bleu cheese, a pungent variety of cheese that regular kids would not touch with a 10-foot pole. But Chef Kris? Oh, he loved it! Chef Kris also got the idea for the cheese puffs from Porto’s, which is based in Los Angeles. Since Porto’s style cheese puffs are not available in Manila, he decided to create his own version and added his own tweak to them. But what really inspired him and pushed him to do it was his own award-winning Cheese Pie, which bagged him the first place in the Real California Milk competition back in October 2020. Thus, Masa Madre’s cheese puffs was born — and it is going to be a permanent item on the menu for everyone to enjoy. Starting with three major flavors that make a strong impact with customers with a penchant for exquisite cheese… More flavors are in the offing, as Chef Kris is profusely working on new flavors to offer.