Cheese straws are perfect last minute appetizer when you have hungry guests

It only takes about 20 minutes to transform strips of puff pastry into cheese straws with a generous topping of cheese, herbs, and a little spice.

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I swear cheese straws taste like fancy pants cheez-its, but you can make them with much better ingredients. In fact, if you make these with homemade puff pastry, you’ll be rewarded with ultra flaky super cheesy little light sticks it will be hard to walk away from. These are so so tasty!

And while you can eat them on their own, they’re great to serve to a crowd with other appetizers. If these cheese straws were served next to my Grandma’s obligatory cheese ball tray that she always made for Thanksgiving complete with olives and sliced meats, cheese, and crackers, I’m pretty sure my cousins and I would have fought less over the olives!

Regardless of where you serve these, they are worth your time! Grab a pizza wheel, you’ve got 20 minutes to get these into the oven.

Puff Pastry Cheese Straws

Why you’ll need to hide these from yourself

1. Stupid fast: Puff pastry appetizers and desserts (like palmiers or Nutella palmiers) are so quick and easy to make, you’ll have to slow down a little to enjoy the process!
2. Haute couture cheez-its: Cheese crackers are amazing, but these cheese straws are like the very best cheese crackers on a plane to Paris fashion week to win all the awards. They’re light, cheesy, crispy, and pretty much everything you could want or hope for in an appetizer ever. My oldest son nicknamed them “Cheese Churros”. He’s not that wrong.
3. They LOOK fancy: Ha! Only you have to know how easy these really are to make because they look expensive. And if you’ve made the puff pastry yourself, you’ll know how cheap these can be to make. If you need to impress someone, make these.
4. They go with everything: You can serve these with charcuterie, Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas dinner, steak, roasted chicken, summer BBQ. I can literally think of no scenario where these would be inappropriate.
5. Stave off the dinner munchies: When you’ve got a big meal to make like for the Holidays, you can have people hanging around the kitchen looking for nibbles. Set out a batch of these, and you’ll buy yourself some more cooking time, guaranteed! They’re literally the ultimate in party snacks. That’s perfect when the turkey is taking longer than usual or you’re just at the end of waiting around for dinner.
6. You can make them ahead: No oven-jockeying needed here. You can bake these a few days ahead of time without a problem. If you live in a more humid climate that me, they might need a crisp up in the oven or air fryer before serving, but they will be good to go.

Puff pastry cheese straws vs. Southern cheese straws

As far as I can gather, Southern cheese straws are more like a savory cookie, often made by piping dough through a decorative pastry tip or a Spritz gun (cookie press).

Puff pastry cheese straws are instead cut from strips of puff pastry covered with cheese.

While both of these appetizers share a lot of the same DNA, they will taste remarkably different in texture.

Tips for making the best cheese straws

1. Roll the cheese into the dough: Just like with palmiers, if you want the topping to stick to the puff pastry, you need to roll it INTO the dough.
2. Use silicone mats: My first batches I made of these cheese straws on my standard parchment lined baking sheets. This was a mistake…the melted chese fuses to the parchment making it next to impossible to pull the finished cheese straws off in one piece. This is a rare bake where having silicone mats like a Silpat is the way to go. With a silicone mat, you can slide the straws directly off onto a cooling rack.
3. Don’t overbake: You want the cheese to melt and the pastry to get crisp, but if the straws get too dark, they will become fragile. That’s another way that the silicone mats will help you: they provide a little insulation from the heat, preventing them from browning too quickly.

Cheese Palmiers variation

You can use the same idea of palmiers and simply fill your palmiers with cheese instead of the sugar.

To do this, roll out the dough per the recipe, pressing the cheese and herbs and spices well into the pastry as you roll. From there, simply cut the dough into strips and roll them up like you would in my directions for Nutella palmiers.

Bake them until the puff pastry is crisp.

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