Hey Kate!
Hope you’re having fun baby-sitting tonight (I just saw it on Facebook). I’m at home in my tiny apartment cooking. So that’s fun too.
The finished masterpiece.
A suefull is what I called it in my mind when I got home from work a bit early and thought, “I think this gives me time to make a souffle”. What, you’ve never thought that? You’ve never got home on a Friday night and thought that a souffle was your best option…even skipping out on a party to do it? That’s right. I’m guilty of skipping a World Cup party to make a souffle. I also washed my kitchen floors. I’m an old maid. An old maid with delicious souffle making skills, and a wicked french accent (in my head) that’s just going to waste.
I’ve made both a chocolate and egg souffle before, and they’re actually surprisingly easy. It was actually a lot easier this time around as I had an electric mixer. Whipping egg whites to bring them to a firm peak with a hand whisk isn’t fun, no matter what Julia Child says.
The main ingredients in a souffle are butter, flour, milk, eggs, and cheese. Basically, you’re frying the flour in butter, adding milk to thin it out, adding cheese for flavour and heft, and using the egg yolks to bind it all together, and the whites to fluff it up. Easy. But we all know that’s not why souffles are impressive, they’re impressive because they come out of the oven in a towering marshmallow like fluff of savoury deliciousness.
It’s also incredibly rich. A small piece will do you. But the thing is that you won’t realize that right away. So you’ll eat too much of the souffle. Guaranteed. Eat a salad, or some carrot sticks first, cause the air in the suefull won’t let you know that you’re much too full until it’s too late. Too late. So eat a salad my friends. Just eat the salad first.
The other good news is that this recipe is straight out of Betty Crocker. So you already have it. This is really just for the benefit of the whole wide internet!
Classic Cheese Souffle
- 1/4 cup butter or margarine
- 1/4 cup flour
- 1/2 tsp. salt
- 1/4 tsp. ground mustard
- Pinch of pepper
- 1 cup milk
- 1 cup shredded Cheddar or other flavourful hard cheese
- 3 large eggs, separated
- 1/4 tsp cream of tartar.
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Burned, gross start of a souffle. It was bad.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Heavily butter a souffle dish. This is one of those small, deep dishes. My souffle dish is about 6″ tall, and I was still worried that it would fall over the edge.
- In a small bowl, mix the flour, salt, ground mustard, and pepper.
- Grate 1 cup of cheddar cheese.
- In a largish saucepan, over medium heat, melt the butter. This is where I went wrong, incidentally. I put the butter on the element to melt, and then prepped all my other ingredients. This lead to disaster in step two…since I didn’t have the flour ready to go, the butter was too hot, and it burned while I was measuring out all the salt, mustard, etc. It was gross. Very gross. This should be a light colour and very light until you add the cheese. When it looks burnt, and smells burt. You should just throw it out, and start again. That’s what I did. At least if you just burn it at this point, you’ve only wasted butter and flour…not the cheese and egg. Which is a bit of a consolation. Back to the recipe. I’ll recap. Melt the butter over medium heat.
This is the clumpy stage of the flour butter mix.
- Once the butter is just melted (not bubbling hot), add the pre-measured flour, salt, ground mustard, and pepper, mix constantly until the mixture goes from clumpy until smooth and bubbly.
- Once it’s smooth and bubbly, remove from heat.
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The smooth and bubbly stage of the souffle base.
Stir in milk, and return to heat, bring to a boil while stirring constantly. Once it’s boiling (it will look like a think lava, an oozing kind of boiling), boil for 1 minute.
- Add the cheese, stir until all the cheese is melted, and then remove from heat. Set the mixture aside.
- Separate the eggs.
- In a medium sized bowl, beat the egg whites and cream of tartar until they are “stiff, but not dry”. Basically, when you take the beater out of the mix, and a peak will stand up on it’s own on the end on the beater, you’re done. It’s like a Dairy Queen cone.
- In another bowl, beat the egg yolks until they’re thick and a light yellow colour. About the colour of butter. You should always do the egg whites first, because you’ll want a clean beater as any egg yolk in the egg whites means that they won’t set up. You can use the same beater from the white in the yolks…they don’t care, and it saves you having to wash out your mixer half way through making the souffle. A little tip from me to you.
- So you have two bowls and your saucepan of cheesiness. Just checking.
- Add the egg yolks to the cheese mixture, and stir until well blended.
- Add 1/4 of the egg whites to the cheese mixture, and stir to incorporate. Do this gently. You want to keep as much air in the mixture as possible.
- Now pour all of the cheese mixture into the egg whites (everything should end up in that one bowl), gently fold the cheese mixture in to the egg whites.
- Gently pour the mixture into your prepare souffle dish, and put the dish in the oven. Bake for 50 – 60 minutes. You’ve probably heard that loud noises in the kitchen will cause the souffle to fall while baking. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I chose to sit quietly and watch a couple episodes of Criminal Minds.
- You want to serve souffle when it comes right out of the oven, that’s when it’s at it’s most impressive. Since it was just me, I let it wait long enough so as to not burn my mouth. It’s also tasty reheated, just not as dramatic. It’s a thick, baked custard like thing at that point.
Tasty, but now fallen, souffle. But we're all fallen aren't we?
So that’s souffle. It is a lot of work and timing. But while you’re waiting for it to bake you’ll have time to do the dishes and make that accompanying salad I mentioned. It’s a French thing I think . The art of having everything to the table without looking like you lifted a finger. Mais oui, c’est vrai.
