52 Recipe Challenge - Week 38

A few weeks ago, I gave in to a craving I had and dug out a recipe for a cheese soufflé. Unfortunately it's somehow taken me three times as long to write up and post this recipe... why this is remains a mystery to me!

The recipe I used was the Easy Cheese Soufflés recipe from Sam Stern’s Real Food Real Fast.

To make this you need:

Some butter for greasing your casserole dish with & 35g of butter for cooking with.

25g flour

Pinch cayenne pepper

Pinch of nutmeg

300ml/ ½ pint milk

A few drops of lemon juice

75g Cheese grated (I used double Gloucester but the recipe suggests cheddar, gruyere or parmesan.)

4 eggs separated

Salt and black pepper.

To start with, I turned the oven on to pre-heat and got out my casserole dish.  The original recipe says to use ramekins; however, I don’t own ramekins and as there are, only two of us it would be silly getting four ramekins for one meal... Anyway, I digress, I greased the casserole dish with butter and grated a bit of the cheese in there as it apparently helps rising.

I popped the casserole dish on one side and then melted some butter in my pan.

Sifted the flour into the pan and also added the cayenne pepper and nutmeg then stirred them together whilst letting it bubble.

After about a minute, I took it off the heat, added the milk a bit at a time, and beat it into the mixture with a wooden spoon. 

When I’d beat the lumps out of the sauce and was sure that it was smooth, I put it back on the hob and brought it to the boil.  I the kept the boiling mixture on a high heat for a few minutes and stirred it to ensure it wasn’t burning.

A few minutes later I removed the pan from the hob again and added the cheese, egg yolks, salt, pepper and lemon juice, then mixed them all together until they were combined. So once I did that I turned the hob off and put my pan to one side as I whisked the egg whites in my food processor.

As soon as I’d whipped the egg whites up until they were all cloud like I put the pan back on the hob, got a tablespoon of the egg white mix and stirred it into the sauce. 

After that was combined, I tipped the rest of the mix in and folded it together trying to be careful not to lose the air trapped in the whipped up eggs.  Once combined the mixture in the pan and the egg whites were combined I tried to fill my casserole dish with it but the casserole dish was too large so I just settled with getting it all in. I also ran my finger around the edge of the mix before putting it in the oven to encourage it to rise.

I then put the soufflé in the oven and turned the oven down from the maximum temperature to 200c/ gas mark 6.The original recipe said to bake for 11-12 minutes but that is for cooking it in ramekins so I set my timer for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes it appeared to have risen but looked a bit anaemic so I left it in for another 20 minutes until it had browned and a skewer poked in came out clean.  As I was confident that it would be ok, I started dishing it only to realise that one side was completely cooked and the other was undercooked.

Under cooked souffle.

I dished up the cooked side with some salad to my boyfriend and blasted the undercooked part in the microwave before tucking in myself.

Cooked half of the souffle.

After all the preparation, stirring and whisking the cheese soufflé just tasted like cheesy scrambled eggs to me in the end.  Due to all the work involved and the underwhelming result, I don’t think I’ll try this again... well not this exact recipe!