Dark Chocolate Souffle

Souffle: The final test

I’ve put off making souffle for a long. I would look at recipes and photos of them, and think they looked lovely, but were just too hard to make myself. One of those kind of dishes that takes a lot of skill and brings you crashing down to the reality of your culinary mediocrity when it doesn’t work out. If you hadn’t worked it out already, this blog is pretty much powered by my ego. So making dishes that have the potential to become fantastic faillures (whilst fun and a good way to learn) does not entice me to try.

But then along came Michel Roux. Who I’m sure anyone who reads this blog regularly is sick of hearing about. But really, the man is a genius. His recipes are simple, yet beautifully constructed. Refined, but not pretentious, and classic but not old fashioned.

So when I got to the souffle section of his Eggs book, I knew it was time to bite the bullet and have a go.

So a quiet Wednesday night to myself, and what does any red blooded Aussie guy do… Makes souffle !

So… a list of ingredients and a rambling set of instructions. If you don’t want to make so much, then just halve all the ingredients quantities (which is what I did, and still had enough to make two quite large souffles).

Ingredients

  • 3 tbsp softened butter (to grease the dishes)
  • 1/4 cup of caster sugar (to coat the dishes)
  • 240 or so grams of good quality cooking chocolate (I had a bar of Valrhona 70% dark chocolate to use up)
  • 10 egg whites
  • another 1/4 cup caster to use when whipping egg whites
  • For the Pastry Cream

  • 1 3/4 cups of milk
  • 1/3 cup caster sugar
  • 4 egg yolks
  • small 1/4 cup of all purpose flour
  • icing sugar to finish

How I made it

Heat the milk and two thirds of the sugar in a small pan and slowly bring to the boil. Put the egg yolks and the rest of the sugar together in a bowl and whisk them into a ribbon consistency (which I assumed to mean nice and smooth and wavey), then slowly incorporate the flour. Then pour the milk mixture into this egg yolk mixture return it to a low heat, and whisk it til its nicely smooth and a bit thick.

Well that was what I supposed to do. What I did in actual fact was not read the recipe properly… Forget to add the flour entirely, and then have to add it later, after I had already melted the chocolate down in a double boiler, and poured that into the egg yolk mixture… which still kinda worked.

So basically now you have thick chocolatey pastry cream, which can be used for lots of stuff, including fillings for choux pastry (ala Beard Papa’s).

To this I added my egg whites which were whipped into soft peaks with the rest of the sugar. I whisked in about a third of the egg whites, and then gently folded the rest in until it was nicely incorporated.

Then let it all cool down, and pour the mixture into the dishes.

The mixture ended up looking like this:

Soon to be souffle

Which I then put into the oven (preheated to 200 C), for roughly 15 minutes…

Souffle: Underdone

And then put it for a bit longer when I could see it was all rather molten inside… Can someone tell me how it’s supposed to be ?

Souffle: Rise my pretty

And thats how it came out… I was pretty happy with the result, although seeing as it was a complete experiment I wasn’t equipt with ice cream, double cream, icing sugar, or any other tasty little accompaniments to add to it… So what we had was nude souffle on a plate. The upside being, that it was lovely and airy and light, and made me feel happy with its magical mushroom shaped risingness. So much so that I intend to make a few more in the near future.

Also, thanks to Sue for the great title, and her ongoing committment to bad puns.

11 thoughts on “Dark Chocolate Souffle”

  1. I’m sitting here. I’m looking at the souffle. I’m sniggering at the title. But I can’t think of anything punny(or funny) to say. Is it the end?

  2. “Nothing is over! NOTHING! You just don’t turn it off! It wasn’t my war! You asked me, I didn’t ask you! And I did what I had to do to win! But somebody wouldn’t let us win!”

    Sorry… Sudden Rambo flashback.

    Ummm, yeh I think we’ve had enough… but feel free to drop a pun my way anytime. I’ll give it a good home :)

  3. Souffle looks great – well done. Souffles should be a bit runny in the middle – maybe the consistency of barely cooked scrambled eggs. The idea when serving a large souffle is that you get some of the firmer outside and some of the softer inside. Yum! Souffles are my emergency meal if someone comes to dinner unexpectedly – quick, easy, ingredients always in the fridge. With good wine and a salad, instant dinner.

  4. Tracy: Thanks for the info… I think i might have over cooked mine a bit then, as the first time I took them out, thats almost exactly how they were… but then for some reason i thought they needed a bit more… Still it wasn’t dry and rubbery… and it’s probably why the nude look worked..

    Jules: I’m glad I’ve convinced someone to do something :) It’s a great book.

  5. Hi Matt, the souffle looks joy, all chocolatey and warm. I haven’t used my oven in the six weeks I’ve lived here so maybe you’ve convinced two people to do something and I’ll see how it works, even if I make something less scary. :-)

  6. Brush off those cobwebs and give it a go Dee :) Winter is on the way… I think a nice roast pumpkin soup would be a perfect way to rekindle you and your ovens love :)

  7. Here’s a quick version…

    Peel and cut up some pumpkin. Pop it into a roasting dish with lots of good extra virgin olive oil and some spices (fennel & coranider seeds), and into the oven until its done.

    Then throw all of it into the food processor and mush it up.

    Then into a pot on the stove and add a little milk or cream until you’ve got the consistency you want… A bit of salt and black pepper… Some sour cream and chives to top… and a big slice of crusty bread… and voila :)

    No reason to ever leave my site again… mwahaha.

Leave a Reply