Vidalia Sweet Onion and Crab Soufflé

Jeffrey Buben: Hi! I am Jeff Buben of Vidalia Restaurant and Bistro Bis. We're doing Vidalia onion recipes today and we're going to show you how to make a wonderful lump crabmeat in Vidalia onion souffl. It makes a fabulous appetizer if you do them in a smaller container. You can do it in a larger souffl container for larger party, makes a great brunch item, great lunch entre or a really elegant starter for dinner party.

Souffls, everybody gets little nervous about souffls, I get nervous about souffls because you never know what's going to happen once you put them in the oven. We're going to try to take a little of a mystery out and show you how simple it is. For this recipe, we're going to use our sweet Vidalia onions again. This time we're going to take the onion, cut it in half and we want a minced onion for this. We want that beautiful sweet flavor and we want that nice little crunchy sweetness in there, but we don't want it to be the main focus of this recipe. The main focus of this recipe is going to be the lump crabmeat.

So we're going to take our onion and basically cut it in half using the root end, hold it again, then finally make slices all the way to the root end and all way across. Come back, make 1-2 slices across and then just crosscut until you have a fine mince on your onion, very simple. Sometimes chefs will take and cut a little bit of an angle down like that and a little bit of angle down on this side, just so when it comes back to the middle, you don't end up with flesh.

There you have beautiful minced onion. We have our butter, we have two tablespoons of butter. We have two pinches of chard and we have one cup of clean jumbo lump crabmeat. When you buy the crabmeat, just make sure that you pick out any shell that might be in there, keep it on ice when you do it and then we're going to saut that just lightly. We're going to need a 10-inch saut pan to saut these ingredients and this will be the next step for the base of our souffl.

Let's get started. We'll heat our pan, gently heat it because the crabmeat is already cooked. We just want to cook the onions so they are a little translucent, melt the butter. We'll add our onions. A little trick with Vidalia onions on the stove: if you want to caramelize Vidalia onion, don't add your salt until after the onions are cooked. By adding the salt, you'll extract water from the onion and you will have less caramelization. In this particular recipe, we just want a light translucent onion, we don't want any color on it. So we're just going to let that saut. So in this particular recipe, we are going to salt, little freshly ground salt, freshly ground pepper, let those onions cook for about 2-3 minutes. Just gently turn them so they are nice and soft and beautifully sweet. To that we're going to add our crabmeat. Again, the crabmeat is cooked so we just want to gently pull the crabmeat in with a pinch or two chas, almost about a pinch and that's about two pinches. We're just going to warm that crabmeat and it's that simple. We just turn that for about another minute on the fire. Turn the fire off and set that aside and there you have your crab and Vidalia onion for your souffl.

In the next segment, we're going to make our bchamel which is a standard bchamel that's good for all souffl recipes, both savory and sweet. So once we make that you're going to know how to make a souffl. We're going to take all the mystery out of it and we're going to get this recipe off the ground and into the oven.