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Vidalia Onion Dishes

Making the Base for Vidalia Sweet Onion and Crab Soufflé

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Jeffrey Buben
Chef / Owner, Vidalia and Bistro Bis Restaurants
www.vidaliadc.com  
202-659-1990 or 202-661-2700

Winner of the James Beard Foundation's "Best Chef Mid-Atlantic 1999", Jeffrey Buben is the chef and owner of two prestigious restaurants in Washington, D.C., Vidalia and Bistro Bis.  Acknowledged by Bon Appétit as one of the "Best New Restaurants of 1993," Vidalia has garnered both local and national recognition with its regional American cooking delivered with Southern hospitality. 

 

Renovated in the summer of 2003, Vidalia has consistently been awarded three stars since October 2003 from the Washington Post food critic, Tom Sietsema and top honors by Washingtonian Magazine's "Top 100" list since 1994.  Vidalia has also been the recipient of the prestigious DiRona award by the Distinguished Restaurants of North America each year since 1996.  The restaurant's wine program has received the Wine Spectator's "Best of Award of Excellence" 2005, 2006 and 2007 and the Wine Enthusiast's "Award of Distinction" in January 2006.   A vote by America Online users named Vidalia as the number one restaurant in the "City's Best Restaurants 2007."

 

The fall of 1998 heralded the arrival of Buben's second restaurant, Bistro Bis located at the Hotel George on Capitol Hill.  Bis features creative contemporary French bistro cooking with updated renditions of classic fare.  Bis was voted one of "Washington's Best New Restaurants to Watch" by Washingtonian Magazine in 1999.  Washingtonian's "Top 100" in 2007 listed Bistro Bis in the top third of the city and the restaurant has been included in the magazine's "Top 100 Restaurants" since 2002. The Washington Post has recognized Bis in numerous years as a top dining destination and applauded for the "best onion soup" in the area.  Nominated since 2005 by the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington for "Restaurant Power Spot," Bis continues to be the place "Where Capitol Hill Dines."  The Mobil Travel Guide, AOL City's Best consistently rank Bistro Bis in the top tier as "Best Hot Spot Restaurant" and as a "Power Lunch destination. 

 

Jeffrey Buben is a 1978 graduate of The Culinary Institute of America and has served on the school's alumni board of directors.  With over 20 years in the industry, he has worked in such notable restaurants as The Sign of the Dove, Le Cygne and Le Chantilly in New York and at several distinguished hotels including The Four Seasons, The Mayflower and The Hotel Pierre.  Voted "Chef of the Year" in 1996 by The Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, Jeff continues to work tirelessly to contribute to many different charitable organizations including Share Our Strength, Food & Friends and the Wine Advocate Fund for Philanthropy to name a few. 

 

Jeffrey is a partner with his wife Sallie in the Fully-Baked Restaurant Group, which owns and manages Vidalia Restaurant and Bistro Bis in Washington, D.C.

Making the Base for Vidalia Sweet Onion and Crab Soufflé

Learn hos to make the custard bechamel base for the Sweet Onion and Crab Souffle.  You can use this as a base for many creative souffles. 

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Making the Base for Vidalia Sweet Onion and Crab Soufflé

Ingredients

(Serves 4)

5 tablespoons butter

¼ cup vidalia onion, minced

1 cup lump crab meat

2 tablespoons chives, minced

3 tablespoons flour, all purpose

1 cup milk, brought to boiling point

½ teaspoon salt

⅛ teaspoon white pepper

pinch cayenne pepper

pinch nutmeg, freshly grated

4 egg yolks

5 egg whites

¼ cup gruyere or swiss cheese, grated

salt and pepper to taste

butter and flour for soufflé mold

Instructions

 
  1. Butter and flour a 6-cup soufflé mold.  Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
  2. Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a medium sauté pan.  Add vidalia onions and cook for two minutes.  Add the crab meat and cook until heated through.  Add chives and a pinch of salt and white pepper to taste.  Set aside.
  3. Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a sauce pan.  Whisk in 3 tablespoons flour and cook over moderate heat for about two minutes.  Remove from heat.  Pour in the hot milk and beat with wire whisk until smooth.  Add salt, white pepper, cayenne and nutmeg.  Return to heat and whisk for one minute until thickened.  Remove from heat and beat in egg yolks one at a time.  Stir into the crab meat mixture, correct seasoning and set aside as the base.
  4. Beat the egg whites until stiff.  Gently stir in half of the egg white mixture into the base from step three above.  Stir in the cheese and a pinch of salt.  Fold in the remaining egg whites.  Pour mixture into prepared mold.
  5. Place on middle rack in the oven and bake 25 to 30 minutes until the soufflé is golden brown.  Serve immediately.
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Transcripts

Jeffrey Buben: Hi! I'm Jeff Buben of Vidalia Restaurant and Bistro Bis. We're back with more Vidalia onion recipes. This one is our Vidalia onion and lump crabmeat souffl, great entre for lunch, dinner or great appetizer for an elegant dinner and let me take you to the ingredients of our next step. This is the bchamel. This is base for all souffls both savory and sweet. Some sweet recipes use a pastry cream, but for savory souffl, a bchamel is great.

We're going to take three tablespoons of butter, three tablespoons of flour, one cup of milk, four egg yolks. We're separated the egg whites for the second part of our souffl. We have a quarter cup of Gruyre cheese. We have salt, freshly ground pepper, a little pinch of nutmeg, a little pinch of cayenne and we're going to need today a medium heat again. We're going to take a medium saucepan and get started.

We're going to take our butter, add our butter to the pan, melt our butter, let that melt nice and beautiful. Then we're going to make a roux, the roux is flour and butter, usually equal parts in most recipes that you'll find. So we're going to melt our butter down and the flour is going to grain -- the flour will be added to that. The most important part about a bchamel is letting the flour and the butter cook completely so we've cooked all the starch out. That will have a much cleaner taste and a much richer taste in the bchamel and you won't have that floury taste to it.

The one thing you don't want to do is you don't want to over-color your butter or your flour or you'll make a brown roux and then you will need to cook that and you'll have a completely different recipe. So once our butter is melted, we'll add the flour. Again, when you're mixing dry ingredients, everything needs to go in at one time, stir vigorously to get it all incorporated and get the lumps out. And as you see what's happening, the butter is starting to incorporate nice and smooth with that flour and we're letting that cook. You see, once it kind of pulls away from the bottom of the pan, that's usually an indication that the flour is completely absorbed with the butter and you've achieved that and you kind of want a little bit of a sandy finish to it as what it's referred to.

To that we're going to add our milk, and if you have a hot roux, you want to add the cold milk. It's always good to add opposite extremes of temperature and not like streams. Continue stirring and so well incorporated. Now, in order for that flour to react with the milk and create our bchamel, we need to make sure that it comes to a complete boil, because at that point, we will have absorbed all the flour in the butter and absorbed all that starch into the liquid and we'll create the right texture for the bchamel. We continue to stir that. Now we have it all incorporated, we just have to wait for it to come up. That looks wonderful!

To that we're going to add a grated Gruyre cheese because we want that to melt, we don't want it to cook too far. We let that melt in the cheese, get that melted in nice and beautiful and you see how that's sticking it up and the cheese is melting at the same time. There we have our thick bchamel, nice and beautiful, look at that, a silky bchamel. That's what we're looking for, that beautiful creamy texture, full achieved, nice and gorgeous. Now we have to season that with a little freshly ground pepper, 2-3 turns, a little salt. I like to put a little cayenne for just a little zip to that and a little freshly grated nutmeg, kind of, adds a sweet spiciness to the bchamel. With that to incorporate that, remove it from the fire, let it cool down slightly before we add our egg yolks and the reason we want to do that is just so we don't cook the egg yolks in the bchamel. So we add slowly our egg yolks to the bchamel, one at a time, or just until you can get them incorporated. There we have our egg yolks inside our bchamel, again it's still, same beautifully creamy. The egg yolks are in, they have incorporated well and there you have the base for your souffl, your bchamel.

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