Cheese Soufflé - Preparing the Base

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How to Make a Cheese Soufflé

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Karen Stiegler

Culinary Instructor, Recipe Developer, Tester, www.pastrynomad.com

www.pastrynomad.com

pastrynomad@yahoo.com

Karen Stiegler is a culinary educator, recipe developer and recipe tester. Karen holds a Diplome de Patisserie from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and has been teaching American and French pastry and desserts in the U.S. and abroad for over 10 years. She is currently teaching for Williams-Sonoma, and offers group, private, and hands-on courses as well as professional pastry demonstrations in shops and restaurants, and also specializes in Healthy Baking. Karen also has extensive experience in catering of American desserts, cakes and candies. Karen spent three years in Paris researching and teaching French pastries and desserts to Americans abroad, founding her own pastry instruction program. Karen is also a professional cake decorator and instructor, and was Cake Decorating Instructor of the Year Worldwide Developmental Accounts in 2000 for Wilton Industries. Karen has a number of published recipes and also holds a Bachelors Degree in Journalism from Pepperdine University. She just completed work on a recipe and menu project for the newly opened Bazaar dining concept by Chef Jose Andres' of Jaleo, Washington, DC, including all restaurants in the new SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. Karen served as a personal chef to the British Ambassador in Oslo, Norway, where she also worked on recipe development, testing and a cookbook. She has lived in France, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Africa and Asia, and traveled extensively throughout the world, sampling all types of cuisine. Karen is a member of Les Dames d'Escoffier and well as Women Chefs and Restaurateurs professional organizations. A recipe of Karen's is included in the James Beard Award Finalist Cookbook, "Cooking with Les Dames d'Escoffier". Karen speaks French, Spanish, Norwegian and German. She has also worked for the National Restaurant Association.

Cheese Soufflé - Preparing the Base

Karen Stiegler from PastryNomad.com shows you how to prepare the base for the cheese souffle.

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Tags:

Cheese

Souffle

French

Cooking

Baking

Seperate eggs

Beat egg whites

Cheese sauce

Souffle mold

Cheese Soufflé - Preparing the Base

Ingredients

4 Tablespoons butter, plus 1 Tablespoon extra butter, softened

2 to 3 Tablespoons grated Parmesan

1/4 cup all-purpose flour

1 1/4 cups milk

1/4 teaspoon salt

6 ounces grated Gruyère or Emmenthal (Swiss) cheese

6 large eggs, separated

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

Instructions

1. Place the rack in the bottom third of your oven. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Generously butter a 2-quart ceramic or glass soufflé dish and sprinkle with the 2 to 3 Tablespoons Parmesan cheese to coat the bottom and sides.

2. Place the 4 Tablespoons of butter in a 2- to 3-quart saucepan on medium heat to melt. Add the flour. Using a wooden spoon, stir and cook until the mixture is smooth and bubbling, one to two minutes. Stir in the milk, and salt, and continue stirring and cooking until it develops into a sauce which thickens and boils, about three to four minutes. Remove from the heat.

3. Add the 6 ounces grated cheese and stir until melted. Add the 6 egg yolks and stir until the mixture is blended and smooth. Set aside this cheese sauce.

4. Place the 6 egg whites in a very clean, grease free stainless steel bowl, and fit an electric mixer with the whisk attachment. Beat the whites on medium speed until foamy. Then add the cream of tartar, turn to high speed, and beat until short, stiff, moist peaks form. Don’t overbeat.

5. Pour about 1/3 of the cheese sauce into the whites on one side of the bowl, and using a flexible spatula, begin to gently fold the cheese sauce into the whites. Add the remaining sauce in two more steps, folding gently until just blended.

6. Pour or spoon the batter into the prepared soufflé dish. Do not fill the mold more than ¾ full. Draw a circle on the surface of the soufflé batter with a small cake spatula or the tip of a knife, about one inch in from the rim, to help an attractive crown form during baking.

7. Bake the souffle until the top is deep brown in color, and cracks, looking fairly dry, 25 to 30 minutes. Do not open the door during baking!

8. Serve immediately after removing from oven, scooping portions from soufflé with a large spoon. Garnish with fresh herbs or a tomato sauce.

Transcripts

Karen Stiegler: Hi I am Karen Stiegler and I am showing you how to make a traditional cheese souffl. Now we are going to start with making the base for the souffl. So I have my sauce pan here and I have my four table spoons of butter. So I am just going to put this in my sauce pan. I am just going to turn it on like a minimum heat and get that melting. And then I have my other ingredients ready here, I have my flour ready to go, and my egg yolks and my milk and my cheese also that I pre-grated.

What we are doing is preparing the base for the souffl and is actually called a roux .

So we have just melted the butter and then we have a quarter cup of flour. So I am going to add that in and don't worry about the lumps, the lumps will work out. You want to just cook the flour and the butter together for a couple of minutes until the mixture starts to bubble. So once the mixture is bubbling and you have cooked it for a couple of minutes then it's ready to go and we want to pour in our milk. So we want to just stir this. What we are actually making now it's gone from a roux to a bchamel sauce. And we want to just stand here and stir this and it will thicken. The flour will cause the sauce to thicken. Now I can see it's getting thicker, I can see it on the back of the spoon a little bit. So we are getting very close now. So you can see now, it's no longer a liquid. It's a sauce because we can see the bottom of the pan and here we have a nice thick sauce. Now I have turned the heat off, we want to start the process of cooling down a little bit but just before that we are going to add all of our nicely grated cheese and Gruyere and Emmental are actually named after valleys in Switzerland.

So you need this to be hot so you can get that cheese melted and it starts smelling really terrific. Now you want to make sure that the cheese is totally melted before you add the egg yolks. It's going to cool the sauce down and suddenly cheese will start melting. It's very thick after I added the cheese and then I am going to add in my egg yolks, and this is going to give just a really terrific richness to the souffl. So it's kind of nice because you used the whole the whole egg, so I am just going to mix these in and you will see that it's a really nice golden mixture from those egg yolks and we are just going to let this cool now. So that is how we make the base for the souffl. And next we are going to talk about the eggs and beating the egg whites.