Last thursday was a national holiday so I had time. Guess what I did? Rrright! I made a soufflé. 

 

Didn´t I write about the nice spring-y weather last week? Well it´s gotten all gray and rainy. Again.

I could also need a kick in the butt to finally start doing serious work for my bachelor thesis... Any suggestions anyone? 

Somehow I managed to not do much this week. I did, however, develop some good plans and strategies to keep my mind off that thesis. Suddenly I´m planning to write a novel, found a gazillion books to read, thought of craft projects, checked half my cook books for the next thing to cook... Procrastinating deluxe! 

This has a good side though: I challenged two friends to make something with or from Rhubarb. Looking forward to that! 

I seriously haven`t had as much time in the past 15 year as I have now. The chance to try some stuff I always wanted to make, right? For a couple of years now I wanted to make Soufflé. But somehow... I was scared. It sounds so difficult. I tried anyways.

Since Soufflé struck me as something delicate and not to be messed with I used a recipe and completely stuck with it! None (!) of my books had a recipe it in so I used one by one of Germany`s/Austria´s best known TV-chefs, Johan Lafer. I´m not a particularly big fan of his but I wanted to make sure that this Soufflé was going to be at least edible.

So here it is: 

Ingredients:

50g Butter

50g Flour

200ml Milk

4 Eggs

Vanilla (I used extract)

Sugar and Butter for the dishes

Nice short list, right? 

First things first: Preheat the oven to 200°C 

Butter the soufflé dishes, the pour sugar in and make sure it sticks to the butter. All over the place, baby! 

 Sugared dishes

Melt the butter in a pot. Make sure it doesn´t brown. 

Molten butter

Add the flour the butter, stir well and make sure you don´t get floury clumps. What you have now is a roux. A very buttery roux but in theory you could go on and make some delicious sauces with this. 

Let it simmer a bit, keep stirring and don´t let it darken. 

 Butter & Flour = Roux

In the meanwhile bring the milk and vanilla to a boil. 

 Vanillamilk... Mmmmh.... Reminds me of elementary school....

Add the vanillamilk to the roux. Mix well, mix fast, you don´t want clumps and bumps.

I thought after that I´d have a batter. But it just looks... funny. 

Transfer the blob to a bowl and add the four eggyolks. 

I was very much afraid that a) the eggyolks would inspissate and I´d have egg chunks or b) the yolks wouldn´t mix properly at all and I´d have a blob, painted eggy- yellow. 

Yes, I was highly suspicious of that blob.  I thought this was going to be one big fail.

But the yolks made a handsome batter out of the blob. A bit sticky but looking good.

Finally: batter!

In a seperate bowl (doh!) beat the eggwhites until you can play with them by holding the bowl over your head without being showered in eggwhites: Beat them stiff! This should be easier, legend has it, if you add a pinch of salt at the beginning. When the egg starts to stiffen, slowly add the sugar. 

Resist the urge to make meringue instead. 

Carefully fold in the eggwhites. This was not as easy as it seems because the yellow batter formerly known as the blob proved to be quite... resistant. It did work out in the end, though.

Fluffy Soufflébatter...

Now fill the (already pretty yummy) batter into the sugared soufflé dishes.

Now put them in the oven and let them bake for 12-15 minutes. 

Do not, I repeat, do not open the oven to sneak a peek in. There is no baking powder or something similar in your soufflés and you still want them to rise, right? They´re shy, give them a bit of privacy. 

Now, I set my kitchen timer to 14 minutes. My oven isn´t the fastest. After what felt like an hour to me i got suspicious because I hadn´t heard the alarm go off yet. Obviously either my kitchen timer is broken or I was too stupid to turn it on. Anyways, I had to open the oven and take a look and my soufflé turned out to be done but a little bit too brown. 

If you try this, make sure you set the alarm correctly. Make sure they are goldenbrown, not slightly-charred-wood-brown like mine...

Still came out ok: 

Outside...

...and in.

Very tasty. Very fluffy on the inside with a nice crust and the sugar in the dishes melts to a great caramel... They do collapse pretty fast so eat them immediately.

I for my part can´t wait to try it again, this time maybe chocolate? Or something savory? Ooooh, cheese-soufflé.... 

Overall: Yes, it´s a bit tricky, but not as bad as people say it is. You do not need to tip toe around your kitchen or whisper around a soufflé, it just wants to get ready all by itself. Understandable, right?

Go ahead, try it. It´s very good and it sounds so impressive! :D

Thanks for reading.

Love, 

a*