Chocolate Souffle
Tonight, I fulfilled my reasonable dream of making a souffle. At around 9pm, I decided that tonight was the night. At 9:05pm, I realized that I needed to run out to the store to get eggs. By 10:00pm, I was back at home with the requisite eggs, ready to whip and beat -- the souffle, that is.
In making Île Flottante for the second FL party, I felt that I had erred on the side of underbeating the egg whites. So this time, I vowed to not make the same mistake.
Which, naturally, resulted in my overbeating the egg whites. :D
This error resulted in the inability to easily fold the beaten egg whites into chocolate + beaten egg yolk mixture, as the whites were so stiff that they fairly crumbled into the mixture. Because they were harder to mix in, I felt that a lot of the lift was lost in the process. In trying to compensate for losing the lift, I tried not to over-fold. You can see how this kept snowballing. :)
The ramikins were slightly smaller than those suggested in the recipe, so I ended up overbaking the souffles, which meant no soft, warm, liquidy center for me. Boo.
So for next time:
- Definitely take care not to overbeat
- Cook for less than the 16.5 minutes I cooked them this time around
They came out of the oven at around 11pm. We served this with crème anglaise to people who were awake at the house.
I was surprised by how fast the process was. There was just enough baking time that I could clean up all the bowls I had used in the process. This is a recipe I'll keep working on for some time to come. Let me know if you want to be a guinea pig. :)
posted by ei-nyung at
11:51 PM
4 Comments:
I guess I can take one for the team.... all in the name of science, mind you. :D
In a strange coincidence, I had chocolate souffle for dessert last night (Aperto, mmmm). It was a huge disappointment. It was so undercooked that the cake-part around the outside wasn't strong enough to hold the souffle together and the whole thing was presented in a liquidly puddle of collapsed cake part and raw insides. I held out some hope, but the ratio of solid to molten was all wrong, and the solid part was too raw itself and had none of that slight almost crunchy firmness you want. Boo!
My brain is breaking. I love Aperto's souffles so much that I wanted to learn to make chocolate souffles, which is what led me to make the ones I did.
But it wasn't good for you? :'(
The ones I usually get from Aperto are generally very very liquidy in the center, but not "so undercooked that the cake-part around the outside wasn't strong enough to hold the souffle together" so for the sake of my own reality holding together (:) I hope it was an off night. Usually, I can stick my spoon in it before it falls apart. But that still sucks and I am sorry for the disappointing experience. :(
I'm fairly certain it was an anomaly. The souffle arrived looking like someone had not only already stuck their spoon in it, but had ripped it open. I would have thought that it was just a bad de-ramakin-ing and plating, but like I said the cake was too thin and soft to imagine that it ever held the souffle together. :/
But the duck was AMAZING.
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