Cheese Soufflé

On a bright January day, the Bridge and Tunnel Club set out to make a cheese soufflé using a recipe from The Cooking of Provincial France, one of the books in the Foods of the World series published by Time-Life Books in 1968. Grease up your ramekin and remember that you can't make a soufflé without breaking more than a few eggs...

Here is what you need to make a soufflé au fromage that feeds four:
4 tablespoons of butter
Enough cheese -- Swiss, gruyere, Jarlsberg, etc. -- to grate about a cup and a half
3 tablespoons flour
1 cup of milk
1/2 teaspoon of salt
Pinch of white pepper
6 eggs

Did you really grease up your ramekin? If not, get out one tablespoon of butter and get down to business. Ideally you want a 1 or 2 quart size ramekin for this recipe. If you must use a shallow mold or straight-sided casserole dish, just use some baker's thread to tie a paper collar around the dish. Be sure to butter the paper really well, unless you like soufflé au papier. When the dish is done, make sure you place a shelf in the middle of your oven, crank it up to 400F, and start grating your cheese.

Any cheese that you can grate will work, and we selected an inexplicable blend of parmigiano reggiano and Jarlsberg. If you have one handy, use a microplane grater to make very thin strands of cheese.

Take 2 tablespoons of the cheese you just grated and dust the inside of your buttery ramekin. Set it aside.

Time to break the eggs, separating yolk from white.

In one saucepan, heat up the milk. In another saucepan, melt 3 tablespoons of butter over moderate heat and add the flour as soon as the foam subsides. Cook over low heat for a few minutes, but do not let the roux brown. It might be a coincidence that roux rhymes with glue, but the former can quickly become the latter if you don't stir the mixture constantly.

Remove the pan containing the roux from heat and pour in the hot milk. Whisk until the mix is completely blended. Stir in salt and pepper and return to low heat, cooking until the sauce comes to a boil and appears smooth and thick. Remove from heat again, whisking in four egg yolks in one at a time.

Keep on whisking like mad until it's fully blended, then you can let it rest away from heat.

Now the real fun begins: you have to whip the egg whites until they form "firm, stiff peaks."

If you do this by hand, you'd better have a bionic arm or a couple of helpers to take turns. For a while it'll just look like foam.

We soon switched to a mixer, which made much quicker work of the whites. They'll start to form thick foam after a few minutes.

Don't stop whipping until the foam will stay on the whisk without dripping and you can make an indentation on the surface with a fingertip.

Now start to put it all together by carefully adding a spoonful or two of the whites to the roux-milk mix.

Use a broad spoon or a spatula to fold the whites in gently. Use an over-under slicing motion rather than a whisking or stirring motion.

Stir in the cheese a little bit at a time, reserving a few pinches for later.

Here's the trickiest part: fold the remaining whites into the roux, a bit at a time, until they are mixed. It's essential to maintain as much fluff as possible. Remember: over-under slicing, not whisking or stirring.

Pour the mixed glop into that ol' greasy ramekin.

Go slowly to keep the fluff. You should fill your dish about three-quarters of the way.

When it's all in there, smooth over the top with a spatula. If you'd like to have a lovely "crown" shape to the top, carve a trench around the edge of the soufflé about one inch in from the rim.

Sprinkle the top with the cheese you reserved earlier and you're all ready to bake.

Put your concoction on the middle rack of the oven and close the door tight. Immediately lower the temperature to 375F.

Resist the urge to open the door while it cooks.

Our soufflé didn't rise past the top of the ramekin because we used one that was three quarts, a bit too large for this recipe. You can see that it did rise, but at this checkpoint it hadn't browned yet.

This is how it looked when finished. You should bake it for about 25 to 30 minutes, and you'll know it's done when it's 2 inches past the rim of your ramekin and/or the top is lightly browned. It rose, it crowned, it browned -- perfect.

Eat it! Quick! It's going to fall! We suggest serving cheese soufflé alongside a baby spinach salad with proscuitto, fresh mozzarella, and black mission figs. Remember, it's just like a fluffy quiche.

Scoop it out, slap it on your plate, and enjoy.