Berry soufflé with a fresh berry sauce — perhaps the fanciest dessert I've ever made, and not
that hard. As with any soufflé, the downside is you cannot make it in advance. But you
can take it up to a certain point in advance. Eat dinner, chill for awhile, make the soufflé
and then have it with a nightcap.
With my recipe here, the berry sauce is both the garnish and the flavor and the color for
the soufflé base, so it's pretty efficient. These are six ounce, 170g boxes of berries.
Two of them for just two portions. Raspberries and blueberries are a good combination. And
you could take a few of the prettiest ones out to reserve for a garnish at the end.
A tablespoon of granulated sugar in there, 12 grams. And then I'ma get my potato masher
and mash these up but you could use just about any means of destruction at your disposal.
Fresh raspberries are super delicate so this probably isn't even necessary for them. But
the blueberries have stronger skins. They need a little help popping open.
I will say, you might want a little more sauce than this recipes makes. I'm just trying to
be efficient because fresh berries are expensive. But you could totally throw an extra box of
whatever berries in here and another big pinch of sugar, it'd be fine.
So my heat is on medium, and now I need to stir it pretty constantly to keep anything
on the bottom from burning and help everything just break down. I'm looking to see the plant
tissues in there fall apart — you'll see the sauce loosen up at first as more juice
gets released, and the color will deepen. Lots of color cooking out of the blueberry
skins, I think.
I simmered that for about 5 minutes. And it's ok if it seems like there's still good stuff
locked in the solids because now we take a bowl and a sieve, dump everything in and grind
with a wooden spoon. Push and scrape in circles until you just have a ball of seeds and skin
left.
Make sure you scrape off the sauce clinging to the underside. And now you should have
about a cup of sauce that tastes like artisanal Pop-Tarts. Give that sauce pan a rinse, just
to get out any chunks.
Get two eggs and bowl big enough to whip them in. Crack them into said bowl, and now I'll
separate out the yolks. These eggs are real fresh, so this is gonna be a two-hand job
— the yolks are clinging to the whites. Yolks go into the saucepan, which should have
cooled down by now.
With the yolks we'll have another two tablespoons of granulated sugar, 24g. Grab a whisk and
mix those up. You'll definitely want a real whisk for this recipe, not a fork or anything.
Then my starch will be two tablespoons of cornstarch, 16g. You can make soufflé with
a butter and flour roux, but the cornstarch gets you a lighter, more marshmallowy consistency
that I want here.
There's not enough liquid in the pan to disperse all that starch, so I'ma grab about 2/3s of
my sauce, 2/3 of a cup, 160 mL, and gradually drizzle that in as I whisk. It's just important
to get all the starch granules dispersed in a thick slurry before you add in too much
more liquid. If there's too much water all at once, the starch will clump up.
That's pretty smooth, and the last thing I'll put in will be a tablespoon of butter, 14g,
heat on low. The classical way of cooking a soufflé base is to cook your butter and
flour roux, bring the liquid up a simmer and whisk that gradually into the eggs and the
sugar, preferably over a double boiler.
With this recipe, I've found it's pretty safe to just put everything in a cold pan and heat
it directly over a low flame as long as you whisk nonstop and don't take your eye off
it. If you stop whisking and/or if you heat it up too fast, you risk getting scrambled
eggs.
If you get the butter melted in and you've been whisking for a couple minutes and nothing
is happening, you might need to up the heat a little bit, but be careful. Slow and steady
wins this race. After five minutes of whisking, all of a sudden there's my egg proteins coagulating.
You can see it. Gotta keep whisking so they don't clump up in curds. A minute after that,
there's my cornstarch gelatinizing. That happens at a higher temperature and you have to wait
for it. Luckily it's easy to see.
And now we're done. Get that off the heat, let it cool. Everything thus far can be done
in well advance. When you're ready to bake, it's time to beat the eggs whites until they
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So with my egg yolks I'll put in a tiny pinch of cream of tartar, but you use a few drops
of lemon juice or something. That will stabilize the foam, as will a little pinch of salt,
and the dessert needs a little salt anyway. Beat that until you get the egg whites pretty
stiff, when they start to look glossy and leave trails like that.
Now for about 40g of sugar. You could use granulated sugar, but powdered sugar gets
you a finer texture and a much smoother, prettier top on the soufflé. That's a third of a cup
of powdered sugar, and I'm beating it into the egg whites in two batches, because it's
a lot of sugar, and too much at once could collapse the foam.
Now you just beat this on full blast until you have pretty stiff peaks, like those. Last
thing — just a little splash of vanilla. Too much will mess with the purple color.
A couple ramekins would be the standard baking vessels, but I'ma use a couple teacups, because
they're prettier and they have handles. Melt just a little butter and then lightly grease
the insides. Classically trained chefs always talk about how you must use vertical strokes
on a soufflé mold, and I'm always like, well, how else could you physically do it with a
brush?
Now we take a little of this meringue and just whisk it mercilessly into the cooled
soufflé base. We're gonna collapse that bit of foam. It doesn't matter. We just need to
lighten the base up a bit so we can more easily fold it into the rest of the meringue.
The classical way of doing this really works. Cut and fold, cut and fold — nice and gently,
trying to get to a homogenous mix in as few moves as possible. We don't want to deflate
the foam too much. Though honestly, soufflés are so light that you really can afford to
loose a fair bit of air here. The thing is still gonna rise. Glossy and gorgeous, that
is..
Time to pack in the batter, all the way to the brim, and push it down to make sure you
don't have any big air pockets that could throw off the cooking. All the way to the
top and then smooth it off. These are standard teacups, about 200 mL. I tried doing a bigger
portion in a tall coffee cup and I could never get the center cooked enough. The dimensions
just weren't right.
Here's another classical trick that really works. Take your thumb and scoop a little
lip out of the top, right around the rim. I've tested this, it's worth it. It keeps
the soufflé's little muffin top from drooping over the sides as it expands. How many of
us know about that problem in our own lives?
Last thing, I'ma take a damp paper towel and clean these cups a bit, because the baking
dish is the serving dish. My oven is at 375ºF, 190ºC, not convection. Obviously, google
your teacups to find out if they're oven safe, but if they're normal stoneware, they probably
are. That glaze fired in a 2000ºF kiln. It's gonna be fine that oven for like 20 minutes.
While you're waiting, you can clean up and pour the remaining third of a cup of sauce
into an attractive little serving spout, if you have one. That sauce is maybe a hair tart
and under-sweet on its own, but on the soufflé it'll be the perfect counterpoint.
I've been baking about 18 minutes, and things are looking pretty gorgeous. When the tops
are just a little golden brown, the inside is generally perfect. Those need another minute
or two. But I like to pull these when they're still pretty wobbly, which you can assess
by just tapping the cup a bit. I think soufflés should be a little gooey inside. If it's solid,
it's just a sponge cake.
Soufflés start to deflate, or "fall," the instant you take them out of the oven and
the steam subsides, so the trick is to eat them right when they're just cool enough to
not burn you. I let these sit until I could touch their handles.
You could spank on a little powdered sugar if you want, maybe put a few of those reserved
berries on top. And then a pretty common way to apply sauce is to dig a little hole in
the center — see, inflated but still gooey — and then pour your sauce into that little
crater, kinda like filling a jelly donut.
In addition to tasting absolutely delicious, the sauce helps visually. As gorgeous as soufflés
look on the outside, they always look disgusting inside, and the sauce kinda covers that up.
You can see how the edge pulls away from the cup, because we buttered the inside.
I am really happy with this recipe. That is seggsy food. A perfect date-night situation,
and again, not that hard, though I would recommend trying it at least once before the big night
if you've never done a soufflé before.
That is just fruity velvet on a cloud.