Sohla Makes Edna Lewis' Cheese Soufflé | At Home With Us

how are you doing i'm just gonna watch it and just just watch it just watch it poof you can dance huh look at that you can make noise it'll be okay it's not magic but it's fun to watch it poof [Music] hi i'm sola a food 52 resident and today i'm going to show you how to make edna lewis's cheese souffle it's lots of cheese lots of souffle so we're going to start with two tablespoons of butter extra butter for greasing up our pan two tablespoons of flour here we have half a teaspoon kosher salt a teaspoon of dry mustard and a quarter teaspoon of cayenne a cup of milk three egg yolks five egg whites and then the good stuff we've got some very fancy schmancy extra sharp white cheddar and gruyere for the recipe she tells you to start by preheating your oven to 425 degrees which i've done and we're going to do a little bit of prep before we get into anything so i'm going to butter a one and a half quart souffle dish well i don't actually have a souffle dish but i've made this before you can really use whatever vessel you've got that's about one and a half quarts this is my rice pot it's exactly one and a half quarts so that's what i'm gonna be using today and it's like it's kind of like a souffle dish like it's tall it's gonna do what it needs to do i've also done this like in individual portions you could do this in six coffee mugs that are like heat proof which is really cute so you can get individual souffles for all your friends and fam if you haven't made a souffle this is a good one to start with it's really just like basic cheesy delicious i really like the addition of like mustard and cayenne the thing that really surprised me with edna lewis is um it says southern cooking but there's a lot of french influence in there that's what's really cool with southern cooking there's like there's influence from all over my oven is preheating edna wants you to pop this on top of the oven so it stays warm for when we go to fill it up you know a lot of people put a collar on the souffle that's like a restaurant thing the collar and then there's like a little thumb trick that you go around and even it out that makes sure that it rises like tall and straight but it doesn't really matter you know it it's gonna still taste good i don't care if it's a little bit wonky i don't need like a perfect straight tall souffle you know i like the o natural vibe save your parchment for something else all right so next we're going to grate our cheese this is all about the cheese i got some i got some good stuff i got some really good stuff when food 52 accounting sees my receipts they will see how good this stuff is this is a very expensive souffle that someone else is paying for but get the best cheese you can find because it's that's like the main flavor here it's all about the cheese so i'm grating five ounces of sharp i got like i got really good this is like the really good cheddar where it has like those little crystals in it from the aging you know what i'm talking about you know what i'm talking about this is the good stuff so get get the best cheese you can afford if someone else is paying for it get the best cheese out there so just grating it on a box crater this is gonna make sure that it melts quickly and evenly into our mornay sauce so the base of a chi souffle is is a mornay sauce that we then add whipped egg whites to and that's really it because it's french it sounds fancy but it's just like their version of queso you know it's like fluffy queso you've made queso you've eaten queso you can make a souffle you're like halfway there so the most important thing is don't use something like american cheese that's not gonna not only does that not have much flavor but the texture is going to be a little bit weird because that stuff has a lot of emulsifiers which is good sometimes but it's not good for a souffle so just go for the best cheddar and the best gruyere or swiss style cheese so something like emmenthaler or appenzeller or whatever you've got you know the kind of cheese with the holes in it we just want to make sure that it quickly and evenly melts into our sauce all right so we're going to start our mornae sauce by melting two tablespoons of butter in a saucepan i find it's easiest to whisk these kinds of sauces if you have a saucepan with rounded bottoms it's just easier for the whisk to get in there and you'll prevent a lot of lumps now we're going to let the butter totally melt and get foamy before we whisk in our flour the main thing with with making a sauce like this is love management that's the most important part make sure we fight the lumps from step one it has melted but i'm going to wait until it foams our butter is foaming and now i'm going to add our flour so it's important to wait till your butter foams because that's how you know that it's gotten hot enough butter is made up of a mixture of water and fat and it foams when the water in the butter is like you know reaching boiling temp so i added all the flour all at once and it's like instantly smooth we're not trying to get any color here we just want to cook off that raw floury taste so it's just going to take maybe a minute or two whisking the whole time to make sure that it heats evenly the color kind of goes from this yellowy to like a foamy white and that's how you know you're there and you know that your the raw taste from your flour has cooked off one really like common mistake people make when they're making bechamel or mornay is they just don't cook the flour enough and then you end up tasting it you can taste this like starchiness even through the cheese it's more likely to develop a really thick skin that way too if you don't cook out the starch i can smell it i can smell that the flour is getting toasty and that's how you know we are we are there so now i have one cup of milk that's just been barely warmed and once again lump management from the start so we're gonna drizzle in just a little bit at a time and you're going to see as soon as you drizzle it in it kind of gets tight and you're going to freak out just keep whisking whisking and as you finish adding in all of your milk it'll thin out oh god it's getting brown i was talking too much so after the first flash it looks real tight don't worry just keep adding no more than a tablespoon at a time in this beginning stage so we can ensure smooth morning action and because we're using warm milk it just comes together all like a little bit faster you want to make sure you're going to add a splash of milk and make sure it's nice and smooth before you add the next splash that's how you make sure you don't have lumps that's the most important thing here if you add all your milk at once i mean i've seen like i've seen jacques papen when he makes his uh mornay he puts all the milk in there at once but he's chocolate pan okay none of us are that good you cook it for one minute and it's done all right i'm gonna turn this off now i'm gonna switch to a rubber spatula and we are going to add our cheese look at this ratio of cheese to to sauce okay how is this not gonna be delicious i added the cheese first in the recipe and that puts the yolks in first and then the cheese but actually it's it doesn't matter it's totally gonna be okay right now we're just making a flavorful base sauce so however it comes together it just needs to come together so don't worry about it all right i'm adding three egg yolks and we're going to stir that in until it's nice and evenly mixed and then i'm going to add half a teaspoon of kosher salt a quarter teaspoon of cayenne and one full teaspoon of dry mustard this is going to season it up and it's really nice the the heat from the mustard and cayenne kind of gives you those like mac and cheese vibes i'm really into it so i'm just stirring this until it looks mostly mostly creamy mostly melted it's got some little bits that haven't totally melted but that's okay because it's going to hang out for a minute while we whip our eggs all right so i'm going to hold on the spatula because we're going to need it later for some folding action but right now i'm going to cover this and leave it on top of the warm stove to allow the rest of the cheese to just melt as it hangs out and while that happens we are gonna whip our egg whites here i have five egg whites clean bowl clean whisk and we just we're gonna whip it we're gonna whip it now we're going for soft peaks here because the souffle is all about puff you might think that you need stiff peaks but actually if you if you over whip it then what happens is when it goes in the oven it's got nowhere to go it's got too much air in it already so it'll just collapse when you have soft peaks what happens is there's just enough air in there so that when the it gets in the oven that air expands and there's still room for the egg white proteins to you know lift grow so soft speed nothing crazy don't lose your head the main thing with egg whites i found is that you need a bigger bowl than you think so you've got room for your whisk to like through so i'm using a whisk and doing it by hand because that's the way i know lewis does it but you can use a hand mixer or kitchenaid but one thing to keep in mind is because we want soft peaks it's very easy to over whip in one of those so just stop frequently and check and make sure you're not going too far it folds over that's what you want so if you look in the bowl when you lift up your whisk it should hold a little a little like a you know dairy queen swirl situation and it holds it on top of the whisk too so now when we get here you have to move quickly because there is no sugar there's no time you got to get folding quickly or this is just going to dry out and get really lumpy right in front of your eyes so we're going to fold our meringue into our base the way you do this is you want to do it in parts we're going to start with 1 3 of the mixture and with the first third of the mixture just get in there stir it in we're lightening up our base this is very heavy you're taking something very heavy and adding something very light so you got to kind of do it in stages now for the second third i'm gonna be a little more careful okay now we're going for more of a folding action so folding what you do is you wanna cut down the middle with your spatula and then kind of like scooch underneath your whole situation and fold it over i know i know it doesn't look like you're actually folding but you kind of are so it's like you cut and you scooch and you turn your bowl there's this whole wonderful thing that happens when you do that you were preserving all that air in that meringue that we we whipped by hand we took so much care to whip and i'm not gonna go until it's fully incorporated just there's some streaks in there at this point and that's okay now i'm adding my last third of egg whites and you can see it's only been sitting here for a moment and it's already looking dry because without sugar egg whites really don't live for very long we're getting in there we're folding this last bit for this last bit i'm going to try and make it mostly streak free but it's better to have some streaks than to lose all your volume if you take it all the way you're going to lose too much volume so i've got my warm dish quite warm i'm going to put this in now things are going to happen quickly i've got my warm dish i'm going to add my souffle mixture to it we're going to go into a 425 degree oven bake it for five minutes and then turn down the heat to 400 degrees and let it go for another 15. all right here we go batter is going in and now we're going right into the oven so 425 we start with this high heat which is gonna help the air bubbles in the foam that we just created expand lift and then we're going back down to 400 degrees and then it's going to kind of set we want to pull this out well it's still a little creamy in the middle so it's not going to be it doesn't take that long to cook 15 minutes the top's going to get golden brown it's going to lift we're going to have a little crusty cheesy thing on top and then the inside will be nice and creamy and gooey that's it that's a souffle you can make this you don't even need a mixer five minute timer you can't you have to be ready for your souffle your souffle won't wait for you make sure everything's ready if you want your souffle with the salad make your salad now if you want some bread get your bread ready now because when the souffle is ready it's go time okay we got eight minutes i said eight minutes a minute ago it must be like seven and a half seven look it just turned to seven seven minutes okay two minutes we've reached the top of the pan all right so i've got like a good i've got a good amount of poof i say it's poofed about uh 30 percent that's good poofage here we go oh boy look at that huh still a slight jiggle but the top is nicely set got a little poof it smells really cheesy not so bad not so hard nice brown top a little bit crisp from all that cheese but if you peek in there still moist now the key is this is going to deflate pretty quickly so you want to get you want to you want to knock it down before it knocks down on itself do you know what i mean take control your souffle so the best thing to do is get in there before it gets you get the souffle before it gets you so just go straight down the middle with a big spoon oh yeah the biggest spoon you got you know do you see how steamy what's really great is the edges get really brown from the contact with the pan i'm going to get a nice big scoop to serve myself so steamy it's set nicely cooked it's still really creamy but it's not raw you know what i mean there's a difference you don't want a raw souffle this is like custardy this really nice custardy interior to contrast the brown golden outside vibes and uh i mean there you go we did it i think this is a great lunch have it with a little bit of salad crusty bread look how steamy cheesy it's just a great excuse to eat really good cheese i mean it just looks like the best fluffy omelette in the world i'm gonna go in while it's hot make sure you serve this right away eat this right away you want to have this while it's hot i'm going to get a little bit of this crusty crusty from the edge a little bit of this saucy from the middle best of both worlds it's very hot because the main flavor here is the cheese i'm really glad that i went for that the best cheese i could find because you can really taste it i can get that nuttiness from the gruyere sharpness from the cheddar a little bit of funk and a little kick of cayenne and pepper in the back of your throat thanks edna this is a good souffle are you an auditory learner head over to play me a recipe a food 52 original podcast where you can listen to me make this recipe soothing sounds of cooking in the background while you cook we can cook along together [Music] you

Channel: Food52

Views: 193,217

Rating: 4.9469633 out of 5

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, sohla el-waylly, food52 sohla, edna lewis recipes, edna lewis cheese souffle, how to make souffle, how to make cheese souffle, cheese souffle, cheese souffle recipe, sohla souffle, eggs for dinner, easy fancy dishes, french cooking, brunch recipes, brunch recipes vegetarian, vegetarian main dishes, savory souffle, southern cooking

Id: hQdw1QBUoCk

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021