My First Souffle

After I moved here and unpacked my belongings, I needed to test my kitchen out. See if the oven worked, figure out where would be best to do my cooking prep, and get used to the new locations of the fridge, knife drawer, and pantry. What better way to do this than to try and make a type of food never before attempted by me - souffle!

Watching people on TV make souffle, I thought it was going to be a disaster. Egg whites, an oven I am not accustomed to, all those stories of souffles falling. I chose to make Gritty Souffle (found in Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food: food x mixing + heat = baking) because I like Alton and his recipes, I got the cookbook for Christmas, and I had all the ingredients. The last reason is usually is the deciding factor. Some days, I will go to allrecipes.com and use their ingredient search in hopes of finding something I can make using, say, garlic, eggs, dried fruit, spinach, and bittersweet chocolate. Some days it is success, some days I go without. Hopefully the list I made would have resulted in a "without" day - garlic and chocolate? Not so much.

Back to the souffle. It is grits, but in a souffle. Or, if you want to make it sound a little more "high class" polenta souffle. It's French, it's Italian - it's Fritalian! The preparation of the souffle is close to Alton's recipe for Cheesy Souffle, but not quite. After making the grits, I was faced with a recipe step I was unfamiliar with - making egg foam (meringue, more or less). And, even though I added the cream of tartar with the egg whites at the beginning, and not after they got a little foamy, everything worked out just fine and fluffy egg whites were achieved.

Next most difficult task - folding the egg whites into the grits. It is important here to not stir, but fold, so that the egg foam does not deflate. I am not sure there is any way of knowing if I did this well or not until the souffle comes out of the oven and it is either a fluffy poof or a pancake. Waiting 45 minutes to find out was nerve-wracking. And, even after 45 minutes, the souffle could have fallen.

Thankfully, it did not and it turned out spectacular. Something it looks like was super hard. But it wasn't, it was rather simple.

It tasted pretty good, too. The garlic flavor really came out, and the garlic I used was not the best I have gotten and I used too much. I also did not have cheddar cheese (I cannot recall what cheese I used), so that would have better balanced the flavors. The best part of the whole thing is getting an "edge" piece because it has Parmesan cheese baked onto it (that is what Alton coated the sides with). Salty, crunchy, buttery, with airy souffle.