Julia Child's Classic Cheese Soufflé (1/24) Part Two

I'm an idiot. A good and much more experienced friend of mine pointed out that I might have overlooked an important part of the recipe: folding. Now, I've folded before for desserts, and I don't know why I didn't translate the technique to soufflés, but I didn't.  And that is, I guess, why I'm doing this project anyhow.  I'm learnding!

Now, the other thing I should mention before updating my first soufflé post in what is almost May is that I'm six soufflés into my project, but just haven't had time to post about them.  Ideally, I'll get them up in the next couple weeks.  Thanks for your patience as I try to find the time to consistently update this blog.  3L year of law school be crazy.  

But enough with the setbacks.  Let's take a look at attempt number three at Julia Child's Classic Cheese Soufflé.

The day started off with a couple familiar face.  Hello, milk and butter.  We meet again.

And as I noted in my last post on this recipe, I decided to double the amount of paprika and salt.

Nice and red/orange.  At this point, the soufflé was much more fragrant than the last two times I made the recipe.  After a few hours of letting the base cool, I whipped up the egg whites and incorporated the two together.

"Fold, Michael.  Fold!" I thought to myself.  "Easy does it.  Eeeasy."  Too much folding is the ultimate soufflé killer in terms of lift and fluffiness.

Right when I finished incorporating the egg whites, I threw this guy onto a rack at the lowest part of the oven, but not before adding an extra few sprinkles of grated gruyere.  Lordie, I love cheese.

My soufflé took an hour to rise and get that nice golden brown top.  The recipe suggests 25 minutes, but to each oven its own.

Hello, there.  Now this is a cheese soufflé, folks.  Still didn't have the same dramatic lift pictured in the recipe, but I'm pretty convinced now that they cheated and used a smaller soufflé dish.

The soufflé was clearly more uniform in sight and flavor than the idiotic layered rendition of this recipe.  Also clearer were the tasty little red specks of paprika.  The first cut of this stuff released a paprika bomb in my nostrils.  Great image, I know.

With the extra paprika and salt, this was by far my favorite version of this recipe.  Salty, cheesy, with just enough extra kick.  Next time, I still want to try throwing in some thyme.

The other notable aspect of this third attempt was the crust on the top of the soufflé.  Brittle, airy, toasted, buttery, and cheesy, the crust tasted like a relative of croissants.  So good.

After finishing the first piece, the soufflé deflated, but my appetite did not.  You better believe I jumped right in and had two more slices before getting on with my day, which might have included half a meatball sandwich and half a porchetta sandwich at Salumi.  And dinner might have included the other half of this soufflé and leftover meatballs and porchetta.  And some salad.  Okay, fine, no salad.  But I did drink two cups of apple-cucumber-green-chard-kale juice.  So I think I did just fine, thank you.

Anyhow, the absolute success of this latest attempt means that I can move onto my Chicago posts and other soufflés.  They'll be up sooner than later.  I promise.