How to Make French Souffle, Part 1

(upbeat instrumental music)

(classical music)

Hi, I'm Tanya Steel of Epicurious.com

and you're watching Around the World in 80 Dishes.

Today we're gonna do a Souffle Grand Marnier

from France with my friend, Chef Lou Jones

from the Culinary Institute of America.

Chef, I think that souffles are probably

the quintessential French dish.

If you think of anything,

to me it's a souffle if we're talking about French cuisine.

What do you think about that?

I'd have to agree.

Yeah, it's a dish that's rather mystic.

You know, full of mystery and such like

but doesn't have to be.

It's really simple.

A lot of people are afraid of souffles.

But you don't need to be

if you know exactly the steps you need to go through

for success.

That's right.

It can be very intimidating and especially

for a home cook.

I know that you've done something

with a little twist

on the classic souffle.

I mean, all of the basic steps

are the traditional way of making souffle

but then you've added a few little twists

so why don't you go ahead

and show us what we started out with.

Okay, well we're gonna cook

our souffle in an eight ounce ramekin today.

Okay, it's been lined with butter and sugar.

So we just, a thick lining of butter

and then just roll your sugar out like so.

[Tanya] Now, you could also use a large

ramekin, right?

A regular souffle dish.

[Chef] Yup, you could do a single,

large (mumbles) souffle.

In our pan here, we have our milk

which we're gonna bring up to the boil.

And whilst we're waiting for that,

we can mix our flour

and butter together which are gonna be the thickener

for the penaude, and the penaude is the base of the souffle.

I see.

The souffle structure.

Okay, so--

So if you want to mix those two together.

I do, 'cause that's something that's very fun.

And once we're doing that,

we'll talk about our inclusions into the souffle today

which are gonna be some ratafia biscuits or Amaretto cookies

and we're gonna soak them not in neat Grand Marnier

but with diluted, with a little bit of simple syrup

which is simply just sugar water brought to the boil.

That's it.

Don't let it reduce.

Just equal parts of sugar and water,

bring to a boil, stop.

Until the sugar is melted.

Yes, exactly, dissolved.

So I mean, that happens maybe a minute or two?

Right?

Yeah, at the most.

Yeah, okay.

[Chef] And then we're gonna pour that

onto our biscuits, over the cookies.

[Tanya] Could you use other types of cookies

if you wanted?

If you didn't have Amaretto cookies?

You could use Lady Finger biscuits.

[Tanya] Ahh.

[Chef] Gouda biscuits.

Just take that off before it--

Oh, yes.

[Chef] So if you want to place that straight

in there.

do it in bits or it's--

[Chef] No, all at once.

[Tanya] The whole thing, wow.

[Chef] And all of it.

[Tanya] Yes, yeah, every little beautiful morsel.

[Chef] That's it.

And even that on your fingers.

[Tanya] Mm-hmm.

[Chef] Because if we don't have the right balance

of thickening here, our souffles may not work.

[Tanya] Oh, oh dear.

So this is what makes people nervous.

(laughs)

Yeah, right.

Makes me nervous.

[Chef] Here we're just going to

gently dissolve our, or melt our butter

and that distributes the flour throughout

the milk without it going lumpy.

See.

[Tanya] You also have to sometimes

vanilla beans are added into it?

Yeah.

Yeah?

We could've added vanilla bean to the base.

[Tanya] Or if you don't have vanilla bean,

you could always use milk extract

but it's not gonna be as good, flavorful.

[Chef] You could use vanilla extract.

Absolutely, you could put it in right now.

So now we're going to add one egg white to this mix

and this is gonna help our souffle just stand up.

This particular type of souffle's is called

a pudding souffle and it's the only souffle

really that you can successfully lift out

the mold and have it freestanding on the plate.

[Tanya] Wow.

[Chef] Which is something that a lot of people

don't know and they haven't seen before.

There's our four egg yokes going in there.

[Tanya] Okay.

[Chef] And while we mix those in,

if you want to take care of that,

I'll get these whites going.

Now that we've finished the penaude,

next what we're gonna do

is make the merengue and create the souffles.

(upbeat instrumental music)