Once again, it’s not gelatin. For anyone missing that particular brand of content, rest assured, Jelly July is coming.
A Soufflé By Any Other Name- Actually Wait This is Straight Up a Soufflé
The last time I attempted something called a soufflé, it was a cold soufflé, which, arguably, isn’t really a soufflé. According to the glossary in my 1930 Knox Gelatine recipe book, a gelatin mixture with whipped egg whites incorporated is a sponge. But then it also lists:
Soufflé – A gelatine mixture made light and fine grained by the addition of yolks or whites of eggs
So why is that not also a sponge? Well, the short answer is prolly something like “cuz you mold it to sort of look like a soufflé”. At any rate, it involves raw egg whites, which for various reasons…well no, one specific reason, people try to avoid nowadays.
It’s this guy. He’s pretty good at what he does.
I also have it on good authority…well. Some authority? that pasteurized egg whites don’t whip well enough for meringues. I’ve yet to test this for myself, though I plan to at one point – as long as you can approach soft peak stage, I feel like you’re in business.
Also, did you know Google Chrome demands you write soufflé with the acute accent? Even though it looks wonky as hell in certain fonts? The first draft of this was full of angry red squiggles. Also, a long time ago someone told me you can disambiguate the acute accent from the grave cuz it forms an acute angle, but the grave also forms an acute angle, from another…angle…anyways, enough about combining diacritics.
Hot Soufflé
Right, so why a soufflé? This month’s theme for Bay Area Kei’s Bibliotheca Blog Circle is Egg, and while I have a lot of choices, I wanted to make something out of an archived cookbook I owned titled Crepes, Soufflés, and Omelets. I say archived cuz, there were only so many recipes in it, and this was before my vintage cookbook collection ballooned, so I just…typed them all into my recipe database and donated the book back. So I don’t have any sweet vintage photographs for you, unfortunately. (Also, in case anyone was wondering, Chrome does not require a diacritic for crepes. Tsk tsk.)
Anyways, I didn’t bother to tag whether or not this recipe for a Chicken and Orange Soufflé in my digital database was from said cookbook or not, but I’m pretty sure it is. The most savory soufflé I’ve ever heard of is a cheese soufflé, and even then, I mean, cheese is its own food group, really. The other ‘charm point’ of this recipe was that I basically had everything I needed already in the house. Sort of.
How The Sausage (and Soufflé) Gets Made
Like any good parasite single, my first step after printing out the recipe was ordering my just-awoken mother to please de-chicken the leftover chicken in the fridge so I could use it for Activities. Not too much later, she then turned the tables and ordered me to get something out from the cabinet above the fridge, which involved some shenanigans OSHA would not approve of. Said something turned out to be a meat-grinding attachment for our stand mixer that I had no idea we had. She seemed very excited to use it again after all these years…or so I thought. Turns out she was leaving shortly for my sister’s house and wanted me to do the honors. I told her straight up I was just planning on using my food processor, which was safely stowed in a far more easily accessed cabinet, to grind the chicken, but hey. Who am I to refuse more content.
Complete in box with Bed Bath & Beyond sticker
I didn’t want to make the recipe short of a taste-tester, and then I ended up nursing a migraine most of the weekend anyways, but when I did finally go to grind the chicken, I realized why we maybe only used this attachment once. It’s both very simple to attach and use, but also weirdly difficult to fully secure. Forcing the meat into the channel with the little wooden deal also requires a decent amount of upper body strength, of which I have very little. And then you kind of have to wait for the last meat dregs to push its way out…
That’s sure a texture, alright
Anyways, it did the job! But I do think a food processor would have also done the job, with far less meat pushing. Also easier clean-up I think?
Sub(stituted)standard Ingredients
The recipe also called for butter and flour (you basically make a roux to start), chicken stock/broth (I don’t remember which and doubt it really matters), orange zest, and, of course, Egg. I finally remembered right off the bat this time that my mother has committed to only using a product called “Better than Bouillon” to eliminate the problem of buying like, 16 ounces of chicken broth when you only need 12. The jar in the fridge was about a month past its best by date, but hey! Not expired! We’re good!
I’m sure there’s a viral video trend of eating this meat concentrate in an unexpected way
I also didn’t have an orange, but I did have several locally-sourced ungodly lemons.
The only law of nature is there is no law
The recipe called for zest of one orange – you can be sure I did not zest that entire lemon. Anyways. All that remained was grabbing my soufflé dish…oh. Oh no.
You see, I have one soufflé dish. It’s a standard size, I think, we’ll say “big and round”. But this recipe called for a 2-pint soufflé dish. I knew before I flipped mine over…yep. Over 2 quarts. Besides that dish, I just have little baby ramekins.
I dug around to see if I had anything that looked remotely in the realm of that size and shape, and found a nice little loaf pan older than I am. I didn’t anticipate this soufflé rising above the sides of the pan, and surely round isn’t required, right? My dad, watching my troubles mere feet away, did some cursory googling and showed me a bizarre article that claimed “rectangular pans are bad, except for loaf pans”. I have no idea how that reasoning goes, but I wasn’t too worried in the first place, so loaf pan it is.
I actually made a few more weird little mistakes, like “dumping in all the ground chicken without measuring it first”, and the ol’ “not taking into account how much salt is in the deal before salting”, but eh.
The Verdict
Well, as I suspected, it didn’t rise very much, though it did rise. This photo was actually taken immediately upon retrieving it from the oven, hence the non-aesthetic potholder for protection – I then put it back in for another 10 minutes for a proper golden brown top. This was after cooking it for the maximum time listed, knowing my notoriously cold oven would likely be its usual self.
The actual finished product, which needed a whole 50 minutes at 375F
I cut myself and my taste-testers a slice, and my first thought was “ah. bit too salty.” Not to the point of being inedible – it’s about as salty as a standard chicken soup. But the double whammy of the chicken goop juice and the already salted cooked chicken really did the job.
When prodded for other thoughts, I was gifted the following pull-quotes:
“I wouldn’t order it in a restaurant”
“Good for old people who can’t chew well”
“There’s better ways to eat chicken”
My dad elaborated that given all the trouble I had to go through, grinding the chicken, getting out my special copper bowl to make the meringue, et cetera, I ended up with a pretty banal dish. I have to agree – even if it had risen somewhat impressively, it just tasted of chicken. That’s not to say I won’t attempt another hot soufflé ever, but I’ll make sure my next one has plenty of cheese in it, as God intended.
kelp 