All Purpose

I’ve been trying to force myself to do a little more cooking and to try some new things in the kitchen. This is probably the second Experiments in the Kitchen, but my first foray (croissants from scratch) happened before I had a name for it.

My second experiment is learning the art of the soufflé. I got Mastering the Art of French Cooking for Christmas this year and that’s one of the main things I wanted to really try. Plus we went to this amazing salon de souffé called Rise while we were in Dallas for my birthday and now I’m hooked on soufflés. The non-dairy thing was stopping me though, but since I took a break from no dairy at Easter it turned out to be a perfect time to try soufflés!

So I actually didn’t use a MtAoFC recipe for my soufflé because I really wanted to do something that was light on the cheese and milk. I used the Goat Cheese and Herb Soufflé recipe from Epicurious.

I halved the recipe and made some other changes, like WAY less Parmesan and goat cheese and used So Delicious Coconut Milk instead of regular milk. For the record, this kind of coconut milk is not like the canned coconut milk you find, it’s much thinner like the consistency of 2% or skim milk and does not taste like coconut at all. I use the cream (non-flavored) in my coffee everyday now.

So when I cook I like to get everything ready and then do the cooking. So I get everything set up and chopped and I might mix some things then everything is ready to go. I guess I watch too many cooking shows, maybe?

I prepped the dishes with maybe a teaspoon of Parmesan for dusting the pans and just a bare minimum of butter to cut the dairy content. Then I got the base ready to go.

I used probably a little less than a full cup of the goat cheese and I barely put any Parmesan into the base. I got the eggs to the right place but when I added the eggs to the base I think the base might have been slightly too hot. Everything seemed fine though and while the soufflés baked I made a Spinach Salad with Raspberry Champagne Vinaigrette.

The dressing was a little tart since I left out the sugar, will remember that next time and add some agave nectar. The soufflés did puff, but not like they were supposed to, but I blame the fact that the dishes I used were a bit too big for the amount of soufflé. I’ll try again soon with smaller dishes.

They were delicious though, really yummy and I’d definitely make this again or some other soufflé variation. So this was a good experiment, but I have not mastered this yet so I’ll be trying again soon.

In: cooking, experiments | | #