Meal: cheese souffle, roasted potatoes, raw asparagus
Cost: about $3 each. (All that cheese…)
Time: half an hour active, 50 minutes baking
Leftovers: half the souffle. I know what I’m having for breakfast. :) The next time I make this, I’ll halve the recipe.
Local ingredients: cheese, eggs, milk, asparagus (from my parents’ garden), potatoes
Organic ingredients: flour

So, I’d never had cheese souffle before, so it went on the list of recipes to try, and we did last night. The verdict: not nearly as hard as I would have thought, very very tasty, and way rich (as in, eat once every six months sort of rich.) It’s basically baked cheese sauce with enough egg to hold it together. For the cheese, I used the vintage cheddar and marble that we get from our farmer’s market, in equal proportions. Since this dish is so cheese-focussed, you’ll want to either use something really good, or something you really like the taste of.

The recipe was from Good Housekeeping Great Home Cooking: 300 Traditional Recipes, which I have out from the library. I like to check cookbooks out of the library before we buy them, to make sure the recipes are as good as they look. I think this one may go on the list to purchase eventually.

If you measure out everything and gather all your equipment beforehand and do things like grate the cheese and seperate the eggs before you start, this will be much easier. This isn’t one of those recipes that you want to be scurrying around saying “Where’d I put the flipping salt?”, a scene that occurs with frightening frequency in our kitchen.

If you don’t have a souffle dish, don’t worry about it. I used an 8×8 baking dish.

Ingredients

- 2 tbs plain bread crumbs or Parmesan cheese (if you have a couple of slices of old bread lying around, take a moment to toast them and chop them up. They’ll be much better than commercial breadcrumbs, and cheaper too.)
- 4 tbs butter
- 1/4 cup all purpose flour
- 1/4 teas salt
- 1/8 teas ground red pepper
- 1 1/2 cups milk
- 8 ounces sharp Cheddar cheese (2 cups)
- 5 large eggs, separated
- 1 large egg white (I saved the yolk and put it in with Jeff’s eggs this morning)

- Preheat the oven to 325 (which I didn’t do, because all of our baking pans are glass. It didn’t seem to affect the finished product.) Grease your baking dish and sprinkle it with bread crumbs.
- In a 3-quart saucepan that you can use a whisk in, melt the butter over low heat. Stir in the flour, salt, and ground red pepper until they’re nice and blended. Slowly add in the milk, whisking to avoid lumps. (It’s worth being slow about this… a little patience and you end up with a non-lumpy cheese sauce, which is never a bad thing.) Cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens and boils (I’ll confess, I cranked the heat up to medium. It was never going to boil on low). Stir in the cheddar and stir until it’s melted, then pull the whole thing off the heat.
- In a small bowl, mix 1/2 a cup of the cheese sauce into the egg yolks, then mix that whole thing back into the cheese sauce. Stir quickly to avoid lumps. Set the whole thing aside to cool.
- Meantime, in a large bowl, use a mixer to beat the eggs whites until they’re forming stiff peaks (exactly what it sounds like. When you pull the beaters out, small mountains are left in the egg whites.) Slowly fold the whites into the cheese mixture, just until the whole thing is blended.
- Pour the whole thing into your baking dish. Baking 45 to 55 minutes, or until brown and puffy, and a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean. (I started from a cold oven and it baked for a little less than 50 minutes. The timer was set to 45, but we didn’t get to it right off.)

That’s it. This was fiddly but actually fairly easy; probably the most annoying bit was separating the eggs. Otherwise, it was just a matter of following the recipe and paying attention. The cookbook has a ton of variations listed for this, and I’m wondering how mini-souffles cooked up in a muffin tin would be.

I served this up with roasted potatoes that cooked with the souffle, and asparagus from my dad’s garden. I was going to do something with it, but it was so good, I ended up just eating it up raw.

I’d like to start making an egg main dish once a week or so this summer - they’re tasty and cheap, but I’m running out of material. Quiche, egg salad, and omelets pretty much covers my range of egg dishes. Anyone have a favorite they wouldn’t mind pointing me at?