CHOCOLATE SOUFFLES AND OTHER LESSONS LEARNED ON TURKEY DAY

Here in Boston, many of us often find ourselves without family members on Turkey Day. Some of us live too far from home, some of us own businesses and can't travel and some of us would just like to avoid parents at all costs. Which is why it's great to gather all of these friends togther and celebrate a day dedicated to excessive eating. This Thanksgiving, we celebrated with dinner at my house and we did it potluck style, which was great cause it divides up all the work and that meant I spent most of my day sitting on my couch and watching tv. I was in my pajamas until 4pm. At any rate, my contribution to the potluck was duck breast, potatoes cooked in duck fat and chocolate souffles.

So for Turkey Day, we decided not to have turkey. Despite Katie's opinion that it's just not Thanksgiving without turkey, I prefer to think of Thanksgiving as a day to get the people you care about for a night, when you can actually sit down, have a conversation and consume a meal (almost like you were an adult.) It's amazing how few of us actually do this. It's not so much the food that matters, it's the company. That being said, we're a big group of foodies, so we're not gonna have crappy food, either. In place of turkey, I decided to make duck breast. I used the recipe from my previous posting (the one that Martha made) and this time, I ordered the duck breasts from D'Artagnan and had them shipped to me. At the end of the day, the breasts, including the shipping, cost as much as it would've had a just gone to Whole Foods and bought them, except these breasts were much thicker and I had a guaranteed supply. So it was totally worth it. This time i also marinated the breasts for 2 days and I improved my technique cooking them, so I think they came out better. (i'm not repeating the recipe here, just go back and look at my previous post).

What I will detail is my chocolate souffle making. Here's the recipe below, stolen from the Scharffen Berger website. To be honest, I don't like Scharffen Berger chocolate. I find it too acidic. So i'm not all broken up that they sold out to Hershey's. But this is still an excellent souffle recipe.

Here's what you'll need:
Butter and sugar to coat the souffle cups
8 ounces dark chocolate, chopped into small pieces
1 tablespoon sweet butter
1/3 cup milk
3 egg yolks, at room temperature
4 egg whites, at room temperature
1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/3 cup sugar
Eight 6 ounce souffle cups

So first, heat your oven to 375F and coat the interior of your cups with butter and sugar. Next (and i didn't remember to start taking photos until later in the process) put your chocolate, milk and butter all in one bowl. Place bowl over a pot that has small amount of water at the bottom and turn on the heat to melt the chocolate.(This is known as a bain marie) Here are a few tips I'm gonna give you. First, I've seen some ppl place the bowl directly into the water. Hell, when i was a kid, I even did this. I thought it would speed up the melting process. But that defeats the purpose of a bain marie. Don't let the bowl touch the water!! The steam created by the heating water is what will melt the chocolate. And why? Because it will melt the chocolate across a more even surface area. Second, you'll see that i place my bowl on top of the pot before the water was heated. The reason why is so the bowl and chocolate will heat slowly along with the water, which is better than shocking the chocolate by placing it over direct heat suddenly. (it will prevent chocolate from breaking if you're ever making a ganache). Ok, so as the water heats, stir the chocolate until it's totally melted. Remove from heat and add your egg yolks.

Here's another helpful tip. The recipe tells you to bring the eggs to room temp. And say you forgot to take the eggs out of the fridge and you don't want to wait from them to come to the right temperature. The key is to place the eggs in a warm bowl of water for a few minutes. That'll help bring them to the correct temperature. Anyway, here's the chocolate with all the other ingredients already mixed in. At this point, the chocolate has a rough, grainy look to it. The first time I made this recipe, I panicked a bit, thinking the chocolate had broken. But it evens out in the end, so don't worry.

The next step is to whip the egg whites. Which i documented thoroughly for all of you to teach you how to whip egg whites. People have a fear of making souffles, and I think it has to do with the egg white part. When I was a kid, I remember the first time I had made a recipe calling for whipped egg whites. It was a recipe for a Sacher Torte. Now, coming from a Taiwanese family, baking is not something that I grew up with. My mom didn't make cookies and cakes from scratch (though she does make excellent sticky rice) and I was the baker in the family. Having never used whipped egg whites in a recipe, I didn't have a very good idea of what it meant to whip the whites to soft peaks. (I now realize that i had overwhipped the whites when I made that first sacher torte, but live and learn)

So here's the thing. When you're whipping eggs whites, all you're doing is forcing air into the whites. And during the whipping, the whites go through several stages. I'm not going to confuse you and tell you all the stages, just start whipping with a handblender or whisk attachment. When the whites are a bit frothy, start adding the sugar gradually, along with the cream of tartar. Ok, and then the key is to keep whipping until the eggs start rising and turning white. Here's a pic.

Gradually, the egg whites will acquire a shiny, wet look to them. This is the point where you want to slow down your beating. Every so often, lift up you beaters or whisk and look at what happen to the egg whites when you do it. Do they just slide off? Then you need to keep whisking. For this recipe, we're asked for eggs whipped to "soft peak". To figure out if it is at soft peak, lift your beaters again, the egg whites are shiny and they stay on the beater, but the peak of the egg whites will fall and point down. Here's a pic. That's what we want. If you're ever asked for egg whites with "stiff peaks" it means that when you lift up your beaters, the egg whites will stand straight up, and the peaks won't fall.

Moving on, we're gonna combine the melted chocolate and egg whites. And remember what I taught you guys about the rules of thirds. And here's another lesson. Always add the lighter ingredient (whipped egg whites in this case) to the heavier ingredient (the chocolate mix). So here's a pic of the first third of egg whites going into the chocolate. Fold the remaining whites in thirds and you'll end up with this lovely chocolate mixture. Ok, and here's another lesson (i'm so full of lessons today!). When you're folding, you're always told to do it with a spatula and be super careful not to deflate your egg whites! But i fold with a whisk. Why?? The purpose of folding is to avoid decreasing the volume of air whipped into the whites. What is the point of a whisk? To add air! So rather than trying to prevent your egg whites from deflating by using a spatula, why not just add more air by using a whisk? Makes more sense. Think about it.

I divided up the mix into my waiting souffle cups and here's the cool thing with this recipe, you can now refrigerate your souffle, covered, for up to 24 hours. So my souffles went into the fridge, to be baked right before serving.

From the title of this post, I mentioned that I also learned some lessons this Turkey Day. Lesson 1: recipes from a 1960s edition of the Joy of Cooking make no sense what so ever. But at least Leah and I figured out why Julia Child was so popular back then. If all cook books were written like the 1960s Joy of Cooking, nothing would have ever been cooked. It's completely incomprehensible. No wonder Julia Child was needed to decipher recipes for us all. Lesson 2: Bring your souffles to room temp before cooking them. ( I will also mention that Kjell and Huong learned that tapioca starch cannot be substituted for corn starch when making a lemon meringue)

So we'd finished our massive dinner and everyone was ready for dessert. I stuck my tray of souffles into the oven, directly from the fridge and allowed them to cook for 15 mintes. Now the 15 minutes is a key part of souffle making. You can't open the door during these first few minutes or your souffle will collapse! Why? By opening the door before the souffles have started to rise, you create a decrease in temperature and that's what will cause your souffle to fall. The timer went off, I checked my souffles and they hadn't risen. Crap. I didn't want to overcook my souffles because they'd lose that nice molten center if left in too long. I let them go for another 5 minutes. Checked again and they'd risen more. 2 more minutes and they were perfect. So they ended up taking an extra 7 minutes. Here it is, the finish product spinkled with powdered sugar and totally yummy.

After speaking with my friend Akash today, I figured out that I should've brought the souffles to room temp prior to baking them. If you noticed in the original recipe, the eggs and the entire mixture is at room temp and I think the refrigeration part is what caused the delay in cooking. Ah well, it was still delicious, as was our entire meal. And as a parting picture to all of you, here's a pic from the Thanksgiving Day table. There's the my platter of duck, with my potatoes in the background, Arti's dates wrapped in bacon, May Ann's mashed potatoes, Leah's sweet potato casserole and my bottle of '94 Chateau Mouton Rothschild. Not pictured were samosas and lemon meringue pie from Kjell and Huong, Karishma's Chocolate, Pear and Almond tart (I was very impressed with how well it came out, especially since it was her first time making it), Harin's very yummy turkey cooked peking style with wraps, and Leah's Corn Pudding. Hope you all had a great Turkey Day, and next year, my souffles will be even better.