Muenster Cheese Soufflés

French Fridays with Dorie

Sad, fallen soufflés

More like fancy scrambled eggs

Follow directions!

 

So careless of me

I know I should read them first

Maybe I had wine...

 

Butter AND DUST the cups!

This is how the eggs pouf up.

Just look at these duds!

 

Still, here I share them.

For me they will remain a

cautionary tale.

Its not the kind of mistake I am prone to make. When am actually following recipes I am quite prone to reading them thoroughly, usually more than once, before making them. I overdo it actually. I read them step by step. I visualize myself going through the steps as I read, imagining what bowls and kitchen tools I will need along the way. I hate it when I get to a point in a recipe and I have to improvised because I failed to notice that the eggs need to be at room temperature or the milk should be hot.

Or that the soufflé cups should be well buttered and dusted with bread crumbs.

Somehow I missed that one here.This is not like me so I can only surmise I must have been seriously distracted last night as I rushed to complete a French Friday’s with Dorie assignment and publish it on time for a change. And I may have been drinking wine. Even more unusual is that I have a small memory of thinking how odd it was that Dorie didn’t specify to breadcrumb the cups! I know I even glanced back at the recipe to double check that point as I was folding in egg whites. Didn’t see it. So I just buttered them, and not very well at that. So I was essentially left with these crustless baked quiches. Too fluffy for a quiche but definitely not fluffy enough to be a soufflés.

I could have told you that they once towered spectacularly. They didn’t. I could pontificate that it is impossible to catch a perfect soufflés on camera. I won’t — that isn’t true. In truth, these lovelies didn’t end up much better than you see here. I seriously contemplated calling them baked quiches. I was going to unfold one onto a dinner plate and stage it like the editors of Bon Appetite but decided instead that these soufflés would be a good cautionary tale for me to share.

That said, they actually tasted fantastic and it was impressed upon me how simply changing up a standard ingredient for a more unusal varietal can breath new life into a classic preparation. In this case the usual gruyere was substituted with a real market european Muenster (and scented it ever so slightly with cumin. (The French Friday’s with Dorie crew tackled the Cheese Soufflés just over a year and a half ago where I managed to follow the directions and prepare the dish correctly.)

 Muenster Cheese Soufflés

The original recipe for these soufflés can be be found here at Bon Appetite.

This Muenster Cheese Souffles recipe was an assignment for French Friday’s with Dorie, a cooking group working its way through Dorie Greenspan’s culinary tome “Around My French Table”. We generally avoid including the recipes in our posts. However, wherever there has been a significant adaptation by me or where the recipe has already been publicly posted by Ms. Greenspan or her publishers or by hundreds of other bloggers I will either include it here (only when adapted) or provide a direct link to it. Please feel free to contact me via the link provided on my page if you need any assistance finding a French Friday with Dorie Recipe. You should buy the book though.

It will change your life as it has mine.