R.I.P Eggs -- March 22 to March 25 -- You Will Not Be Missed

Today was a very exciting day because it was the last day of egg week. Thank God. Seriously. If I never see another souffle it will not be too soon. The reason that we made souffles again today is that we were not only making souffles that contained flour today, as opposed to yesterday, but we were also learning a variety of different techniques for making the bases of these floured souffles. As such, we learned how to make Bechamel (a Mother sauce...sorry, I got no clue what this means but I'm sure google does), Boile (pronounced boil, which made it very difficult for me to follow when the chef was boiling the boil), and Pastry Cream. The pastry cream was my favorite because it is something that I've always thought was terribly difficult to make but it was actually quite easy, tiring because you had to whisk constantly for about 15 minutes but easy.

Like yesterday, the first thing that we made was our chocolate souffle and it was a relatively easy process. First, we made a roux (melt butter and add flour and stir until it is a blonde color -- blonde like me as my partner said) and then added milk and whisked until the mixture was thickened and had become a Bechamel sauce. Then, we melted chocolate and waited till both the chocolate and Bechamel were cool and then we whisked some egg whites and sugar and separated a few egg yolks and added coffee to them and combined everything together into the Bechamel/egg yolk/chocolate mixture but the whipped whites. Those we folded into the batter gently and slowly like any good folder would. After that, it was easy as pie to finish the souffles, we ladled them into souffle cups, leveled them and baked them until they were just right. They were delicious, and to me, better because they had flour in them, sorry Dad. I say that because I think the flour gave the souffles a little more support and therefore they seemed much more substantial and less like eating chocolate flavoured air.

I won't bore y'all by going through the other two souffles in too much detail, needless to say, the process was pretty much the same for all the souffles. Make your base, cool your base, whip your egg whites, fold your egg whites into the base, ladle into ramekins and voila! Souffle. However, the pastry cream is kind of a neat thing to talk about a little more. Like I said, I always thought that pastry cream was really tough to make and apparently there is a method that is tough but that method is the "old school" method as our chef said and we learned the "new school" method. Again, all the "new school" method involves is throwing all the pastry cream ingredients (milk, butter, sugar, flour and eggs) together into a large saucepan, turning the burner on to low and whisking until the cream is thick and has no lumps. After you cool it, which we did by placing a bowl of the cream into a bowl with ice in it and just stirring until the cream cooled, you can do a lot of different things with it. You can fill tarts or eclairs, you can put in on cakes, you can eat it with a spoon, heck, you can even make it into a souffle! The other neat thing about pastry cream is that you can use different flavourings in it too. Our group used coconut milk instead of regular milk but you could also put vanilla or other kinds of essences or extracts into the cream as well and it would probably turn out rather well.

As you can probably tell, I am super tired of eggs and so I am not sad that their moment in the sun has passed. However, it does delight me to inform you that tomorrow this blog will feature not the tales of endless souffles but tales of marshmallows made by hand and all the excitement that that entails!


So long souffles! You were good while you lasted but we're not sad to see you go.