Salted Caramel Soufflé

This Sunday's baking challenge from Baked Sunday Mornings is a Salted Caramel Soufflé. It sounds delicious right - what could be better than a delicate and airy caramel-flavored confection? I was excited, but nervous since  a soufflé presents several hurdles beyond the usual challenge. I normally bring my baked things to work, so that I'm not eating an entire batch myself, but that's impossible with a soufflé. I've never made a soufflé before and all the conventional wisdom states that your first soufflé is guaranteed to be a disaster. And of course, our weather this weekend was expected to be a glamorous mid-90s F, with high humidity and scattered thunderstorms.

So I made the logical choice to have people over Friday night and serve them soufflé fresh from the oven (which is the only way to serve it). Since I've never made a single soufflé before, I wasn't sure how long this salted caramel soufflé would take me to prepare, and I didn't want to be a sticky mess when people arrived, so I decided to make these the night before, pop them in my freezer, and then simply transfer them to the oven as soon as people arrived. I argued with myself a little over whether I should make the recipe twice or just double it and proceed once. Out of laziness and a desire not to spend my entire night in the kitchen, I worked with the doubled recipe, and planned to make one normal-sized (2 qt) soufflé, then about 6-8 minis in 7 oz ramekins.

Google advised me that it is possible to make soufflés ahead of time (and I know that some restaurants must). The trick is, supposedly, getting the soufflé into the freezer immediately after folding in the egg whites, and then adding 2-3 minutes of baking time to account for entering the oven from frozen. I readied my ramekins with a coating of butter and granulated sugar, tried to make enough level room in my freezer, then started with my soufflé batter.

I was surprised by how easy and fast Baked's salted caramel soufflé was to make. There are five critical steps: letting the separated egg yolks and whites come to room temperature, making the salted caramel, beating the egg yolks then tempering them with the caramel, whipping the egg whites to stiff (but not dry) peaks, and then folding them in. I gave the eggs two hours to come fully to room temperature, since the recipe header and everything online says room temperature eggs are one of the keys to soufflé success. The remaining steps took less than 30 minutes, although I was right to be concerned about being a sticky mess. Myself, my counter, and my stove top were covered in sticky residue from the caramel sauce and egg whites.

Making the caramel itself went off without a hitch, and took about 10-15 minutes total. I chose a nice grey sea salt as my fancy salt for adding to the caramel. The only difficulty I had with the caramel was whisking in the room temperature cream to the 340 F caramel. I've made caramel sauce frequently at this point, and I know to be careful, but the steam coming out of the pan as I added the cream was killer. I should have put the cream into something with a handle and more heatproof than a ceramic bowl from Target.

Once the caramel was made, the heat turned to low, and the milk added in, it was time to beat the egg yolks, then temper them with the hot caramel. This was one step where I really felt hampered by making these by myself.  Tempering the egg yolks involves pouring in the warm salted caramel while simultaneously whisking the egg yolks. Since I knew I wanted my stand mixer for whisking the egg whites, I elected to use a handheld mixer and a different bowl for the yolks. However, I only have the two hands, my pan of salted caramel was quite heavy, and my bowl wasn't certain it wanted to stay in one place on my counter. Somehow, I managed it with only a few streaks of egg yolk all over myself.

In retrospect, it might have been worth tempering the egg yolks and caramel sauce in my stand mixer, moving them to a different bowl, cleaning the mixing bowl and whisk attachment, letting it cool a little, then whipping the egg whites. I say that because I feel like one of the places where I may have gone wrong with this soufflé was trying to fold in my egg whites to the still warm egg yolk-caramel mixture. The recipe didn't say anything about letting that mixture cool at all, so I proceeded despite some hesitancy, but when I poured my batter into the soufflé mold, it was clear that there was melty caramel hiding underneath my lovely frothy batter. Alternatively, it's possible that I simply took too long to fold everything together, or I didn't fill my ramekins quickly enough because it was difficult trying to evenly split all the batter, or I should have made a single batch at a time because it was just too much to fold together properly in a timely fashion. I'm not entirely sure - clearly I made at least a couple errors.

In another example of poor planning, I hadn't cleared sufficient level space in my freezer, so my poor soufflés sat around waiting to "quickly" get into the freezer to avoid the risk of falling during cooking while I tossed everything out of my freezer, put the filled and Saran-wrapped ramekins on the bottom, found a sheet pan to protect them, then piled everything back in.

I baked a test 7 oz salted caramel soufflé the morning of my dinner party and found to my chagrin that my soufflé didn't rise at all, and also wasn't done after the 15-16 minutes I had given it (I expected 12-13 minutes of baking time for the minis, then the 2-3 minutes Google instructed for baking from frozen). I gave it another 2-3 minutes, took it out and found that my egg whites and caramel sauce had certainly split. However, it was utterly delicious and quite filling - I couldn't finish the whole serving (okay, maybe eating a salted caramel soufflé at 6am isn't a good idea, but there weren't many alternatives).

Unsurprisingly then, I found that my full-sized soufflé was not done when I expected it to be done. From the freezer, it took about 40 minutes, after going into the 400 F oven (which had been preheated at that point for 1 hour) and having the temp dropped immediately to 375 F. It certainly never rose, although I didn't help matters any by opening the oven door to check on it when I thought it would be done. Maybe it was my error here again - a friend mentioned she thought my oven read 325 when she was watching me panic over my poor unrisen, not done soufflé.

All of my difficulties aside, this soufflé was delicious. Everyone loved it, even the people who aren't huge fans of sugar. It's sweet, a little salty, rich, delicate, and of course, absolutely decadent. I dealt with the layer of caramel on my bottom by breaking the top and then carefully spooning the caramel sauce from the bottom over the top layer. I used to bus tables at a fantastic French restaurant in Forestville CA called the Farmhouse, where the served chocolate soufflés with a vanilla crème anglaise by breaking the crust of the chocolate soufflé and pouring in the creme, so I figured a similar idea would work here. Maybe the salted caramel is supposed to be on the bottom of this soufflé, although I feel like Matt and Renato would have said so...

Since I had doubled the recipe, and then served two other desserts in case the soufflé was a failure, I had a few of the mini ramekins left over. I've never been under the impression that soufflé would keep once cooked, but for curiousity's sake I decided to give it a try today, about 36 hours after baking (I kept them covered in the fridge). I popped a mini ramekin in the microwave, covered, for 30 seconds and discovered that this salted caramel soufflé is still pretty delicious as leftovers. It's not nearly as good as it is fresh, but it's phenomenal fresh... as leftovers, the soufflé became a little custard-y and smelled a tiny bit egg-y, but it was very definitely still edible.

I highly recommend trying your hand at this salted caramel soufflé, so head over to Baked Sunday mornings for the recipe and to see how others fared (and if they have some tips for success!).