MOLTEN CHOCOLATE SOUFFLÉ

Celebrating Vietnam's Independence day with these decadent chocolate soufflés. A recipe by Chef's Step, these soufflés unfailingly amaze your guests as they are served hot right from the oven.

There are many approaches when it comes to soufflés. Some recipes use cornstarch for the base, some discard flours all together and rely on eggs for the soufflés' structure. This recipe by Chef's Step calls for something called Beurre Manié, a mixture of butter and flour used to thicken a sauce, soup, or in this case, serves as a base for our soufflés. We will later hydrate this mixture with hot milk, which will yield stable, fool-proof soufflés.

Although we fully adopted all our techniques from Chef's Steps recipe, we tweaked the ratio of some ingredients as well as the baking time to our liking.

I. Ingredients

35g o. granulated caster sugar

35g o. unsalted butter

35g o. flour

190ml o. milk

68g o. egg yolk

112g o. egg white (4-5 eggs)

135g o. 65% chocolate

5g o. salt

II. Instructions

Prepare your ramekins by brushing them with softened butter (always brush upwards) and coating them with white caster sugar. Preheat your oven to 190 Degrees Celsius.

Mix your flour, butter, and salt into a dough.

Heat your milk in a small saucepan until small bubbles form around the brim. Mix in your dough for 1-2 minutes until a thick mixture forms. Take it off the heat and transfer mixture to a bowl.

Add in all of your chocolate and mix until they are completely melted. Then whisk in your egg yolks.

In a separate clean bowl, whisk your egg whites. When big white foam forms on top, slowly sprinkle in your sugar while continuously whisking your egg whites to stiff peaks.

Fold your egg whites into your chocolate mixture in three. Stop when there are no white streaks left.

Transfer your soufflés mixture into the ramekins, level them with an off-set spatula. Wipe to clean the edges of the ramekins.

Bake for 13-14 minutes in the oven on the second rack or 15 minutes on the middle rack.

Dust with powdered sugar and serve with slightly whipped cream.

Notes

We whip in all of our sugar with our egg whites instead of dividing them up like in Chef's Steps recipe. As the egg whites start to form white foam, slowly pour in the sugar mixture. DO NOT mix them in all at once, or else your egg whites will have a hard time forming stiff peaks.

We baked our soufflés at 190 Degrees Celsius for 13-14 minutes for a molten texture. If you prefer a cakey texture to your soufflés, feel free to leave them in for another extra 5 minutes.

Instead of 80% dark chocolate, we used 62-65% chocolate for a less intense dark flavor.

After one or two tries, you will definitely pick up the rhythm. Good luck !