Summer Cooking Camp

The Incredible Egg Soufflé and I
By Gerry Furth-Sides

Never one to care about the bad press heaped upon the poor egg for its relatively small amount of high fat and cholesterol content a while back, I never stopped eating them or that includes the yolks. Egg whites alone are just perfect, thank you very much, in macaroons or meringue pies. After all, the incredible total egg holds its head up high as an excellent source of Riboflavin, Vitamin B12 and Phosphorus, Protein and Selenium.

Add to that the glorious experience of eating freshly laid eggs with golden yolks from chickens raised by a neighbor, none other than Tom Waits' mother. The yolks were so golden it took me years afterward to find a similar color yolk with Trader Joe's Golden Horizon eggs.

Now comes the revelation of a sublime and stylish form of egg: the Baked Egg Soufflés served at Panera Bread. A soufflé is simply a savory or sweet mix lightened with egg-white foam, then dramatically inflated above their dish by oven heat. But what French elegance and richness, bound by Panera bakers in its very own Parisian French brown paper circular wrapper.

The Egg Soufflé is so rich and generous in portion it can be shared. But priced at $3.99 who wants to share?

And after I patted myself on the back for eating "protein" in eggs (three total in three days) Panera Bread egg soufflés instead of their mouth-watering pastries came the realization it was made of a couple of eggs, bacon, four kinds of cheese and spinach! And these were all baked inside a sweet French puff pastry dough. Oh, my!

The Panera Bread staffs in the valley locations are of no help in holding you back from devouring them either even though they "sell like hotcakes and only a limited number are made daily." Staffers cheerfully offer to hold as many as you want in reserve with a phone call.

The good news is that the soufflé tastes like it has thousands of calories but actually is only 580 calories with a lot of vitamin A in it. And it fills you up for the rest of the day.

Soufflé, "puffed up" in French, has become the international culinary term for a light, frothy dish, with eggs beaten just stiff enough to hold its shape. Soufflés historically have been prepared savory or sweet, hot or cold, but usually thought of as a sweet dessert in this country. Think chocolate soufflé.

The basic hot soufflé has as its starting point a roux--a cooked mixture of flour and butter, a French invention of the late 18th century and considered in one 1813 cookbook, "new method of giving good and extremely cheap fashionable suppers at routs and soirees.

About half a century later, the famous food writer, Careme, goes into great detail on the technique of making soufflés, from which it is clear that cooks had been having much trouble with soufflés that collapsed. The dish acquired a reputation for difficulty and proneness to accidents, one it does not really deserve. Nor is it true that a soufflés falls if there is a loud noise.

The success of a soufflé, however, is a direct result of temperature. Heat expands the air in the egg whites; coolness deflates it. The rest comes from the continuous evaporation of water from the bubble walls into the bubbles.

And what must go up in the oven must come down at the table...As the soufflé bubbles cool, the air they contain contracts in volume, and the vapor that come from liquid water in the mix condenses back into liquid.

Patrons of La Grande Taverne de Londres, which opened in Paris in the 1780s, were perhaps the first to enjoy this dessert soufflé and the place became for more than fifteen years the most famous restaurateur in Paris.

And now we have the Panera Bread soufflé! For more information, complete nutritional details and locations, visit:

www.paneranutrition.com

back to top