No-Fail Fruit Souffle

Hi, I'm Heather Bertinetti, and you're watching eHow.com. Today, I'm going to show you how to make a no-fail fruit souffle. Souffles are always a little intimidating. They fall, they separate, they can break. Everybody says don't open up the oven because the souffle is going to fall. I guarantee you by the time you finish this segment, you'll not go wrong with this souffle, and it will not fall, I promise you. Here's the ingredients first. We have four egg yolks in one bowl separate from the four egg whites. The egg whites go in a mixer bowl. We're going to use a KitchenAid mixer. I'm just going to crack an egg here, and we'll put the yolk in this bowl. A little trick, if you ever get yolks in your egg whites, you never want to start with dirty egg whites. So, if you happen to have any yolk fall into the whites, then an easy way to get it out is to use the other shell. See, the buoyancy of whites are always lighter than the yolk, and the yolk will always fall to the bottom, so if you use the other half of the shell, you can kind of scoop and fish out the yolk. We'll, put it in the yolk bowl. So first, we want to get our ramekins ready to go. I have just regular store bought ramekins here, and I'm going to use some melted butter with a pastry brush. I'm going to brush the inside of the ramekin, constantly turning it, making sure to coat the entire sides and bottom of the ramekin in the melted butter. Make sure it's nice and greased up. There you go. Now I'm going to take some granulated table sugar, and now I turn the sugar, and I make sure that all the sugar and the excess falls out of the ramekin, and it's perfectly coated in butter and sugar. So we'll set these aside, and let's talk about fruit purees. A lot of grocery stores don't carry fruit purees. At the restaurant, we get them in all the time. However, they do contain 10 percent sugar already, so keep this in mind whenever making a dessert, and if you can't find a fruit puree in the store, which I'm sure you won't, you can always use sorbet. This is my little trick. I like to melt down sorbet. Sorbet is just fruit that's pureed up with water and sugar. So here I'm going to use mango, just store-bought mango sorbet. So here I have a quarter cup of mango sorbet that's melted down that I'm going to use for my fruit part. I'm going to add the sorbet to my egg yolks and with a whisk, make sure it's all incorporated, I'm just going to whisk these up, just like that, okay? Set that aside. So now, I'm going to take my egg whites, and I have a quarter cup of sugar, plus two tablespoons of sugar. I already have this scaled out, so now I'm going to whip these on medium speed until stiff peak. The stiffer your whites, the better. The stiffer your whites are, the more volume your souffle will have, and the more it will grow and have a high peak. So now that I have my egg yolks with my mango puree whisked together, I'm going to transfer this to a larger bowl. So we get all that in there, make sure everything is in, and now I have my egg whites that I whipped to stiff peak. The way you can tell that egg whites are whipped to a stiff peak is if you take a spatula, and then you hold it upside down and it doesn't fall, you're at stiff peak. Remember, the stiffer your egg whites, the higher your souffle will rise, so you can't go wrong with beating them very well. So now, let's incorporate this into the yolks. So, I'm going to start by whisking in just a little amount at first, just to incorporate it. It's going to seem a little lumpy at first, but I guarantee you it will take. So see how the viscosity of the egg yolks change a little bit, and it's a little thicker? This is the point that we call ribbon stage. It almost leaves a mark, and a ribbon and a line. Now we're good for folding. The next technique is called folding. Take another little bit, and with the whisk, start from the center and fold out. You want to make sure it's as airy as possible. Okay, now we're going to add a little more. So, see how it's almost mousse-like, that's when you know you're at a great consistency for a souffle. It's not so hard, is it? Make sure to get all the bits and pieces out of the whisk and we're ready to bake. So now I just like to use a regular spoon. A tablespoon will work fine. We go back to our prepared ramekins, and I have them here on a cookie sheet, and we're going to bake these after we fill them three-quarters of the way up for about 15 minutes. As soon as these souffles are in the ramekin, we want to get them in the oven. If they sit out for too long, you risk the meringue dying and falling, and then you won't have a nice full souffle. The temperature that I'm going to bake these at is 375 for about 15 to 20 minutes. We'll check them and keep an eye on them. Let's put these in the oven. So, whenever I finish a souffle, I like to use tongs, do not touch the side of the ramekin because you'll burn yourself, put it on my plate, then I like to top it off with a little sifted powdered sugar. That's a mango souffle. I'm Heather Bertinetti, for eHow.com.