Raspberry Amaretto Chocolate Souffle
First of all, does anyone know how to get the accent mark above the ‘e’? I cannot figure it out. I’m sure there’s a way to do it with html or some other formatting, but I don’t know it. Oh well.
Anyway.
I was SUPER excited to try souffle! ! I love a nice, warm, fluffy souffle. Chocolate, cheese, fruit, they’re all tasty and comforting and I love them all.
I decided I was going to try a couple of recipes from well-known chefs, since I had NEVER attempted any souffle before this. I was so surprised to find how simple it was, overall, although it definitely relies on a solid background knowledge of the skills involved.
The first recipe I tried was Emeril Lagasse’s chocolate souffle (photo at the top, and the recipe can be found here), and it was AMAZING. It was rich and sweet, but without being cloying. The sauce was creamy and chocolatey, with just a hint of orange from the Grand Marnier. The only thing I can say against this recipe is that it made SO MUCH MORE than I anticipated…I doubled the recipe because I was feeding 6 people (the original recipe says it’s for 4), and I had WAYYYY too much! I had gotten small ramekins to leave with the family we were staying with, and I filled all 6 of them plus their extra-large ramekin, I probably could have filled another 6 small ones. Not that having extra souffle was a bad thing! I was very impressed with how easy this recipe was to follow, because I had never made any type of souffle before and it still came out perfectly.
The second recipe I tried was Alton Brown’s Easy Chocolate Souffles. These were…a little disappointing, to be honest, but really only because I made these second. They were dense and rich, and very cake-like. If I had made these first, I would have been thrilled, because it seems very fool-proof, but because they have flour in them, and because they are mixed in a blender instead of whipped with a hand or stand mixer, they were more like little cakes than a souffle.
Don’t get me wrong, they were delicious and rich and I happily ate the entire serving!!! But they were not a fluffy and light as I expect from a souffle.
Armed with my knowledge and experience from these two recipes, I decided I was ready to try my hand at creating my own recipe. So without further ado, here are my Raspberry Amaretto Chocolate Souffles!
The major flavor from this recipe comes from a quick sauce made by cooking some raspberries down with some amaretto liquor. Amaretto is a pretty sweet liquor to start with, so skip the sugar at first. If you taste it and decide you do want to add some (if you wound up with extra-tart berries, perhaps), be sure to do that while it’s still cooking so it incorporates well, but I found that with all the sweetness of the amaretto I didn’t need any more sugar in the sauce.
You can use a cocktail muddler to make mashing the raspberries a little easier, or just use a wooden spoon
When you’re melting the chocolate, be sure to use a double boiler. If you don’t have an actual double boiler (like me), then a glass (or other heat-proof) bowl set atop a small pan of simmering water will do. I have seen lots of recipes give instructions for melting chocolate in the microwave, and to be honest, I do not recommend it. It’s REALLY easy to burn your chocolate that way, and with the price of good baking chocolate, I don’t like to risk it. That said, it does reduce the chances of water getting in your chocolate, which will make it seize and unusable, which can happen with a makeshift double boiler. If you do choose to use a microwave, chop your chocolate finely, use short bursts (like 10-20 seconds at a time), stir between each one (even if it doesn’t look like anything’s melted for the first couple rounds), and stop when there are still a couple of small chunks (the residual heat will finish melting the last few chunks, and it helps ensure that the chocolate doesn’t burn).
This is a bad example of a makeshift double boiler. Use a bigger bowl. If the bowl is the same size as the pan, like it is here, it increases the chances that water will get into the bowl, and that will make your chocolate unusable.
When adding the egg yolks, I found what worked best was tempering the yolks with a bit of the chocolate mixture before adding them to the warm chocolate. If the difference in temperature between the yolks and the melted chocolate is too great, then when the yolks get added to the chocolate they’ll just cook and you will wind up with slightly scrambled eggs in chocolate.
Tempering the egg yolks raises the temperature gradually, so that they don’t curdle when they are dropped into the hot, melted chocolate. Usually this is done with a whisk, but I have more rubber spatulas than whisks so I made do.
The crucial step in this recipe, and in any souffle, is folding the flavor mixture into the egg whites. All the rise comes from the whipped up egg whites, so if you knock too much air out of them your souffles will be flat and chewy, instead of light and puffy. Most recipes I see call for folding the egg whites into the chocolate mixture a little at a time, but I have always had more luck adding to the egg whites instead of the other way around. If you are finding your souffles are coming out flat, try it a different way and it may click.
Mmmm…just looking at this makes me crave a sweet, puffy, chocolate delight!
The first time I made this, I topped it with a chocolate ganache that was made with half of the raspberry sauce, but my taste testers (also known as Husband and Daughter) both really liked it better with a dollop of whipped cream instead. They said that it balanced out the richness of the souffle a little better, and wasn’t quite as heavy. Sifted powdered sugar would also make an excellent, lighter topping.
They had already sunk a little by the time I got them photo-ready, but they were delicious all the same!
I hope you love this recipe as much as I do. If you make it, I would LOVE to see photos in the comments!
Until next time, happy baking!
