Chocolate Soufflé

And Class #5

Hmmmm….chocolate!  Even the word sounds rich and round and satisfying.  Chocolate came up frequently on the survey I sent to students before the cooking class began.  We devoted one class to it, but in fact we could have devoted a whole semester to it.  Chocolate is a very complex subject matter and ingredient.  But all we have is 100 minutes so we did our best.

Bert Gordon is a history professor at Mills who has a specialty in food history and is known for his four hour occasional talks on the history of chocolate.  I took a chance and emailed him in the beginning of the semester to see if he’d like to give an abbreviated talk on chocolate to my class and he quickly replied that he would.  Professor Gordon traced the path of the cacao bean for my students bringing them to the point of the boutique chocolate explosion that is happening today while they munched on several different types of semi sweet chocolate chips and chocolate short breads made with two different cocoa’s.  I wanted the students to taste the difference between manufacturers and get an inkling about how those various flavors would impact their choices for recipes.

After Professor Gordon’s talk we went into the kitchen to make chocolate soufflé, ganache, and crepes.  The soufflé recipe is a Nouvelle Cuisine recipe, which means it is made without the béchamel that is typical in the pre N.C. era.  In fact, this is a flour less recipe since it consists of chocolate, eggs, and sugar.    Soufflé appeared on the survey as an item people wanted to learn about and I was happy to teach it since it gives me an opportunity to discuss eggs and the importance of temperature when working with eggs and chocolate.  While the soufflé was baking I told everyone about the miracle of ganache.  If I was allowed only one chocolate recipe in my life it would be ganache because armed with a bowlful of ganache I can do a million things.  It can be used as a frosting, a glaze, an ice cream topping, a profiterole drizzle, strawberry dip, you name it!

Following our success with soufflé and ganache we moved on to the expected failure of crepes.  Once crepes are mastered they are simple, but it’s the mastery that takes some time and involves the proper pan, spatula, butter or oil, and batter all working in concert.  Unfortunately I forgot my perfect spatula for crepes and the pans we had in the kitchen just didn’t feel like making crepes that day.  It was a team building experience with some students managing to make crepes in spite of all that was working against them.    You may ask why crepes were in a chocolate class?   They were there as an excuse to be smothered in ganache, cream, and oranges.  No matter what the crepes looked like, the dessert was fantastic.