Easy Chocolate Souffle Recipe

Hey, I'm John Kanell, and today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making a classic chocolate souffle. So let's get started. To make this souffle, you'll need granulated sugar, eggs, butter, a little bit of salt, a nice semi-sweet chocolate, pinch of cream of tartar, some vanilla, and of course, ramekins and a pastry brush. First off, we're gonna brush those ramekins with butter. I'm using four five-ounce ramekins. If you wanna go a size larger to six-ounce, totally fine, but I think you're gonna get three nice portions from that as opposed to four. So if you want four, go for the smaller ramekin. I'm brushing liberally with butter on the bottom, and now, the tricky part is, you want your souffle to rise up and be so dramatic. To do that, you're going to have vertical brush strokes going all the way up of butter, and it's just gonna help the souffle rise up and be really delicious. Just make sure you have nice coverage. I actually like to butter the rim, too. You're gonna repeat that for all of your ramekins. Now, I'm grabbing about three tablespoons of sugar, move that around, and then just work the side so it's completely covered in sugar, and repeat the process for the remaining ramekins. These guys go into the fridge to hang out and chill while we make our souffle. Now, we're gonna grab a cutting board, do some chopping, and make sure that oven is at 400 if you plan on serving these souffles right away. The nice thing that people don't tell you is souffles can be made hours ahead of time, and then, when you're ready to have a delicious dessert, pop them into the oven, and amazing magic comes out. You don't have to make them and serve them right away. Before I chop this chocolate, I'm gonna fill this pot with about two inches of water and set it to boil. Now, we're gonna chop our chocolate, three ounces of a nice semi-sweet chocolate, although you could totally use chocolate chips and it'll still be delicious. One, two, three ounces. Give this a nice fine chop. It's always better for chocolate pieces to be small and the same size when you're melting them. Souffles are so intimidating, but they're actually really, really easy. It's shocking that they have such a bad reputation. There's a couple things you have to do right, but once you do them, it's like you can sleepwalk through this recipe. Today, we're making a delicious chocolate souffle, but you can let me know in the comments if there's any other flavors you'd like to see on the channel. One that I used to have in Los Angeles was a Grand Marnier souffle. Mm, it's orange liqueur, and it's served with a nice creme anglaise. Ah, so good. I also want three tablespoons of unsalted butter. Could be room temperature or cold, but room temperature is better. So I'm gonna cube this into some smaller pieces and add it in with the chocolate. There we go. This is gonna melt up on our double boiler and be amazingly delicious. Grab a spatula, and we're gonna place this over that boiling water after we reduce it to a simmer. Plop that on, and you can mix it occasionally. It'll melt really fast because those chocolate pieces are so small. While that melts, we're gonna separate our eggs out. We're using the yolks, and we're using the whites, so crack your egg into a bowl. We do not wanna mix the two, so you can use your clean hands to separate or an egg separator. I know a lot of you love that plastic water bottle trick. So egg yolks go in one bowl. We're dumping the egg whites out one at a time into our mixing bowl just in case a yolk breaks. That way, we don't have to throw the whole batch into our breakfast. To my egg whites, I'm adding a quarter teaspoon of cream of tartar. This is an acid derived from the winemaking process. It's gonna stabilize our egg whites. You could skip it if you don't have it, or you could also add in a couple drops of vinegar or lemon juice to help you stabilize those eggs. This gets set aside. We're gonna whip that up in a minute, but I think our chocolate is ready. There we go. Take a look at this chocolate. It's nice and silky. Just mix in any pools of butter that you see. And we're gonna set this aside for two minutes just so it doesn't cook our egg yolks too much. While that chocolate's cooling down, grab your stand mixer. We're gonna pop the egg whites on just so we're ready. Nice, clean whisk attachment. Whenever you're mixing up egg whites into a meringue, you need to really make sure your mixer bowl is clean as well as the whisk attachment. So if you were making a frosting the other day and someone came over and did a bad job washing it, your egg whites are gonna be really sad. They're not gonna fluff up and be as amazing as they could be. It'll still be a meringue. It just won't have the volume, and you really want that volume for a souffle. My chocolate's cooled down a bit, so now I can add my egg yolks in. If you plop them into really hot chocolate, there's a chance they could just change texture and you'd get some scrambled egg situation happening. I'm also gonna add in a half teaspoon of vanilla. Mm, a little depth of flavor. One quarter teaspoon of salt. It's really gonna balance everything out. Just make sure you're using a kosher salt or if you happen to have a fine grain salt, use half of what the recipe calls for. We're gonna whisk this up now, just so it's nice and smooth. Kind of like turns into chocolate pudding almost. It has a very silky, beautiful texture to it. Now we're gonna set our chocolate aside and say hello to it in a little bit. It's time to make our meringue. This is the most important part, so we're gonna lock our mixer off and mix on high until the eggs are frothy and doubled in size, you know, double the volume. So it'll be about one to two minutes. Right now you wanna grab your tablespoon and your sugar. Once this is doubled in volume, looks nice and frothy now, we're gonna slowly, slowly add our sugar in. If you just dumped your sugar in, it would deflate the egg whites and it would not be great. Just drizzle it in. You have so much time, no hurry. If you wanted to in this recipe, you could definitely use caster sugar or superfine sugar if you felt like it. Already the whites are really changing texture. And for this recipe, we want stiff peaks to form and I'm gonna show you what that looks like. In fact, this is two tablespoons in, we have one to go. And I wanna see what it looks like. Yeah, this is like, these are almost, these are basically stiff peaks. There's a little bit of droop right here, but that's not bad at all. So, that's looking good. We're gonna add that last tablespoon in. No need to rush it. I know these are stiff peaks because the meringue sits in the mixer like this. If it sits in the whisk, you know it's really stiff. See, straight up, very spiky peaks. So, all of our components are ready. We're gonna start the most important part. Okay, I realized I should have used a large bowl for my chocolate. That's fine, just one more dish tonight. We're gonna transfer this into a large bowl. By the way, this is one of Brian's favorite dessert. Light, chocolatey, melts in your mouth. And it's like, oh, it's just almost refreshing at the end of a meal. So, here's the deal. We have a rich chocolate mixture with butter in it. I have a light meringue mixture. No fats in here. If you just mix it all together, you're gonna deflate too many of the air bubbles. Your souffle is not gonna rise up to the sky and have that chocolate cloud-like texture. So, we're gonna grab about a cup of the mixture, maybe a little bit more, and fold that into the batter or into the chocolate. But while we're always gonna be careful, I'm doing this understanding that this is sacrificial meringue. Basically, I'm lightening up the chocolate mixture so that the rest of it can get folded in successfully. So, basically, for this first batch of meringue, you can be a little bit more vigorous and rough with it, understanding that a lot of it will pop. For the rest of it, we're gonna be very careful, sweet and kind. Okay, you can see this has really changed colors. So, it's really lightened up. And now that I'm seeing close to no streaks, I know I'm ready for the next batch. That looks good. So, now I'm gonna add in half of the remaining meringue. This is how you fold things in gently. Think of this as scraping the bowl down with a final movement. So, you're scraping, then you bring it up and cut through. Then scrape again. You're creating these circular motions that are folding things together without crushing them. This technique is really, really important for a lot of the more delicate cakes, like angel food or chiffon cake, where you're just folding things in with egg whites, and the egg whites do magic in the oven and make things light, fluffy, and melt in your mouth. So, I'm scraping, then I'll cut in. Scrape and cut through. Last batch of meringue, folding it in gently. And now, it should mix more easily because the batter is so much lighter thanks to all the other millions and millions of bubbles of egg whites in there. Just doing one final check for any bubbles of meringue here or there, because I wanna have a thoroughly chocolatey dessert. I have a beautiful uniform chocolate batter. This is gonna get refrigerated for 10 minutes, so it's a bit firmer, and then we'll be right back. My batter is chilled. These ramekins are chilled, and the oven's at 400, nice and hot. So, we're gonna portion the souffle out evenly between our ramekins. Just get that in there. This is so easy to do with a big triggered scoop, just like that, it plops in, and you're not crushing the bubbles by manipulating the batter too much. So, we're just gonna finish filling these guys up. And this, as you can see, is a perfect amount of batter for my five-ounce ramekins. This isn't a trick, but in order to get that beautiful look for the souffle, you're gonna do two things. One, flatten the top out, gently, gently flatten the top, so it's nice and smooth, just like that. They're nice and flat, but they're not gonna shoot up to the sky unless you do one crucial step. You can use your finger for this, or a little spatula or knife, like I am. And you're gonna go in a quarter of an inch and bring this away from the ramekin, just like that. So, it's floating in the ramekin now, and that way, it's free to rise up. These are going into the oven 12 to 14 minutes for the smaller ramekin size, closer to 12, larger ramekin size, closer to 14. They'll be puffed amazing, and they'll have a little bit of jiggle in the center. And you will wanna serve them immediately, right away, because they begin falling instantly. They're still gonna taste delicious, they're not gonna look as impressive. So, into the oven you go. Out of the oven, puffed and delicious, but rapidly falling. So, you're gonna serve this with a little bit of whipped cream. You can make an easy quenelle with two spoons. Just plop that on, a little raspberry, and just like that, it's ready to enjoy. I like to serve these right onto plates, straight to your guests, and they are all gonna be amazed by how delicious this is. It melts in your mouth. That is some chocolatey perfection. I hope you get a chance to make this recipe, and if you like this video, check out my chocolate playlist.