Bacon & Boursin Souffle

Why hello everyone!  Vacation was outstanding, but after two weeks without a knife in my hand I was jonesing to get back to cooking.  Unfortunately for cooking, not so unfortunately for my personal life, life is ramping up and making blogging a bit more difficult.  Yes, dear reader, I'm going to leave you hanging there.  Things aren't to a point yet where I want to discuss things publicly just yet.  Besides, this a food blog, not my personal blog. 

So after two weeks out of the kitchen, I decided to get back into the swing of things with what could be considered the single most difficult dish to pull off successfully, a souffle. This version has bacon, which always makes everything better, and one of my favorite cheeses that I don't use nearly often enough, Boursin.  Ironically enough, Boursin is a pre-made cheese combination classically consisting to garlic and chives, but there are other versions that have pepper and one other that is slipping my mind right now.  I used the garlic and chive version for this recipe.

 Everything you need for the meal.  Eggs, parmesan, cream or tartar, spinach, milk, flour, onion, boursin and bacon.

Ya'll know what bacon looks like cooking in the pan so here is the crispy deliciousness after it had been cooked off.

Once the bacon was done, I added the chopped onions and sauteed those off in a bit of the bacon fat.

I then added the flour to coat the onions, this was the start of the roux which was used to form the bechamel base for the souffle.

Next the milk went into the complete the bechamel.

I let the milk mixture simmer for a bit and then some spices went in which included salt, pepper and a bit of nutmeg, which wasn't actually in the first picture.

This is the reduced milk mixture, the next step was to add the spinach and let the whole thing heat through.

Now the spinach goes in.

And finally the egg yolks.  Once thing to be really careful about at this point is to temper the egg yolks.  This just means you add a bit of the bechamel to a separate bowl to the egg yolks and bring them up closer to the same temperature as the rest of the mixture in the pan.  This makes sure that you don't turn the yolks to scrambled eggs in the final mixture.

Once the wet mixture was completed I put the separated egg whites into a mixing bowl and beat the hell out of them until they formed stiff peaks.  This is what stiff peaks look like, basically when you pull the beater out of the bowl the egg whites hold their shape.

The key to souffle is to fold in the egg whites gently to the rest of the mixture.  You want to mix gently because the lifting power of the egg whites is what you want to harness in order to get the souffle to puff up.

 The souffle pots ready to go into a 400 degree oven.  The recipe called for a much larger souffle pan to be served more like family style.  I don't have one of those and I live alone so I served these in individual dishes.  This required on the fly thinking on the baking instructions.  The recipe said to bake the dish for 30 minutes at 400 then to lower the temp and bake for another 15-20 minutes at like 300.   Turns out my souffles were overdone after the first 30 minutes in the oven.

For whatever reason the final picture didn't turn out but trust me, they were done after the first 30 minutes.  While they were probably overcooked they still tasted really delicious.