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Cheese Souffle

A baked cheese soufflé made with milk, bread crumbs, egg yolks, cheese, and stiff egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and cheese are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,130 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cheese Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the base

  1. Mix milk, bread crumbs, egg yolks, and cheese in a saucepan.

  2. Stir over medium heat until well blended; then cool.

Bake and serve

  1. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

  2. Pour into a baking dish or ramekins.

  3. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 20 minutes.

  4. Serve immediately.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Bread + cheesetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Trapped air in the beaten whites expands in the oven, lifting the souffle and giving it its light structure.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the base as they thicken with gentle heat.
Cheese
Adds rich flavor and fat, and helps give the base body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the other ingredients blend into.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and thicken the base, adding body to the mixture.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently preserves the air bubbles in the whites. Stirring or deflating them makes the souffle heavy and flat, so it will not rise well in the oven.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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