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Dessert

Coffee Souffle

A light, airy dessert made with coffee, butter, flour, eggs, and sugar, baked until puffed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Coffee Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and cook until frothy.

  3. Stir in two-thirds of the coffee.

  4. Add the remaining coffee and cook until smooth.

  5. Remove from heat.

Make the souffle

  1. Mix in the sugar, salt, and beaten egg yolks until thick and smooth.

  2. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  3. Pour the mixture into a buttered baking dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Set the dish in a pan of hot water and bake for 25 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

  2. Serve with coffee sauce.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whipped whites lift the souffle and yolks enrich and set the custard structure.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter and coffee into a stable base that holds the batter together.
Butter
Forms the fat base with flour and adds richness and flavor to the batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the souffle and softens the coffee's bitterness.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air bubbles in the whites intact. Stirring or overmixing deflates them, so the souffle will rise less and bake up denser.

“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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