Skip to main content
Main

Cheese Souffle

A baked cheese soufflé made with butter, flour, milk, cheese, egg, cayenne pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. 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. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Whisk in the flour and cook for one minute.

  3. Gradually add the milk, stirring until thickened.

  4. Remove from heat.

Make the mixture

  1. Stir in the beaten egg yolk and grated cheese.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg white until combined.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 20 to 25 minutes.

  3. Serve immediately after removing from the oven.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
The whites trapped in the batter expand with heat and lift the soufflé as it bakes.
Flour
Cooked with butter and milk, it thickens the base so it can hold the air and structure.
Grated cheese
Adds rich flavour and fat, and helps give the base body and a savoury taste.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a smooth white sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the roux that starts the base.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg white until combined. Folding gently keeps the air bubbles in the whites intact. Overmixing deflates them, so the soufflé will rise less and turn out dense.

“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.

You might also like

Macaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipesCheese MakingCheese Making50 recipesCheese FrittersCheese Fritters34 recipesCheese OmeletteCheese Omelette31 recipes