Corn Souffle

The Souffle. If you whisper the word too loudly while one is in the oven, it will fall... Right? Making this souffle worried me; up till now, I had never attempted one before, and no one likes a failed recipe.

I bought the ingredients for this a few weeks ago, truth be told, but I've been steadily coming up with excuses to not bake it. These have ranged from "I had corn yesterday!" and "It's too hot to bake something for so long." to "The puppy is bouncing around too much today, the vibrations will surely make the souffle fall."

Finally, I started to feel guilty about avoiding the recipe, and decided to toughen up and go for it.

So did it rise?





INGREDIENTS
2 Cups Cream-Style Canned Corn
2 TBSP Flour
2 TBSP Sugar
1/2 TSP Salt
4 Eggs, separated
1 1/2 to 2 Cups Whole Milk
1 TBSP grated Raw Onion
1 TBSP grated Green Pepper
1/2 Cup melted Butter

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Butter a 1 1/2 quart souffle or baking dish. Set aside.

Measure canned corn into a bowl.

Stir together salt, flour and sugar.



Mix with the corn.






Beat egg yolks to mix them and add milk. If the corn seems wet, use 1 1/2 cups milk, if dry, 2 cups. I couldn't decide what it seemed like, and used a little over 1 1/2.





Add onion and pepper, and mix it all in to the corn mixture. This looks like a petri dish to me. Let's quickly move on.



Stir in the melted butter.



Beat the egg whites till fluffy, but not dry, and gently fold in to the corn mixture.





Place mixture into the buttered dish.



Bake 1 hour, or until puffed and brown. Serve immediately.


So I put the souffle in the oven, and kept checking on it to see if it was getting "puffed and brown." After about 20 minutes, it began to rise...



It was getting puffed! Yes! It continued to puff up more and more. After 1 hour 15 minutes, I decided that it was nice and puffy and brown and done. I removed it from the oven and carried it to the table...



Even as I carried it the 10 feet to the table, I knew something was wrong. It fell even more quickly than I expected it to, and, worse, it jiggled.

Souffles shouldn't jiggle.

I snapped a couple of quick photos, and then put it back in the oven, hoping to solidify the interior of the souffle, and perhaps keep it from deflating even more.

After another 20 minutes, it seemed more solid, if still a bit deflated and sad, so I decided to eat it.





The corn "souffle" was very custard-y, underneath the crust. I'm not sure if this is the fault of the recipe or the creamed corn I bought, or a little bit of both. It certainly didn't turn out the way I had imagined it would (fluffy), even though this was very tasty. (I may have eaten half of it by myself.)

I'm planning on trying another souffle sometime soon, and then returning to this one, to see if a second attempt would render it puffier and more souffle-like.