With soufflés, it seems that timing is everything. You’ve got to be ready with the rest of the meal an instant BEFORE the soufflés come out of the oven.  They don’t scare me, but I’ll admit that it all seems a little fussy to me.  Going into this challenge, I wasn’t 100% convinced about the magic of a soufflé, but I was open-minded.

This week’s recipe for Cook the Book Fridays is for cheese, bacon, and arugula soufflés.  We thrive on leftovers here, so the fact that leftover soufflé is just not a thing means that I needed to make only enough for one meal.  I opted to halve the recipe and hope that eating two soufflés each wasn’t too much.  Plus I needed to find an evening when I had time to make the recipe.  In fact, I didn’t get around to it until tonight even though I was running around all day getting ready for the garden club’s big plant sale tomorrow.

Making soufflé isn’t that hard, but there are a lot of steps.  Cooking the bacon, wilting the greens, grating the cheeses, making the roux, separating eggs, and so on.  I worked my way through it methodically, and things came together without a hitch.  The twice-baked twist on this recipe was interesting but added to my feeling that the recipe was fussy.

Before

We ate two personalized soufflés each with a big green salad for a satisfying meal. The flavors were nice, but we both felt that it was too much like a quiche without its advantages (like more flexible timing on serving and leftovers).  My takeaway from this recipe is a new inspiration for a quiche or frittata filling.

After

So I’m still not convinced that a soufflé is worth the effort.

However, if you want to try, you can find the recipe of page 139 of David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen.  And you can check out other reviews by following my friends’ links here.