Carla Makes the Fluffiest Egg Soufflé

[Tommy] Wow.

Rolling, egg rolling.

What if this was an egg rolling video?

Um, it's not an egg rolling video.

[upbeat metal music]

Hey it's Carla, I'm in the Bon Appetit test kitchen,

and today I'm going to make souffle'd omelet,

AKA omelet souffle, which is both easier

than making a souffle and also simpler

than an actual omelet.

So you really can't lose.

It's got both parts of the egg doing different things.

So you get to separate the eggs and the whites,

because, I don't know, they get to go do their own thing

and then they come back together

and everybody is greater for it.

So let's get into that part, the three egg part.

They're gonna need to be separated,

like misbehaving truants in school,

we have to separate the eggs, alright.

[Tommy] So how is this easier than an omelet?

Oh [laughs], guess what I didn't do?

I didn't separate the egg.

A lot of people do the thing where they pass it

back and forth in the eggshells, don't do that.

Also, this is just a cheater way,

it's a lot easier to use your hands,

and in a lot of ways it's more hygienic, too,

and it's also safer for not,

it's oogy, I'm not gonna say it's not woogilly.

Try that again.

The reason I don't like to separate the egg

with the shell is because the shell is sharp,

and the shell could then cut into the yolk.

So what I do is I get it open,

and then instead of passing it back and forth

shell to shell, I pass it back and forth hand to hand.

You've got to whip eggs in a clean bowl.

If there's any fat or grease inside the bowl,

it does something with the egg white proteins

and it makes it so that they won't whip.

So make sure your bowl is very clean.

Oh my God. [laughs]

It's early, but I shouldn't have used this whisk

because now it's got egg yolk on it.

I was supposed to use that fork.

I'm gonna season these.

Put those over there.

Large whisk, large bowl.

What's gonna happen here is,

at the beginning just get them foaming, right?

And liquidy, they start out kind of oogy,

as I mentioned earlier.

And then you get them to where they're just like

liquidy and foaming, right?

Then from there you wanna kinda crank up the volume

if you know what I mean.

And the goal is, we want stiff peaks.

I have to stop whisking

because I have to explain this with both hands.

So the egg white, the proteins in the egg white are like

spreading out and stranding, and then at the same time

you've got air coming in,

and the air's getting enveloped by the proteins

and it's expanding and expanding and expanding.

And you want to get it to the place where

the egg white protein has stretched and is filled with air

but it hasn't stretched past its capacity.

So it's like blowing up a balloon,

you get to that great place where it's like really full

and really voluminous, but if you went too much further

it's gonna thin out and pop and the air will be no more.

You can do a figure eight pattern,

you'll see that a lot in recipes.

I'm just trying to get the whisk to go under over,

and I'm tipping the bowl to the side

because it just makes it a little bit deeper over there

so I've got like some volume of egg to work with.

[Tommy] Do the rock and roll hands help at all?

You've got this going on.

[laughs] Yeah, that's right.

[laughs]

Rock and roll is here to stay guys.

I saw a bunch of people on the train this morning

getting off, they were going to a Def Leppard concert,

they were all tricked out,

they had all Def Leppard outfits.

They had Def Leppard license plates with them,

they had Def Leppard concert tees,

and I was just like can I not go to work

and go wherever you guys are going?

[Tommy] They're going to a concert

at 9:30 in the morning?

[laughs] I don't know where they were,

maybe it was a conference center?

[Tommy laughs]

Maybe it was a Def Leppard fan club meetup?

A hair metal convention. I don't know.

[Man] Def Leppard just got into the

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Oh, really?

Is that where they were going?

[Man] I don't know.

Alright, so one quick anecdote about Def Leppard

and we're already at, um,

I would describe this as very soft peaks.

So you can see how they kind of run

off of the end of the whisk.

They're holding a little bit of shape,

but they're kind of slooping around,

and if I were to try to turn the whisk over

that peak just flops, right?

It's not peaking, it's flopping.

So I'm looking for a peak that will stand up on its own

when I invert the whisk,

but that also still looks really shiny.

When you go past shiny and it gets matte,

that's when it gets like curdly

and that's when you've gone too far

and then you have to start over.

So that looks a little bit more,

see how bouncy it is and shiny and resilient?

Kind of very elastic I would say,

and when I turn it over, voila, look at peakies going up.

So nice, a tiny bit of Dairy Queen peak at the top

but really good looking stuff.

Alright, that's a firm peak.

[Tommy] Did you say Dairy Queen peak?

Yeah Dairy Queen, like on the top of a, you know,

the Dairy Queen [tongue clicks]

and the top of the soft serve,

and it makes the perfect little swirl

and then the little peak on top

that just tiny peaks over?

That's the Dairy Queen peak, right?

Okay, I'm not crazy.

Tommy, where'd you grow up?

Alright, so then at the beginning of this

I'm just gonna add, I don't know,

a third of the egg white mixture into the egg yolks.

And at this stage I'm just trying to lighten up

the egg yolks so that it will be closer in texture

to the egg white, and that'll just make it easier

to fold in the rest.

When you're folding, the goal here is like

we just created all of this volume and air and loftiness,

and that's the souffle-y part,

and I don't want to batter that around

and pop all my bubbles.

So think about like getting into a big bathtub

that's filled, with the whole surface

has all those bubbles on it,

and if you get in and slam your hands around

a bunch of times you're gonna pop all the bubbles,

but if you like slide into the bath and like

[throat gurgles] that's what you want to do,

you want to preserve all the bubbles.

I don't really take that many bubble baths,

but that really came to me in a Jean Nate kind of way.

Only the old people will get that reference,

no one here laughed,

[laughs] and that's fine.

No one laughed.

Looking at me like what the [beep] is Jean Nate?

[laughs] It's cool.

Alright, so folding and not battering and preserving loft.

You fold from under, see how I'm going under

but I'm also rotating the bowl at the same time?

And you've got to get down to the bottom.

So I want this egg white and egg yolk mixture combined

because I don't want big pockets of egg white,

but just combined.

So the mistake that people make when they're folding

is they just keep going around the side,

and I know this because I'm trying to teach

a nine-year-old child how to fold at home.

And they just go around the side,

and they go around the side, and that's great

except you have all of this egg white in the bottom.

So you've got to go scooping from the bottom,

moving the bowl, but not so far

that then you've sacrificed loftiness.

I think we're there, there's one little piece of white,

but by the time I scrape this into the pan it'll be gone.

So the other things that I need,

the chives are gonna stay over here,

there's some cheddar makes it better

for putting in the middle of the omelet,

and then we can just start cooking it I'm pretty sure.

Yes, I've gotten nods of approval,

so let's take it to the stove.

Alright, this is like, I don't know,

a little less than a tablespoon of butter

and this pan is over medium to medium-high.

The thing is, with this,

the omelet can get a little bit brown

so that's a way that makes it easier

than making like a French omelet

where you really aren't supposed to get any color at all,

and the eggs take color pretty quickly.

And this is a non-stick pan because it's eggs

and I really don't want it to stick,

and it'll give like a nice smooth, shiny surface.

Alright, so then

the beautiful omelet mixture goes in

and I'm gonna gently kind of spread it out.

It wants to stay sort of in this custardy

kind of bouncy texture.

And now it just needs to cook.

So because it has a lot of volume,

that's why the heat, I want like medium, medium-high,

just to make sure that it gets cooked to the center.

You can already see that it's bubbling around the edges

and the butter's browning a little bit which is okay,

that means the surface of the omelet

will take on a little bit of color,

and I think that's fine in this type of omelet.

So I'm gonna look for a little bit like making pancakes,

I'm gonna look to see that some of the air bubbles

are popping, and that's like an indication to me

that the heat is moving all the way

from the base of the omelet to the surface.

It's like two minutes, maybe, that this is gonna take.

So it's totally set on the bottom,

you can see how I can lift it up.

And a bubble popped over there.

I'm just preventing any possible stickage.

It's not sticking, though.

I just want to gloss it up, a little bit of butter.

Alright, so at this point I feel

she's pretty firm around the edge,

it's shrunk back from the pan,

a couple more bubbles have popped.

Now I'm gonna sprinkle some cheddar cheese

and just let that soften.

And do you see how now it's like puffed,

instead of shrinking back down

it's puffing up in the center?

It took on some nice height.

I'm gonna bring it back over here,

we're gonna fold it, bingo bango.

So now I don't have to roll it

and I don't have to get it to fold over

onto itself in some special way,

I'm just folding it like a taco.

Alright, we talked about this,

we weren't sure if this was gonna happen but it is.

It's just so puffy in the middle

that it's a little bit hard to fold,

so I'm just scoring it with my trusty old butter knife,

and that's just gonna give, I think,

a place for this to fold into.

Oh yeah,

oh momma,

wowie zowie.

[laughs] Look at that.

It's so puffy in such a satisfying way,

it's like pushing back on me a little bit, it's resilient,

but you can tell there's so much air in it.

A little more chive, a little more flaky salt.

I'm gonna hot sauce it up.

Oh baby, baby cakes.

And the thing is, that center,

you might be saying to yourself,

that center looks a little uncooked,

like has she not noticed

that some of the inside is coming outside?

Well, think about soft scrambled eggs,

or a baveuse omelet which is cooked on the outside

and a little bit runny in the middle,

that is the right way to have an omelet.

If you wanted it cooked more, I would lower the heat

and keep going, but this is like delicious

souffle'ed, fluffy egg filling.

Oh my God, and the cheese, you don't have to do the cheese

but you know, you don't have to love yourself.

Mm-mm,

so light on the tongue, oh my God.

It's got such a nice

medley of textures,

because the outside is firm but also brown

so it's a different flavor,

and then as you cut through it, it's just like

this puffy, melt-in-your-mouth, dissolving air souffle.

This is an omelet people can like really rock out to,

like Def Leppard. [laughs]

Right here, it's a rock-and-roll omelet,

you should make it. [laughs]

Mm-hm, okay, I'm not gonna talk about Jean Nate any more.