Cod Fish Souffle - My first souffle ever!

Recently my fantastic mother-in-law, made a fish souffle and blogged about it on her blog, Helenismos. Normally she doesn't blog about food, but more about her wonderful handcrafted blankets, doll, pillows, and bags. She added the recipe and said her son (my hubby) loved it as a kid, so I felt the need to make it for him and the little one.


I've never made a souffle. I don't even remember ever having eaten a souffle. I've heard of them, particularly the cheese ones, but I never a fish one. Since I am who I am I definately wanted to give it a try for selfish reasons and not just for my boys. I love learning how to make new things and I love to try new dishes, so of course this was a recipe for me :).


Cod Fish Souffle - Adapted from Helenismos Fish Souffle
5 cod fish fillets (original calls for whiting fish), fresh2 tablespoons butter2 tablespoons whole wheat flour1 cup milk, warm6 eggs, yolk and whites separatedPinch of salt, pepper and cinnamon (the original recipe calls for nutmeg but I didn't have any) First you want to cook your fish in a skillet over medium heat. It should take about 5 minutes, turning half way through. Let the fish cool enough to be able to touch it. Cod isn't really easy to cut into chunks but it's doable and in fact (according to my hubby) if you can flake the fish so that you can barely feel the texture when eating the souffle, that's even better.

Next in a sauce pan (if the skillet is deep enough you can do it in there as well so as to not have as many dishes!) melt the butter over medium heat, and slowly stir (I used my whisk) in the flour then the milk. When you add the milk, you want to whisk it constantly so there are no lumps. Remove from the heat and add the fish back into the butter/flour/milk mix and stir well.

Add in the seasoning (you may want to add an extra bit of pepper, the hubby said it needed just a tiny bit more when I made it). Next add in the yolks one at a time. All but two of my yolks broke when I separated the egg whites from them so I just added a little bit at a time and made sure to fully incorporate it before adding more.

Now put your egg whites into a big bowl, do not be silly like me and try to whisk them by hand, unless of course you have strong enough forearms to be able to whisk for like... 10 minutes constantly. Instead use an electric beater, much quicker and easier and well worth the 2 minutes it takes to clean the beaters :).

Beat the egg whites until they are firm and form stiff peaks. I didn't do this... I did it to the softer peaks, as I thought that was enough. If you don't know what a stiff peak is, it's when you turn off the electric mixer and pull the beaters out of the egg whites you get little points that stick up, if they curl over then they are soft peaks (up until recently I had to always check just to make sure which was which!)

Slowly stir the stiff egg whites into the fish and milk mix. Incorporate this fully. You'll notice it kind of poofs up a little as you add in the whites, giving it more volume. Pour the batter into a round baking tin, or into ramekins for individual souffles. I don't have a round baking tin so I used one of the spring form pans that my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas (I don't know if I said how excited I was to get those but I love them even if I don't get the chance to use them much!).

Allow this to bake in a 350F preheated oven for 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.


As you can see by the various pictures, it didn't come out all high and mighty like a souffle should (I think this is due to the soft peaked whites instead of the stiff peaked whites like I was supposed to do).

But this doesn't matter cause it tasted great! I didn't even have a problem with getting the little one to eat it! If you've seen my previous posts or have a little one of your own, you probably know what an achievement this is!! The hubby said it looked and tasted perfect except not as high as it should have been. I'll be doing this again and I'm going to try out other types of souffles and see what all I can incorporate into them and will be trying to get my next ones to have more volume!