04/12/23 - A Steam Oven Cheese Souffle

To start with, we used an ordinary souffle recipe with butter, flour, milk, cheese and eggs. We've had good results making puddings and custards using steam, so we expected to get good results making a souffle. If nothing else, steam ovens transfer heat more effectively than even convection ovens since steam carries heat better than dry air. They can also delay browning. When we make puddings or custards in a regular oven, there's a tradeoff between getting the thing cooked through and having the top too roasted. We use a 100% steam setting for puddings and custards, but we wanted our souffle to brown on top, so we compromised with a 60% steam setting.

We had also read that souffles work best when the heat rises from below, so we set our oven to use its bottom heating coil. The downside of this was that this is the least powerful heating element in our oven, so it took a full half hour to get up to 350F which is about as hot as the oven can get using only that element. Next time, we'll heat the oven using convection heating and switch to heating from below.

We gave our souffle about 20 minutes. We could see it rising almost immediately, and then we could see the top browning. We had never had a souffle rise as nicely as this one. When we took it out, it stayed inflated for a while, at least until we dug into it. All told, excellent results, now strictly an internal matter.