Sweet Potato Souffle – Food Wishes

Today we have another great video from Chef John from Food Wishes with a lovely Sweet Potato Souffle recipe for us.

It is a proven fact that people love puffy food and Chef John’s al time favorite puffy food is Soufflé. This is not just because they are gorgeous and delicious and versatile. But also because people think these are really hard to make which they most certainly are not.

The sweet potato souffle that we are looking at in this recipe is even easier to make than others. This is because it eliminates almost half the usual steps.

So let’s get started by roasting a couple of sweet potatoes. The Chef recommends the orange flesh variety of sweet potato for this. Sometimes the ones that are red on the outside has white flesh inside. So give the sweet potato a scratch to make sure it is the orange flesh one.

Before you roast them, prick them here and there with the tip of a knife. That lets the steam out and they won’t explode. Cook them by either roasting them in the oven or putting them in the microwave and cooking them till they are very soft.

One of the only ways to mess up this recipe is to not cook the sweet potatoes soft. Let them sit until they are cool enough to handle.

Scoop the flesh out and in to a bowl. If you cooked them long enough you should end up with a smooth mash. You are welcome to blitz it in food processor or just work them over with a potato masher.

Now to move on to the rest of the prep. This starts by separating four large room temperature eggs. Put the yolks in one bowl and the whites in another. Remember, it is always ok to get a little bit of white in the yolks, but you never want to get yolks in the whites.

The only other prep to do is to butter some ramekins very generously. Do not be shy with the butter and rub it all over, even to the top of the rim. You will place the ramekins on a baking sheet for cooking.

Start making the Sweet Potato Souffle batter by adding a generous cup of the mashed sweet potato to the bowl of egg yolks. Also toss in a quarter cup of milk. Season it very simply with nothing more than 1 teaspoon of kosher salt and pinch of cayenne.

Now mix it together. Because some of the ingredients is thick and the other thin, you want to start off slowly to avoid splatter, and then slowly crank it up. Once you have the mix nice and smoot you can move on to the egg whites.

We will be beating the egg whites with a whisk but not before adding a pinch of salt. The salt is not just for flavor, it will help us whip these up into beautiful peaks.

In case you are tempted to use you mixer, don’t. The meringue will form in an amazing short amount of time. Just use nice long circular strokes. You want very luxurious, relatively soft but still well defined peaks.

Add exactly half of the whipped egg whites to the other bowl. Fold and stir that in. We do it in 2 halves because the first one just lightens the mixture whereas the second is the much more important one.

So for the first go we don’t need to use as light a touch. Once we have the first half folded in we can go ahead and fold the second half in. We want to be more careful here to not knock the air out.

The better you are at folding the more air will be retained and the higher the soufflés will rise. The important thing here is to know when to stop. Only spatulate until the egg whites have almost but not quite disappeared.

Take a spoon and carefully transfer into the ramekins being as gentle as humanly possible. Fill them all the way to the top.

Once ready put it in the oven at 425 degrees for about 15 minutes or until they are beautifully brown and fully inflated.

Garnish if you want and serve!