The soufflé has a reputation that the boat environment makes worse. The reputation is that the soufflé is fragile, temperamental, likely to collapse at any disturbance, and dependent on the controlled conditions of the professional kitchen that the offshore galley does not provide. The reputation is partially accurate for the wrong reasons and entirely accurate for one right reason: the soufflé does not tolerate vibration during the baking, and a moving boat provides vibration.
The solution is not to make soufflé at anchor rather than on passage. It is to anchor before making the soufflé. The flat water of the anchorage is not a calm more than a professional kitchen provides. It is exactly as much calm as the soufflé requires, and the conditions that the anchorage provides when the wind is light and the swell is absent are conditions in which the soufflé works.
The Preparation
The chocolate soufflé preparation begins three hours before the meal because the preparation can be done in stages and the stages allow the galley to produce the soufflé without the simultaneous attention that the baking requires and the service of the other courses demands. The crème pâtissière base: the milk and the yolks and the sugar and the flour cooked to the thick custard that the flour produces, cooled to room temperature, the dark chocolate melted in the bain marie and folded in.
The soufflé dishes. Four ceramic ramekins from the galley’s small crockery store, buttered and sugared and filled to two thirds with the base. This can be done in the afternoon. The meringue from the egg whites beaten to the stiff peak that the offshore humidity occasionally makes take longer than the kitchen expects, but always achieves, is folded into the base at the last moment, just before the oven.
The oven preheated to 190 degrees. The soufflés in. The galley door closed. Twelve minutes. No opening of the oven. No checking. No conversation about whether it is working that involves raising the voice or moving quickly through the galley. The twelve minutes are the twelve minutes. They produce what they produce and the production is not improved by the observation.
The Moment and the Taste
The soufflés come out risen. The Long Table that has been told that soufflé is being made and that has been treating the galley with the specific consideration of twelve people who understood that something requiring quiet was happening receives the soufflés with the silence that the unexpected produces rather than the silence that the expected good thing produces: the silence of twelve people who did not quite believe it would work and who are now revising their assessment of what the offshore galley is capable of.
The taste is the taste of the chocolate soufflé made correctly: the exterior set to the specific firmness that the oven’s heat produced on the outside of the risen foam, the interior still molten in the centre where the twelve minutes did not reach, the dark chocolate from the provisioning in its most concentrated form because the soufflé’s technique concentrates rather than dilutes the ingredient it is built around.
The powdered sugar from the fine sieve. The cream from the tin that the dry stores keep for exactly this occasion. The Long Table that ate the soufflé on the anchorage in the Adriatic or the Banda Sea or wherever the flat water and the right evening conspired to allow it never forgot that the boat made soufflé. Neither did the cook who made it. Some dishes are worth the audacity.
