Cooking Soufflés

Baking soufflés is not a perilous enterprise. Put a room-temperature soufflé mix in a hot oven and it will rise. Don’t worry about opening the oven door. The mix can’t fall unless it actually begins to cool down, and even if that did happen, it will rise again when it heats up again.

Most soufflés are placed directly on a rack or baking sheet in the oven, but small individual soufflés are often light enough that they can be blasted halfway out of their dish by the steam generated at the oven-hot dish bottom, so the dish ends up half empty. A baking pan filled with water, or individual foil cups of water on a baking sheet, will moderate the bottom temperature and keep a small soufflé in its dish.