Hot Dessert Soufflés

In classic French cooking, a dessert soufflé is based on pastry cream (crème patissière), a thick, rather starchy filling that most of us have tasted as the filling in eclairs. The pastry cream is made by cooking flour and sometimes cornstarch with eggs and milk. It is flavored and, just before baking, folded with beaten egg whites. (A little sugar is often added to the egg whites to stabilize them.) Most “modern” soufflés are made without pastry cream or even entirely without flour. The effect is lighter, but since there’s no flour to stabilize the soufflé, a flourless soufflé will fall more quickly than one made with flour. The usual way to make a flourless soufflé is to make a sabayon sauce by beating egg yolks, sugar, and flavoring together over gentle heat until the mixture turns light and airy. This sabayon is then folded with beaten egg whites and immediately baked.