Hi! I’m Jeff Buben of Vidalia Restaurant and Bistro Bis. We’re doing Vidalia Onion Recipes today and we’re going to show you how to make a wonderful lump crabmeat and Vidalia Onion Soufflé. Makes a fabulous appetizer if you do, I mean, the smaller container, you can do it in a larger soufflé container for a larger party, makes a great branch item, great lunch entrée or a really elegant starter for a dinner party. Soufflés, every body gets a little nervous about soufflés. I get nervous about soufflés because you never know what's going to happen once you put it in the oven. We’re going to try to take a little of a mystery out and show you how simple it is. For this recipe, we’re going to use our sweet Vidalia onions again. This time we’re going to take the onion, cut it in half and we want a minced onion for this. We want that beautiful sweet flavor and we want that nice little crunchy sweetness in there. But we don’t want it to be the main focus of this recipe. The main focus of this recipe is going to be the lump crabmeat.

So we’re going to take our onion and best, we cut it in half using the rude end, hold it against there. Finally, make slices all the way to the rude end and all way across. Come back, make one, two slices across and just cross cut until you have a mince on your onion. Very simple. Sometimes, the chefs will take in a cut, a little bit of an angle down like that and a little bit of angle down on this side. Just so when it comes back to the middle, you don’t end up with flops. There you have a beautiful minced onion.

We have our butter. We have two tablespoons of butter. We have two pinches of chive and we have one cup of clean jumbo lump crabmeat. When you buy the crabmeat, just make sure that you pick out any shell that might be in there. Keep it on ice when you do it and then we’re going to sauté that just lightly. We’re going to need sauté pan to sauté these ingredients and this will be the next step for the base of your soufflé. Let’s get started.

We’ll heat our pan, gently heat it because the crabmeat is already cooked and we just want to cook the onions till they're a little translucent. Melt the butter. We’ll add our onions. A little trick with Vidalia onions on the stove, if you want to caramelize Vidalia onion, don’t add your salt until after the onion is cooked. By adding the salt, you’ll extract water from the onion and you’ll have less caramelization. In this particular recipe, we just want a lightly translucent onion. We don’t want any color on it. So we’re just going to let that sauté. So in this particular recipe, we are going to salt--a little freshly ground salt, freshly ground pepper, let those onions cook for about two to three minutes. Just gently turn them so they're nice and soft and beautifully sweet.

To that we’re going to add our crabmeat. Again, the crabmeat is cooked so we just want to gently fold the crabmeat in with our pinch or two of chives, that’s about a pinch and that’s about two pinches. We’re just going to gently warm that crabmeat and it’s that simple. We just turn that for about another minute on the fire. Turn the fire off, and set that aside you. And there you have your crab and Vidalia onion for your soufflé.

The next segment, we’re going to make our béchamel which is a standard béchamel that’s good for all soufflé recipes, both savory and sweet. So once we make that, you're going to know how to make a soufflé. We’re going to take all the mystery out of it and we’re going to get this recipe of the ground and then into the oven.