Hi! I’m Jeff Buben of Vidalia Restaurant and Bistro Bis. We’re back with more Vidalia onion recipes. This one is our Vidalia onion and lump crabmeat soufflé, a great entrée for lunch, dinner or a great appetizer for an elegant dinner. And let me take you through the ingredients for our next step. This is the béchamel. This is the base for all soufflés, both savory and sweet. Some sweet recipes use the pastry cream but for a savory soufflé, the béchamel is great. We’re going to take today, we’re going to take to three tablespoons of butter, three tablespoons of flour, one cup of milk, 4 egg yolks, we’ve separated the egg whites for the second part of our soufflé. We have a quarter cup of Grier cheese. We have salt, freshly ground pepper, a little pinch of nutmeg, a little pinch of cayenne.

And we’re going to need today a medium heat again. We’re going to take a medium sauce pan and get started. We’re going to get our butter. Add our butter to the pan. Melt our butter, let that melt nice and beautiful. And then we are going to make a rue, the rue is flower and butter, usually equal parts in most recipes that you will find. So, we’re going to melt our butter down and the flower is going to be added to that. The most important part about a béchamel is letting the flower and the butter cook completely, so we’ve cooked all the starch up, that will have a much cleaner taste and a much richer taste to your béchamel and you won’t have that flowery taste to it. The one thing that you don’t want to do is you don’t want to over color your butter or your flower or you’ll make a brown a rue and then you’ll need to cook that and then you’ll have a completely different recipe. So once our butter has melted, we’ll add the flower.

Again, when you're mix in dry ingredients, everything needs to go at it one time. Stir vigorously to get it all incorporated and get the lumps out. And as you see what's happening, the butter is starting to incorporate nice and smooth with it, the flower and we’re letting that cook and you see--once it kind of pulls away from the bottom of the pan, that’s usually your indication that the flower is completely absorbed with the butter and you have achieved that. And you kind of want a little bit of a sandy finish to it as what is referred to. To that we’re going to add our milk. And if you have a hot rue, you want to add a cold milk. It’s always good to add opposite extremes of temperature and not like streams. Continue stirring, until well incorporated.

Now, in order for that flower to react with the milk and create our béchamel, we need to make sure that it comes to a complete boil because at that point we will have absorbed all the flower in the butter and absorbed all the starch into the liquid and we’ll create the right texture for a béchamel. We continue to stir that. Now, we have it all incorporated. We just have to wait for it to come up. That looks wonderful. To that, we are going to add our grated Grier cheese because we want that to melt. We don’t want it to cook too far. We’ll let that melt in the cheese. Get that melted in nice and beautiful and you see how that sticking it up. And the cheese is melting at the same time. And there we have our thick béchamel, nice and beautiful, look at that, that silky béchamel. And that’s what we’re looking for, that beautiful creamy texture full of cheese, nice and gorgeous.

Now, we have to season that with a little freshly ground pepper, two or three turns, a little salt. I like top put a little cayenne for just a little zip to that and a little freshly grated nutmeg. Kind of adds a sweet spiciness to the béchamel. With that, you incorporate that. Remove it from the fire. Let it cool down slightly before we add our egg yolks and the reason we want to do that is just that we don’t cook the egg yolks in the béchamel. So we add slowly our egg yolks to the béchamel, one at a time or just enough until you get them incorporated. And there we have our egg yolks inside our béchamel. Again, that’s still staying beautifully creamy. The egg yolks are in. They have incorporated well. And there you have the base for your soufflé, your béchamel.