Ash Wednesday Smoked Salmon Soufflé Roll

...well, I missed Pancake Tuesday, and like a good little non-Catholic, I fully planned to spend the day after the day you're supposed to use up all the dairy in your fridge making something with a ridiculous amount of milk. Don't worry though, my soul is safe, as it's not real milk. I had grand plans to use up most of an open container of almond breeze (milk substitute that only lasts a week in the fridge).

Basically I will try my best to not let anything delicious in my fridge go to waste (the not-so-delicious gets chucked when necessary), so I spend a lot of time looking for recipes that call for a lot of milk. Pancakes work perfectly. Shoot.

What else works perfectly?

Chocolate soufflé, but those recipes don't actually call for that much milk. I needed something that would use a lot at once. Usually my fall-back is rice pudding, but with 6 cups of risotto sitting in my fridge right now, the last thing I want to make is more rice. So I was left with quiche. I've been meaning to make quiche for a long time. Crust-less because I wanted a quick and easy protein source, but pie crust is long-term commitment.

I started looking for recipes and they all seemed fine, except they bake forever, and they just seemed pretty bland. Eggs just don't do it for me. Sure, put them in things, or scramble them over things, but when the focus is the eggs themselves, I just get sad. It's how I picture vegetarians who miss meat when they get a big bowl of beans or tofu put in front of them and the person next to them gets a pulled pork sandwich or barbecue ribs. A little part of your dies...but maybe that's just muscle mass. There's a reason the pork smells amazing and the other...well, doesn't have a smell. Sure, you can add a million things to beans or tofu (or eggs), but if they're not great to begin with, then they're going to be less great in the end (Please note, I actually don't eat pork. Does that make me more or less of a hypocrite?).

To get around this problem, I started thinking about all the great things eggs can do. They may not taste wonderful cooked as they are, but if you torture them a little with a whisk or mixer, they will succumb to your desires for flavourful food. Egg whites rise and egg yolks thicken, giving two of the world's greatest creations - soufflé and mayonnaise.

Since I was already acting like a horrible Christian, I figured I should head to Bonnie Stern's book which happens to have a lot of Jewish recipes. Smoked Salmon Soufflé Roll. Kind of cheating on my whole spiel about the miracles of eggs, just because the smoked salmon was what the recipe was all about, but I would get to try my hand at folding egg whites again (I hadn't done it since my overwhleming amount of Christmas mousse-making) and I'd get to make a quasi-quiche, kind of satisfying the little voice in my head which has been telling me to stop procrastinating on making it since about October. Finally, some peace and quiet.

Milk
Flour
Salt
Pepper
Thyme
Cayenne
Chives
3 eggs, separated
cream of tartar

thick yogurt cheese
1 tbsp dijon
smoked salmon
green onions, to garnish

This was supposed to use up two cups of milk but I only had 3 eggs, instead of the 7 the recipe originally called for, so I ended up making a half recipe. I whisked the milk in a saucepan with the flour. It said to bring to a boil slowly but that didn't happen. All of a sudden I had very, very thick porridge, but no clumps or burns, so it was fine. I removed it from the heat and stirred in the herbs and spices. Separating the eggs was also not so great. I got a bit of yolk in the whites, which is exactly what you're not supposed to do, as the whites won't rise as much, but again, no more eggs, so it would have to do.

So now the recipe said to beat the egg yolks, but after Alice Medrich's mousse recipes in "Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts", I'm spoiled by explicit instructions on how long and at what speed to beat. I didn't know if they were supposed to turn pale yellow, so I just whisked for a while instead of beating (Mostly I didn't want to wash the beaters before I had to use them on the egg whites) and then poured a little of the milk mixture in the yolks, then poured the yolks back into the milk pan and whisked again.

Now the whites. They actually rose! I beat them with the cream of tartar until they were "opaque and firm". Who knows what that means? Without a reference to soft peaks or stiff peaks, I'm lost hills and valleys of fluff. I assumed this "firm" stage was after the soft peaks stage, but they seemed to get awfully opaque awfully quickly. The recipe didn't tell me to worry about over-beating, so I figured a little more was better than a little less. Then I folded a quarter of the whites into the sauce, and then the sauce back into the remaining whites. I think I still suck at folding. Everything got combined in the end, and I didn't stir, but I don't think this was expertly done. By the time I poured this onto an oiled piece of aluminum lining a baking sheet the soufflé had definitely stopped thinking up.

Into the oven at 400 Fahrenheit for 18 minutes, or until firm but not dry. Well how exactly am I supposed to know if it's dry? No tooth-pick trick is mentioned. And you have to let it cool for 10 minutes. The first time I pulled it out it seemed a bit too spongy, but the second time it seemed browned enough and with this lovely slight crack on top that's so good for banana bread, but apparently so bad for soufflé. It immediately started to fall, like my spirits. It got pretty flat, but since this was going to be rolled into a log (like my Mocha Buche de Noel!!! but thank goodness it didn't need to be filled with anything frozen, iced and baked again) I figured flat was better.

Actually this was all a whole lot like the Buche de Noel. I inverted the aluminum onto a plastic cutting board (no tea towels available, Ms. Stern) and spread a tbsp of dijon (I didn't half that ingredient...) and all the yogurt that I'd managed to make into yogurt cheese (not much since my sieve lined with paper towel is exceedingly small. Certainly not the called-for 3/4 c.) on the soufflé. Then I placed a single layer of smoked salmon on top of the cheese and rolled up the log with the assistance of the plastic, bendable cutting board (same concept as a sushi roller or the rolling method of the Mocha Buche de Noel). Smoked salmon saved the day. Actually, to be fair, smoked salmon and dijon saved the day. They're so lovely.

The eggs? They were light and fluffy and rolled just fine, but they were a wrap for the delicious soufflé roll fillings. Oh, and a note about the smoked salmon. I couldn't decide between regular smoked salmon or double smoked salmon at the Poissonerie Atwater. The double smoked was dryer and less salty, but I didn't find the regular too salty at all, so I made half the soufflé with one type and half with the other.

This may look like a sandwich, but the consistency was very un-sandwichy. It was soft like a very light dough that stuck slightly to your fingers if you tried to pick it up. That's all egg with a little flour, more like the lightest omelette you've ever eaten. This would have been prettier if I'd done the full recipe and used all the yogurt cheese, but even as it was, the layers looked beautiful. It wasn't for a party so presentation didn't matter too much to me either. I am perfectly capable of imagining how the spirals of soufflé are supposed to look while I'm eating the best brunch I've had in a long time. Take that, pancakes.