Pistachio soufflé: a small act of faith

I often think (and write) about how much faith baking requires. Every time you entrust a batter, a dough or a sponge to the oven, there’s little you can do to change its fate. Sure, you can make sure you don’t open the oven dough (don’t open the oven door!), you can double check your temperatures and timings, but really, it’s a waiting game. Hoping, trusting that the cake or the bread or the pastry will have risen, turned golden, or crisped.

Cooking is different: in general, you can fiddle when you’re cooking. You can taste, and add, and adjust. Cooking isn’t a done deal until you serve the finished dish, and you can lift the lid, remove from the oven, season and stir to your heart’s content without any detrimental effect.

Perhaps this preoccupies me because putting my faith in something isn’t in my nature: I’m pessimistic, sceptical, and extremely impatient. Baking forces me to go against that nature, to close my eyes and hope for the best. Especially with my old, knackered, unlit, scratched-up oven door, which brings a new, more prosaic meaning to the phrase ‘through a glass darkly’. And nothing tests my faith quite like a soufflé – as I put that slightly sloppy mixture not quite-filling the ramekin, I have to trust that it will rise up, that I have done enough. And I think that’s why baking brings me so much joy, because when it works, the rewarding of faith is tangible, undoubtable: the choux puffs, the pastry flakes, the soufflé rises.

Even if you’ve never made one, it’s likely that you know that the aim of a soufflé is height, and that once it’s in the oven, there’s not much you can do to change the end product. But you may also think that a soufflé is a technically difficult dish, not to be attempted by any but the most confident cooks, that it’s riddled with booby-traps and pitfalls.