Soufflé, s'il vous plaît

Being a vegetarian, as it turns out, is a lot easier than I thought it would be. I've yet to hold up a Burger King or punch someone with a ham sandwich in the face. I haven't even been tempted to cheat when I'm positive there are no witnesses about. All in all, it's going pretty well. There is one ingredient, however, that is featuring quite regularly in my meat-free meals. Cheese. Strictly speaking, a lot of cheeses contain rennet and so couldn't be considered vegetarian at all but I'm circumventing that conundrum by deliberately not reading the ingredients on cheese packaging. As far as I know, they've all been rennet-free.

To celebrate my ever growing appreciation of cheese in all its glorious forms I decided to make one of the most notoriously hard cheese dishes there is - the cheese soufflé. As somebody American once said, go big or go home.

If countless hours of watching cooking shows has taught me anything it's that Gordon Ramsey is a tad shouty and that soufflés are as sensitive as a pregnant lady. Even the slightest vibration can set them off and you'll lose that extravagant pouf you've been working so hard to create. The key, I have deduced, is to not open the oven door once the soufflés are in, until they are ready to come out. On the TV, this always seems to be a struggle for the contestants of various cooking competitions, who invariably bite their lips, pace up and down and hold their breath before ultimately opening the oven too soon. I actually found it very easy not to touch something until I was supposed to so my cheese soufflés came out fine. Here's what you need:

30g butter
2 tbs flour
250ml milk
120g of Gouda
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
4 eggs
salt and pepper

Start by pre-heating the oven to 200 °C and coating the sides of four ramekins with butter. In a saucepan on low heat, melt the butter and mix in the flour, making what the French call roux. Then mix in the milk, bit by bit, until a creamy sauce forms. Then add the nutmeg and grate in the Gouda. I'm assuming that you can use pretty much any cheese you like as long as it's solid. After mixing in these ingredients the mixture becomes a little stickier. Take of the heat and season with salt and pepper.

For the next step you have to separate your four eggs so that the yolks can be mixed in with the batter and the whites can be whisked into a foam. This YouTube video has a nice tip for separating your eggs.

Mix in the four yolks and then fold in the whisked egg whites. You now have your soufflé mixture. Spoon into the four ramekins and put in the oven for 25 minutes. If you like a bit of drama, put on some suspenseful music, pace up and down your kitchen and continually press you face against the glass door of your oven until the time is up. When the timer dings, take out the soufflés and serve immediately, the pouf only lasts a few minutes before they start to deflate.