Mango Soufflé / Custard

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January 20, 2008

8:47 pm

12 Comments on Mango Soufflé / Custard

Baking, Food, Recipe

This one could be said to be a bit on the exotic side, drawing, as it does, from any number of cultures, but actually the recipe just came out of thinking, “what would go well with this?” We had two mangoes, you see, which had been sitting around, glaring at us … and, well, they “needed eating up.”*

Mango Soufflé / Custard

  • 2 mangoes
  • 1 block silken tofu
  • 3 Tbsp coconut cream
  • 1 Vanilla bean
  • Cardamom
  • Cinnamon
  • Nutmeg
  • 1 Lemon zest
  • 1 Lemon juice
  • 2 Tbsp Rose water
  • 3 Tbsp tapioca starch
  • 1/4 cup sugar (to taste)
  1. Blend everything except sugar and tapioca starch.
  2. Taste it. Add sugar if it needs it; omit if it doesn’t.
  3. Blend tapioca starch into mixture.
  4. Pour into ramekins.
  5. Bake at 350°F / 175°C for 25 minutes or until center is just set.

The entertaining thing about “until center is just set” with this particular dish is that … well, it’s not gonna set, probably until you pull it from the oven and let it sit for a while. What it’s going to do, unless you had the sense to put these in a water bath, is to turn bubbly around the edges & form a skin on top. Now, for us, this isn’t a problem. For you? Well, solve it by starting out with a water bath, or finish it by maybe putting on a sprinkling of sugar & caramelizing it with a torch.

Flavorwise, the reason to hold the sugar & the tapioca starch is to see how sweet it’s going to be. We didn’t want to overwhelm the flavor by making it too sweet, so by holding the sugar & starch, you can taste it & get a good idea of the sweetness of your fruit. If you put the starch in sooner, then you’re going to have a sample with a rather chalky taste … which isn’t terribly bad, but isn’t as easy to determine flavor as it could be.

This is also a very forgiving dish because of one thing: it doesn’t use eggs. You can’t overcoagulate the proteins in this because … well, they’re pre-coagulated in the form of silken tofu. The binder here is the tapioca starch, which holds up to heat very well. So, if you feel like it, cook it as long as you want, or as little as you want – it’ll only gel so far, and that all depends on the amount of starch you added. If you want it to be firmer, then you’ll have to do up another batch. If you experiment with using cornstarch (or corn flour as it’s called here), let us know how it turned out.

* Full quote: “She’d announce at lunch, ‘We must have the pork tonight, it needs eating up.’ Vimes never had an actual problem with this, because he’d been raised to eat what was put in front of him, and do it quickly, too, before someone else snatched it away. He was just puzzled at the suggestion that he was there to do the food a favor.” Terry Pratchett, Thud, p 287


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12 Replies to “Mango Soufflé / Custard”

  2. Kelly – don’t worry! You’re not allergic to banana & chocolate, are you? We did the same thing just the other night, using a couple of bananas & probably 1/4 cup of cocoa powder instead of the mangoes. It gives a much thicker dessert, too!

    This version is quite palate cleansing, in a strange way – while you’re eating it, your brain says, “hey, this is rich!” But then, the moment your mouth clears, you’re not left with any oiliness, as you’d be if there had been cream in it.

  6. Huh – a custard without eggs and souffle without any scary dropping. I do like the tofu – always enjoyed the texture of vegan custard things that use tofu. The mangos though – were those *really* in your local/organic box? Hmmm?

  7. Oh, no – the mangoes weren’t in the local/organic box … but we couldn’t abide making a root vegetable custard, so we had to compromise a wee bit.

    The pear version, perhaps, could be local … but that about does it for fruits up here in the northland, I’m afraid.

    Of course, vanilla isn’t local, nor is nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom … nor, probably, the tofu or the coconut! So – this is an entirely non-local dish, unless you live upon a tropical island somewhere.

  8. Some of the considerations of whether to purchase non-local / non-organic have to be based upon quality of life, you know? I cycle to school, we don’t fly very often, we don’t use bags for groceries … so that we can “spend” our petro-dollars on things like spices or the occasional mango – things which give us more for their weight (how heavy are spices?), or which are in the manner of a treat.

    I think that it’s important to have a balanced approach to these things: somewhat along the lines of eating the occasional salmon, or allowing a small amount of synthetic materials into our wardrobe (shoe soles? can’t do without ’em). If there are alternatives, we’ll take them, but at the same time we’re not going to be fascists about this.

    Chocolate or coffee, of course, must be fair-trade, as we’re not going to support what amounts to slavery … but we’ll also buy those, as luxuries, and as a wise expenditure of our petro-dollars.

    On the balance, our carbon footprint is about as small as it can be made, and is taken into consideration – but, again, unless there is some balance to life, it’s not worth living.

    Dial-a-rant tuning out now.

  11. So if I make this I will create two problems. The first is that I will show up my poor sweetie who once made a variation on the this theme with avocado and honey for a dinner party. Clearly this was before we were an item. The sad fact of the matter is that his custards were dreadful and no-one would eat them. He had to scrape 12 little ramekins into the garbage. Needless to say he’s rather sensitive about tofu custards. The second problem is that I love mango anything and would eat them all.

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