Corn soufflé is one of those dishes that has a lot of strong opinions attached to it. (Those opinions come mostly from southerners, we’ve noticed, though we’re not going to pretend that midwesterners like ourselves don’t also have strong opinions about certain types of food. In fact, we have such strong opinions about food that we created a website to talk about those opinions!)
There seems to be as many different terms associated with corn soufflé as there are opinions. Corn casserole, corn pudding, and so on. Since we’re from the cold north, we’re actually not sure what the difference between any of those things is — if there even is one.
Now that we’ve shown our ignorance about corn soufflé, we’re going to attempt to review the Stouffer’s Classic Corn Soufflé. When it comes to this corn-based dish, we can’t claim to be experts; we can only tell you what we think about it.
Before we get into that, though, let’s talk about this cooking process. We know we rarely cook up a Stouffer’s meal without mentioning that they take a really long time to cook, and we’re going to do it again. Just bear with us for a moment. This soufflé must be cooked in the microwave for a total of ten minutes. Pull it from the box, remove the plastic film, heat it for five minutes, stir it, then put it back in for five more. Oh, and none of this time is on a low heat setting. This is ten minutes of full-on microwaving.
When this came out of the microwave the first time (halfway through the cooking process — the part where we stirred it), we realized this wasn’t what we were expecting at all. We thought we’d have something more like cornbread, but instead, this was still gooey and cream-corny at that point. Five more minutes of cook time caused it to solidify a bit, but never to the point we thought it would. We were expecting something like a quiche filling, but this is still pretty soft. Unless you cut it into pretty small pieces, you won’t be able to serve it in a neat rectangular shape like the one shown on the box.
This is also much sweeter than we expected. We were expecting savory and instead we got sweet. We’d describe this as sweetened cream corn with the consistency of scrambled eggs. And that, in fact, is pretty much exactly what this is.
One box of this contains two and a half servings. Since a serving has 150 calories (40 from fat) and 450 mg of sodium, that means the full box has 375 calories (100 from fat) and a whopping 1,125 mg of sodium.
Now, we’ve ranted in the past about meals that try to hide their calorie counts by splitting the box in strange ways, but we don’t necessarily think that’s a valid complaint here. This is clearly intended to be a side dish, and unless you plan on making a meal of this corn soufflé, you probably actually won’t eat a whole box in one sitting. So we do see splitting this one to be somewhat reasonable, though we don’t understand why anyone would package something with a “half serving” of something. Two and a half? Why not go with either two or three?
The Stouffer’s Classic Corn Soufflé is our first attempt at trying a corn soufflé, frozen or otherwise. So did we like it? We think so. We can’t compare it against the real stuff, so it’s hard to give an informed opinion, but as newcomers to the whole corn soufflé thing, we think it’s pretty alright.
To learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this frozen soufflé, check out our package scans below.
