MAXINE GORDON meets the North Yorkshire ex-husband and wife team who have created a mouth watering off-the-shelf soufflé.

FEW dishes cause dinner-party hosts to break out in a sweat like a soufflé. Light and airy, the hot, mousse-like dish is devilishly hard to pull off.

Cracking it, so to speak, is on a par with making your own hollandaise sauce or beef stock, in terms of showing off your cheffy skills.

Restaurant menus reserve a special place for the soufflé dish – normally at the end of the listings, with a hefty price tag and a warning that it will take at least 20 minutes for the chef to prepare.

Any home cook who pulls off a soufflé with success will be showered with praise by well-impressed guests.

Such is the trickiness of soufflé making that no big brand or supermarket giant has been able to bring an off-the-shelf dish to the mass market.

Until now.

Smithy’s Soufflés are two little pots of pre-cooked soufflé which simply need to be finished off at home in a hot oven.

What’s more, these ready meals, aren’t the brainchild of some retailing giant, but a couple of foodies from a tiny corner of North Yorkshire.

Jan and Geoff Smith used to be husband and wife but are now “happily divorced” and run the award-winning gastro-pub, The Hare Inn, at Scawton, near Rievaulx Abbey.

Chef Geoff has been making soufflés for more than two decades and drew a regular clientele who would visit The Hare to eat from his soufflé menu, which featured the likes of smoked salmon and dill, double cheese and a chocolate dessert soufflé.

Two winters ago, the business was struggling after severe weather kept punters away, and Jan and Geoff needed to find another way to make money.

“I came up with the idea of marketing the soufflés,” says Jan, a bright-eyed blonde, who if she was a drink would be a Prosecco.

Geoff, being more of a dark bitter type, thought it wouldn’t work.

“I remember telling her: ‘If it could be done, someone would have done it’,” he recalls.

But the seed of the idea was there, and with a grant from Business Link and an investment from a friend, Jenny Riddell, the couple set about trying to recreate Geoff’s kitchen delicacies in factory conditions.


After much trial and error, they cracked it, and Smithy’s Soufflés arrived. Currently, they are available in selected farm shops, Fodder at Harrogate and Hunters of Helmsley, but Jan is hoping to find a bigger stockist any day.

The couple are just back from a huge trade fair in London, where interest in the product was huge, says Jan.

The soufflés already sell in Mumbai where there is a growing middle class, eager to eat English food, explains Jan.

So good is the ready-made soufflé, that Geoff now serves them to customers at The Hare.

“We put some chef’s tips on the back of the pack,” says Geoff.

“If you add two fluid ounces of whipping cream to each soufflé before you pop it in the oven, it makes it that bit nicer.”

For the chocolate one, melt some dark chocolate before stirring it into whipping cream and pouring it over the soufflé prior to baking.

Just be sure to hide the packaging from your guests.

• Smithy’s Soufflés retail for between £3.50 and £3.95 for a pack of two.

• To find out about local stockists, visit smithyssouffles.co.uk