Perfect Yorkshire Puddings

Those of you who follow Carl’s Crafty Kitchen will know how much I love to cook, especially for my friends; and one dish that they ask me to make, more than any other, is a Sunday roast of beef with loads of gravy and Yorkshire puddings; so, I thought that I should share my failsafe recipe and method.  If you follow these instructions to the letter, your Yorkshire Puddings will never fall flat.

My recipe uses four plus one (I’ll tell you about this later) medium sized eggs and makes approximately twenty puddings.  Even if I’m only entertaining eight adults I make this quantity, if they have their children with them, the puddings always disappear!  If not, they go into the freezer in a vac-pack bag.

As to equipment, any old bun tin will do so long as it is liberally dosed with lard for cooking.

Ah, what is a “bun tin,” I hear you ask? Well dear people ‘buns tins’ for those of you of less than forty summers or so, were what we used before the transatlantic invasion by “The Muffin” brigade, to make those lovely tea time treats with icing (frosting) and a cherry on top!  And we certainly didn’t have them on our way to work.  We had dripping on toast then if we were lucky, 😋!

The older and better used they are the better they seem to work and a dear Yorkshire friend of mine absolutely insists that she never washes her Yorkshire Pudding tins, she only scrapes off any residue then wipes them out with kitchen paper.  How about that!

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In the picture you’ll see I’ve used old jam jars for measuring my ingredients, because in my recipe, ingredients aren’t weighed, they’re measured by volume, and the trick is equal volumes of flour, eggs and milk!!

Ingredients

·         Eggs x 4+1

·         Full fat milk

·         Plain flour

·         Salt

·         Lard or dripping

Method

Hardware preparation

Set the oven to 220 C.

Grease the bun tins with a generous quantity of lard or best of all beef dripping or corn oil if you really have to!

Put the baking racks in the middle slots of the oven.

Put the greased tins into the oven on the racks, once the pudding batter has been made.

Preparing the pudding batter

Break four medium sized eggs into a glass jar.  Note the level!

In another, same sized, glass jar pour “full fat” milk up to the level reached by the eggs in the first jar, simples!

In a third, same sized glass jar add plain flour up to the level reached by the eggs and milk in the other two jars!

Add a good pinch of salt.

Finally, using (preferably) an electric stick mixer, beat all the ingredients together in a pouring jug then finally beat in one more egg!

Please don’t ask me why the extra egg?  I don’t know the answer, but folklore suggests that this is the egg that makes the puddings rise mountainously!

Cooking

When the oven is up to temperature, put in the greased bun tins.

When the fat in the bun tins begins to smoke, quickly open up the oven and pour a portion of batter, about half way up, into each indentation of the bun tin.

Put the tin back, close the door, set a timer and DO NOT open the oven door for at least fifteen minutes better still, twenty minutes.  It depends on how well you “know” your oven.

At this point its up to you, do you like crispy or soft puddings, pale or browned, you choose, more or less cooking time?  Practice makes perfect.

Eating

In days gone by when farm workers were fed on site as part of their pay, it used to be said “them ‘as eyts most puddin gets most meyt!” Because meat was expensive and puddings were cheap to make, workers were encouraged to fill up on them so that when the meat came on the table, they wouldn’t have room for big helpings.

This is the history of why a true Yorkshireman or woman will always ask to have his or her puddings served with lots of rich gravy before the meat and vegetables come to table!