Yorkshire puddings

When I would visit my grandparents in Yorkshire in the north of England as a child my Grandmother made roast beef and Yorkshire pudding every Sunday lunch

Traditionally Yorkshire pudding was served before the beef with gravy poured in to the middle, this was so you would fill up and not eat as much beef.  Her Yorkshire puddings were perfect they were light and crispy and when I get them right, it takes me back to sitting in my grandmothers kitchen with her shovelling them fresh from the oven on to my plate.

She never gave me her recipe as sadly she died when I was still quite young, and my Mother did not make them, we always joked that she had not inherited the Yorkshire pudding gene.  Any way I experimented until I got them the way I wanted them.



Any way here is my version of Grandma Naylor's Yorkshire pudding.

1/2 cup of flour
3/4 cup of milk
2 eggs
1 teaspoon of salt.

Mix all the ingredients together until they make a fairly runny batter.

Now this where Grandma would leave it on the top of cellar steps for a couple of hours, but if you don't have a cellar (and who does) then just leave it on the kitchen counter for a couple of hours, it will thicken slightly  as the flour molecules expand or something.

When you take your roast beef out of the oven to rest before carving, crank up the heat in the oven to 500.  Pour a little of the beef fat into each Yorkshire pudding tin. If you don't have them and frankly unlikely that you do a large muffin tin will do.  I did see them years ago at the IGA but they called them muffin top tins.

Yorkshire pudding tin

Any way put the tins in the oven with the fat in them to heat up and take the battery out of your smoke alarm. When the fat is smoking pull them out and quickly pour in the batter.

Then quickly get them back in the oven.  Watch through the window and you will see them rise almost immediately.  Turn the oven down to 350 DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR.  You can put the battery back in the smoke alarm now.

They will take about 15 minutes, so just as your beef is carved and ready you can pull them out and pile them high.

Cooked to perfection

My son who is into photography was taking pictures of the making of Yorkshire puddings for me because there are some points in the delicate art of Yorkshire puddings that you can not multitask.  He  took this picture of me in the kitchen which for me really captures what me cooking in my kitchen feels like to me.

In one of my happy places

To me food links us to our past and to our cultures and for me yorkshire pudding does that more than any other food and I was born in Yorkshire.