Making Yorkshire Pudding is easier and quicker than buying pre-made. It is also yields incomparably better puddings- like the difference between freshly fried and microwave chips, instant and fresh coffee, or a nice bottle of Laphroaig and that cleaning stuff I get from the garage down the road when I am really desperate. As with pork crackling recipes, I have noticed there is a lot of useless methodology circulated by otherwise perfectly respectable chefs and food writers. And again, as with pork crackling, I have endeavoured to boil off the nonsense and reduce the watery stock of fable down to a poignant syrup of practical advice.

QUICK SUMMARY RECIPE FOR IMPATIENT BROWSERS:

1. Make batter:      A. Put some plain flour in a bowl (no point measuring – see below)      B. Crack in an egg, and whisk to a smooth stiff paste- preferably no thinner than thick porridge. If it is too dry, add more egg (and then flour), if it is too runny, just add more flour     C. Whisk in milk until the batter is the consistency of double cream
2.  Get metal receptacle for your pudding (the shape affects the manner in which the pudding will rise). Does not need preheating  or anything like that, despite what you may have heard (see below)
3.  Add oil (roasting fat is best but not vital) to cooking receptacle. Again, despite popular myths, no preheating is required (see below). Add more oil than you think- the batter needs to be covered. At least 1 cm deep oil is a good guide
4.  Pour batter into tin / receptacle. It is best to pour into centre of oil. Do not pour in too much: the batter should be floating in a coat of oil like a big yolk in albumin
5. Place in a 200˚C oven. Do not open the door until puddings have puffed and set- they will go a light brown on top where the oven is hottest. Should take 15-20 minutes

 

Common Problems:

puddings rise fast but then collapse quickly

- Use a higher proportion of egg in the batter. Egg makes it hold.

- The oven is too hot: the pudding rises too fast and it wont cook through before they start to burn. The heat needs time to penetrate to the cooler centre of the batter while not burning the outside. Reduce the heat (next time)

Pudding is too crunchy, even chalky, or a wee bit plasticky

- Use a lower proportion of egg / higher proportion of milk in the batter

-You are eating a poor quality toy, not your Yorkshire pudding

 

On quantities:

Don’t bother weighing the flour. After a couple of times you will know roughly how much to use. The final consistency of the batter is all that matters, and that is determined by the amount of milk you add. This can only be done by feel- trying to measure the milk according to some recipe is only going to leave the end result to chance.

The amount of flour you use really only determines how much wastage you have at the end. This is only worth worrying about when you have got the technique down. Although I hate food wastage In general, I see it as something of a necessary evil when learning and practising. It is only a little dairy down the drain for the minute.

Determining the amount of flour is like choosing the size of a canvas before you start painting. Maybe.

Okay, if you want me to be specific, start with a mug full of flour. Or a small mango sized heap. God, just put some flour in a bowl, you’ll get the hang of it.

On texture:

The proportion of egg you use affects how much the pudding rises and how solid it is at the end of cooking.

Why not use all egg then? The puddings would be massive and light!

Well the problem is that the puddings will become too hard and chalky, and the flavour is not as nice – I think it should have an element of creamy pancake to it. Using milk to thin the mixture from paste to batter imparts just enough flavour and softens the texture, but not enough to make the puds collapse too easily.

On your tin / receptacle:

Some people like lots of little puddings, some like one big one. In my experience it is determined by whatever is to hand. Obviously it is easier to divide lots of individual puddings between lots of people, and the texture will be more uniform due to the lower ratio of volume to surface area, allowing more consistent heat penetration and less difference between cooking times of surface and centre. however, it can be nice to do massive Yorkshires. Why not serve all your roast beef and veg and gravy in one massive mediaeval pudding? Or a Sunday roast wrap, rolled up in a big Yorkshire pudding? Maybe thats going a little too far…

Inevitably the centre of these big ones wont be as uniformly crisp as with smaller ones, but I quite like having that pancake texture in the middle.

Non-stick and non-non-stick: no difference due to the amount of oil you should be using. However, non-stick surfaces can be useful for cleaning off those inevitable burnt on drips from your ladle…

You can try different vessels for different effects. For example, here is a quick Yorkshire made in a blini pan:

Essentially you will find that the initial profile of the batter in the vessel will determine how the pudding expands. Imagine it like first of all setting a balloon which you then inflate.

On Pre-heating:

EVERY recipe I have ever seen insists on preheating the tin and oil, probably till smoking or sizzling or something.

I have never found this to make a difference at all. My Yorkshires always rise and cook perfectly without pre-heating. The idea, I suppose is that the oil is supposed to seal the batter which then expands like a balloon.

But batter does not mix with the oil, unless you give it a stir. Metal and oil heat up very quickly and are closer to the source of heat, so there will be a thermal differential due to the physical nature of the cooking apparatus.

On timing:

If your oven is at the right temperature, then Yorkshire puddings will cook in a about 15-20mins, in my experience. Mind, different ovens behave differently which can affect cooking time. This can depend on factors like shape and air circulation.

As you will want to serve the puddings fresh from the oven, it is a good idea to put them in just when your roast has been taken out to rest. Remember it is hotter at the top shelf. Don’t put them too high in the oven or when they rise they’ll squash against the top, of course.

On general method:

Blindly following a tight recipe will rarely work, unless you get lucky. Cooking is not like assembling flat pack furniture (thank God). There are all sorts of factors which vary – the size of eggs, ambient temperatures etc.). It is a good idea to have at least a bit of a grasp of what is going on so you can adapt.

The success of a Yorkshire pudding batter is dependent upon its consistency. It can take quite subtle adjustments to get it right, bet when you know what you are looking for it will be easy. Experiment, and learn from mistakes is my motto.

Florence shall forever be known as the home of artistic genius, the cradle of the Renaissance, the fountainhead of western thought and culture. So I thought I should write about the way they do beefsteaks here.

Thick. Crisp on the outside, bloody as a Primark sale on the inside. Served simply without any sauce, no bullshit. Perhaps you could have some lemon juice, oil, or pepper at most. Fantastic t-bones and rumps allowed to show off their natural flavour, not stifled by any pretensions to improving on nature’s work.

I first had bistecca Fiorentina when I was a kid, and my dad laughed that it was bigger than my head. It is still the best way of eating steak, in my opinion, but never quite the same outside of Florence.

Florentine food is quintessentially unpretentious. They try and show off the natural quality of their produce with almost an arrogant minimalism- as though they don’t believe they need to do anything fussy because they simply have the best ingredients available to man in their city. They might well be right.

Their cannellini beans, for example, are served boiled with just the addition of salt and olive oil, and can be plumper and sweeter than grapes. Why piss about with seven layers of stock preparations like the French grand style cuisine? More important to eat healthy, delicious food every meal as standard.

So go and try the bistecca, let the blood run down your neck like a prancing cannibal in orgy of blood and wine with beans on the side. Which is coincidentally the context originally described by the phrase ‘La dolce vita’.

I like the idea. Polish cuisine is never really going to be slimming is it? It’s a shame the proprietor did not read the slogan to himself out loud though…

I love food.

I love cooking. I love good eating. I love figuring out how to cook food which is ruthlessly healthy and intensely tasty. I love cooking for friends. I love cooking on big occasions for lots of people. And I love cooking for myself. I love buying food.  I love talking and arguing about food. But I truly hate something about the way we the English relate to food.

I use the term English advisedly here: I cannot really comment on the other nations of the UK. Anyway, any Sassenach discussion of Scotch cuisine always starts with haggis and descends ultimately into gasping about deep-fried mars bars. Look, the Scots just enjoy them. And having heart-attacks.

I grew up in quite fortunate gastronomic circumstances. My family is fairly cosmopolitan. My parents used to live in Italy, and we used to drive all round Europe for our family holidays, which meant I got to eat loads of different types of cuisine at source, as well as get a feel for the produce of slightly more demanding cultures.  At home, my parents always cooked amazing food, for which I shall always be indebted to them.

I became aware of the horrors which lurk in English cooking when I started going to school. I went to my local state school which I loved. However, I was one of those kids who brought a packed lunch (like the international kids of whom there was a good number). I was traumatised by the sight and the smell of the slop being dished out. There was hard oily pastry covering some weird sweet meat-jelly (as a main course). The boiled potatoes smelled of dishwater and were lousy with wretched black lumps. Dessert? Think saccharine pink biscuits doused in a sputum of watery custard. I could describe more of the horrors but I should move on to the merciless dinner ladies. They wore thick glasses which distorted their eyes (honestly, they all did) and, while I am sure they were all perfectly nice people, they forced the poor children in the care to finish every last festering lump on their plates. My god, why? Why did they think I did not want to eat it? Because I had an eating disorder at the age of five? Because I was evil? Because I was trying to give them more plate scraping work to do, just despite them?

Incidentally, my uncle (who went to the same primary school as me) was so traumatised by one session of a dinner-lady bullying him to eat some putrid fish that he never has been able to eat fish ever since.

What was strange to me was that so many of the kids thought the food was fine, even better than what they got at home. And I don’t think my school was unusual. Nor have things changed much, if Jamie Oliver is to be believed. Kids are still getting used to eating swill.

Interest in food has changed in England over the last 20 years or so. People want to eat and cook stylish, healthy, and what they deem to be good food. But here is the problem. ‘What they deem to be’.

In Italy, I would say that people generally know what a good pasta sauce or tomato tastes like. They know because they have grown up eating good sauces and good tomatoes. The English have not. The tomatoes we get in supermarkets here are for the most part laughably poor quality. If any of you know any Italians, ask them. Even better, go to Italy and look at the produce. And weep. Farmers and retailers have to supply Italians with good produce because if they do not, it will not get bought.

Let me put it like this: an Englishman cannot for love nor money find a satisfactory cup of tea outside of Britain. It is always wrong somehow. These bloody foreigners just don’t get it, right? For all their poxy coffees and fine wines, they don’t know what a good cuppa should taste like. That is what English food is like to foreigners.

In England we have been getting a bit more clued up about food. We WANT to learn. We look up to Delia Smith, Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall, Gordon Ramsey et al. We adore the holiness of organic food and decry g.m. farming as Satan’s cruel machination to kill our children. We watch interminable cooking programmes on the cancer-box.  But these good intentions are nothing if when it comes to buying good produce, we take more interest in a ‘taste the difference’ label than the smell, taste, and feel of the food. We talk the talk well enough, but are yet to walk the walk.

We wrap our food in rubbish. Next time you go to the supermarket, take as much food as possible out of its wrapping and make a pile. Bags, boxes, cartons, cling-film. It is staggering what supermarkets do. Not only  is the amount of packaging an achingly avoidable environmental problem, it more importantly separates us from the sensual experience of the food. All those subconscious senses which have evolved over tens of thousands of years so that we can quickly determine the best, safest and tastiest foods are cut off by the plastic.

Some may say that this is the fault of supermarkets. However, I would say that they get away with all their crap because we let them. We will pay more for a product just because it has been pre-sorted. We trust that taste-the-difference food will taste, well, different. We do not demand it. We do not say ‘these tomatoes have clearly been ripened in a lorry, I shall take my custom elswhere!’ or ‘this beef has been clearly butchered by an epileptic monkey and that pork I had is more water than meat, I am not coming here again!’ or ‘raspberries in December?  no wonder they taste like tramp’s piss! Good day!’ or ‘fuck me, Jamie, those mussels smell like a dog’s gall bladder! Go see a doctor!’

I think we English are obsessed with getting a good deal when it comes to food shopping. We clearly love these patently mendacious 2-for-1 offers (supermarkets still use this pricing ruse so we clearly have not grown wise to it). But still we seem to pay so much more for our lacklustre vittles than other European countries. Maybe this is the trick. Supermarkets universally overcharge, making their customers desperate for a bargain.

I was chatting to an onion farmer recently who was telling me all about his view of supermarkets. Essentially, he said supermarket purchasers know nothing and care less about the quality of food. They are ruthless in their price demands. That is all that matters to them. They are no different from stock-market commodity brokers. Farmers are squeezed, and standards go down. These unscrupulous purchasers can get away with it too because the majority of their customers cannot tell the difference.

Similarly, people complain about the rights of battery chickens. But the English have been buying scrawny, tasteless chickens and watery, nasty eggs because we think they are perfectly edible and fairly priced (judgments with which I would disagree). The battery chicken is the result of these two elements: the English consumer’s economic priorities and their ignorance of quality. I was in Switzerland recently, and even the least expensive chicken in Migros was better than anything I have found in Tesco or Sainsbury’s.

[I shall continue this directly in another post. This needs to be spread over several posts for mercy's sake if nothing else]