Yorkshire Pudding

On the very first day of my very first visit to Europe, I was walking around bleary-eyed and jet-lagged in London.  My flight had arrived at 7 a.m., and as it was too early to check into my hotel, I stowed my bags and just wandered around gazing at the sights.  Finally, 11 a.m. arrived, and that meant the pubs were opening.  It was time for my first beer in the U. K.

I found a little pub near Saint James Square called The Red Lion.  It was tucked away in a little alley, and was quite tiny itself.  I believe I was the first customer of the day.  Well, I'd planned on having just one beer and heading to the hotel, but you know how it is, one beer led to another, and soon I was chatting away with some of the Londoners having their lunch.

The Red Lion Pub, with its proprietor (left) and a patron (June 1994)

As I chatted with one businessman bloke who was downing the beers on company time faster than me, I saw a waiter walk by with what looked like some sort of a steaming bowl of stew, and the bowl was made out of some bread-like substance.  I asked the local man what it was.  "Yorkshire pudding," he said.  I ordered one--it was divine.  I can still taste that beefy, bready "pudding," which the pub had filled with roast beef, veggies and gravy.

Now, here in The States, pudding is a sort of sweet, creamy paste-like substance that we eat for dessert.  But in the U.K., its more of a savory puff pastry made from flour.  A traditional accompaniment to roast beef.  I think I like theirs better.

I started making my own little Yorkshires a few years ago, and the wife and I always enjoy them with our roast beef.  They are simple to make, I discovered, and always come out delicious.

Yorkshire Pudding

1.5 cups flour
2 teaspoons salt
3/4 cup milk
3 eggs
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup rendered beef fat or lard

Note this baby calls for rendered beef fat.  Not really something you have lying around, I know.  If you don't, you can substitute lard, but the Yorkshire Puddings will come out a bit different.  (more on that soon)  For me, when I smoke a brisket, I always save the beef fat that renders out for other uses.  After the brisket is done, I chill it in the fridge, and the fat rises to the surface of the surrounding area and solidifies.  I then break it off in chunks and freeze it til I need it.

Smoked Brisket--note the fat that has rendered and solidified around the meat when it cooled.  I used to throw this out.  Not anymore.  Now I break it up in chunks and freeze it for future use.

I can tell you it makes some flavorful Yorkshire puddings.  (also great for frying or roasting potatoes)

Anyhoo, to start, mix the flour and salt, then add milk and mix.  Beat eggs in separate bowl then whisk into flour mixture.  Mix in water.  Let this sit for over an hour.

When ready to cook, place about a teaspoon of the beef fat (or lard) in each cup of a muffin tin.

Place this in a 500 degree oven for a few minutes to heat the pan and drippings.  Then open the oven and carefully ladle the pudding mixture into each cup.  Fill each cup about halfway full.  (these babies will expand!)

Bake at 450 for 15-20 minutes, until puddings are literally popping out of their cups.

Earlier, I mentioned that using beef fat vs lard will produce different results.  Well, that happened for me, anyway.  With the lard I got a lighter, fluffier pudding that tasted fine but was maybe just a little more bland than with the beef fat.   These are pictured in the photo above and also below:

With the beef fat I got a denser pudding that didn't puff quite as much, but it had a great beefy flavor that was accentuated by a hint of smoke (this was smoked brisket fat, after all)  These are pictured below:

Either way you make them, be sure to serve them with a nice beefy main course like Roast Beef.

I haven't tried it yet, but I plan to make some larger puddings in pie tins and serve the roast beef inside them, just like I had in London all those years ago.  I'll report back when I do.

Until next time,


Cheers!


Chris

Welsh Rarebit

You all know I love cheese, so how could I not love Welsh Rarebit: an utterly British dish of toasty bread slathered with rich melted cheese thinned with ale then broiled.  I first tried this dish on a pub crawl during a sojourn to London, but I’d heard of it years earlier, when I was a kid.  I still remember the place I first heard of Welsh Rarebit—it was of course the place where one usually hears of Welsh Rarebit:  The Gomer Pyle TV Show. 

Admit it, you watched it.  We all did.  We didn’t know any better back then.  Well, there was this one episode where Gomer started sleepwalking and doing crazy things (well, crazy for Gomer) like yelling at his Sergeant and generally not being himself.  It turned out that the cause of all this was that he had been eating Welsh Rarebit every day for dinner.  Apparently there’s been a long-standing belief that eating Welsh Rarebit causes strange dreams. 

Where did that come from?  How could melted cheese on toast cause strange dreams?

To the Internet, Robin!  Turns out that there was a very weird comic strip in the early part of the 1900s that was called Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend.  This strip, which prefigured The Far Side by three-quarters of a century, presented the bizarre, surreal dreams of people who had eaten Welsh Rarebit before bed. 

This strip was apparently the source of the notion that Rarebit causes weird dreams.  The author of the strip (Winsor McCay) originally drew a one-shot comic strip called Dream of the Tobacco Fiend.  His Editor liked it, but apparently he didn’t want to offend the tobacco fiends of the world, thus he suggested McCay replace the word ‘tobacco’ with something completely innocuous and innocent.  Their choice:  Welsh Rarebit.  I have to admit that the juxtaposition is funny because of its absurdity.  But of course Rarebit got a weird reputation ever since.

Well, reputation be dammed!  This is a delicious dish that one shouldn’t miss. 

Welsh Rarebit, dispite the ‘Welsh’ moniker, is not from Wales (my ancestral homeland, no less) but in fact the dish is quintessentially English.  The name may have originally been ‘Welsh Rabbit;’ it is speculated that this was either a slight against the Welsh in that they couldn’t afford a real rabbit, and that they had a supposed fondness for cheese. 

  

Welsh Rarebit

4 Tablespoons Butter

1/4 Cup Flour

2 Tablespoons Dry English Mustard

1/2 Teaspoon Cayenne Pepper

2 Tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce

12 Oz Beer (Preferably an English Ale or Bitter)

2 Cups Cheddar, Grated

3 or more Slices of Crusty Bread, Toasted

Melt Butter in a large skillet.  

When it has melted, sift in the flour 

and allow to cook for a couple of minutes.  Add the Cayenne 

and the English Mustard.  

Add the Worcestershire Sauce 

and then the beer.  

Allow this to simmer for a few minutes, 

then add your cheese.  

Stir over medium heat until the cheese is melted. 

Toast your bread slightly (not too dark, as it’s going back under the broiler in a moment with the cheese)  You can use slices of ‘white bread’ if you want, but I find some nice slices of baguette or Italian bread work best, and make a nicer presentation. 

Slather the toasted bread with the cheese sauce.

Make sure you cover the tops of the bread slices completely.  

Place the slices under the broiler.  Keep a close eye on them.  Pull ‘em out when just start to turn golden brown and bubbly. 

.

Serve immediately, but watch out, they’ll be hot. 

Until next time,

Sweet dreams….

Rustic French Bread

Bread nombre trois in this Thanksgiving week of breads is what I call “rustic” French bread, for it is neither a thin baguette or a round boule, but is made with a similar dough recipe.  It’s ‘rustic’ because it is similar to some of the loaves you might see in small bakeries that dot the countryside of France.  (a shape the French might call a ‘batard,’ for it is perhaps a bastardized baguette)   This shape is also rustic to me because it’s the shape of loaf that my mom used to bake when she made “French Bread,” from the recipe in her little 1950s paperback French cookbook. 

The cookbook was folded over so that it was permanently turned to the French bread page, and thus that page was yellowed, dog-eared and foxed more so than the rest of the book.  (Mom didn’t do a whole lot of ‘other’ French cooking)

I like this loaf because it is a nice middle of the road size between small baguettes (which I love, but are difficult to make properly.  More on them in a later blog post) and full-sized sandwich bread. 

The key to making a good French loaf is to make what is known as a poolish, or starter, the night before.  This little bit of dough will undergo a long, slow fermentation all night long, developing some amazing, tangy, complex flavors that will show up in your final bread loaf.  Don’t skip this step. 

Rustic French Bread

for poolish:

5 1/4 Oz (1 1/4 Cup) Unbleached All Purpose Flour
5 1/4 Oz (2/3 Cup) 60˚F Water
1/8 Teaspoon Instant Yeast

The night before, mix dry ingredients together and then add the water and stir just to combine.  Cover and let sit overnight.  In the morning you will have something that looks like this and smells wonderfully ‘bready.’  

Note the bubbles in the poolish from the long fermentation. 

for main dough

10 1/2 Oz (2 1/2 Cups) Unbleached All Purpose Flour
1 1/2 Teaspoons Instant Yeast
2 1/2 Teaspoons Salt
5 1/4 Oz (2/3 Cup)  60˚F Water
All of the Poolish

Place the flour, yeast and salt in the bowl of your mixer and stir to combine.  

Add the water to the poolish and use a fork to break the poolish dough free from its bowl.  Add it with the water to the mixing bowl of dry ingredients and run your mixer with a dough hook until the ingredients are just combined.  Let rest 20 minutes. 

After the rest, knead the dough by hand or with your mixer until it just becomes elastic and a bit cohesive.  Transfer to a lightly-oiled bowl and let rise for two hours, punching down and folding after one hour. 

After the two hour rise, move the dough to a lightly-floured surface 

and work it into a loaf shape.  

Then move it to a couche as I’ve done here and let the loaf rise for an hour or so.  

If you don’t have a couche, use a perforated ‘Italian Loaf’ pan or similar. 

Preheat oven to 500˚F with a baking stone inside. 

Using a bread lame or sharp knife, cut diagonal slits in the top of the loaf.

Transfer the loaf with a peel from your couche to the baking stone.  

Turn the oven down to 475˚F and bake for 20-25 minutes, until the loaf is golden brown and crusty.  (for a crunchier crust, add a tablespoon or two of water to the bottom of your oven when you put the loaf in.  The steam created will help to crust up the bread!)  

Take loaf out of the oven and let cool a bit before slicing. 

When cool, cut off a slice and admire the crumb.  

Not a bad effort, but a master baker can usually get a lighter, airier crumb with larger cells or holes in it.  I'm just not there yet, and can't seem to do it on a consistent basis.  Here's a photo of another loaf I made with a slacker dough, and it is a bit closer to what I'm looking for:

But, I'd actually like to see even more, larger cells like what you might find when you cut into a loaf from France or an excellent artisan bakery.   Oh well, at least mine still tastes great!   Let's slice it up...

and serve it up with plenty of real butter!

It also makes an excellent base for cheesy garlic bread.

Just sprinkle the buttered bread with mozzarella and garlic salt and zip it under the broiler for a few minutes.  Mouthwatering!


Until next time,

Here’s hoping your Thanksgiving will be a hearty one!

Chris

Brotform Bread

Bread Number Two for our Thanksgiving week of breads is a simple country loaf that gets gussied up by doing its rising in a brotform.  I got this one from my mother-in-law as a gift last Christmas, and I've been enjoying using it this year.

A brotform is simply a wooden bowl made of spiraled rattan that imprints a delightful pattern on the risen dough that remains after the bread bakes, making for a much more attractive loaf.  But there's more to it than that.  Raising your dough in a bowl helps a slack dough gain a better rise, and not spread out everywhere like a pizza pie crust.  You could do this in a regular bowl, of course, but it wouldn't look as pretty.  I also believe the spiral channels, which hold flour, help facilitate the dough releasing from the brotform.

So now that we know what it is, let's make some bread.

Brotform Country Loaf


2.5 Cups Bread Flour
1/2 Cup Pumpernickel Flour
1.5 Teaspoons Active Dry Yeast
1.5 Teaspoons Salt
1 1/4 Cup Lukewarm Water

Preheat Oven to 450F.  Add the bread flour to the mixing bowl.

Then the pumpernickel.

Then the yeast.

Add the salt and then give all these dry ingredients a stir to thoroughly mix them.

Add the water.

Then attached a dough hook to your stand mixer,

and mix/knead everything until all is incorporated in a nice dough ball.

Knead for an additional four minutes or so.

Dump dough in an oiled bowl (not the brotform yet), cover and let rise for 1.5 to 2 hours.

At this point, toss a heap of flour around in your brotform to get it well-floured so the bread will release later.  Be generous with the flour here.

Take your dough from the first bowl and place it, smooth side down, into the brotform.  Do not press the dough into the brotform, simply let gravity do its work.

Let rise for another 1.5 hours.

At this point, gently turn the dough out onto baking sheet, stone or floured peel.  If dough doesn't drop out, gently tap on the side of the brotform and it should release.

Cut a cross pattern of slits in the top of the loaf with a lame or sharp knife.

Bake in your 450 degree F oven for 40-45 minutes, until the crust is dark brown and makes a hollow sound when you thump it.

Remove from oven and let rest for a couple minutes.

Then slice it up and serve piping hot.

Until Next Time,

Here's hoping you get a rise out of this bread!


Chris

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