Yorkshire Puddings
Rest the batter, and get the fat smoking before it goes anywhere near the tin. A tepid tin is the only reason Yorkshires fail to rise.
- Prep
- 10 min
- Cook
- 25 min
- Resting
- 1 hr
- Total
- 1 hr 35 min
- Serves
- 6
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Cereals containing gluten
- Eggs
- Milk
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Batter
Baking
Method
Batter
Whisk the flour and salt with the eggs to a smooth thick paste, then beat in the milk a little at a time until you have a batter the consistency of single cream.
Adding the milk gradually to a thick paste is how you get a lump-free batter without straining it. All at once and you are chasing lumps around a bowl.
Rest the batter for at least an hour at room temperature, or overnight in the fridge.
Resting hydrates the flour and lets the gluten relax, and a rested batter rises noticeably higher. This is the one step that costs nothing and is skipped most often.
Baking
Heat the oven to 220C fan. Put a tablespoon of dripping or oil into each hole of a 12-hole tin and put it in the oven for 10 minutes.
The fat must be shimmering and just smoking. This is the whole recipe: the batter has to hit fat hot enough to set its outside instantly, which traps the steam that pushes it up. A tepid tin gives flat heavy discs and nothing else causes that.
Give the rested batter a quick whisk and pour it into a jug.
Pull the tin out onto the open oven door and fill each hole about two-thirds full, working fast.
Get the tin back in within about twenty seconds. Every second it stands, the fat cools.
Bake for 20 to 22 minutes without opening the door.
Do not open it to look. The rise depends on trapped steam and a draught of cold air at minute twelve will collapse them permanently.
They are done when they are deep brown, dramatically risen and dry to the touch inside the well. Serve immediately.
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What to expect
- Taste
Mild, eggy and savoury, and largely a vehicle. Salt and the beefiness of the dripping are what it has, and they are enough.
- Aroma
Hot dripping and baking batter.
- Texture
The entire point: a crisp shell, a hollow middle, and a slightly custardy layer at the base where the batter sat in the fat.
- Sound
The batter shrieking as it hits the fat, which is the sound of it working.
- How the flavour moves
Salt and fat, then a mild eggy finish. It is designed to carry gravy.
- Serve it
Straight from the oven. They begin to deflate within a few minutes and that is normal.
- Goes with
Roast beef and gravy. In Yorkshire, a large one on its own with gravy before the meat, which is the older way round.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Beginner in method and unforgiving about temperature.
- Cost
Very low. Flour, eggs, milk and fat.
- Equipment
A 12-hole tin — the sturdier the better — and a jug.
- When to make it
Sunday.
- Best season
None.
- You know it is done when
Deep brown, dramatically risen with a hollow well, and dry to the touch inside the well. Pale ones are undercooked and will collapse.
- And it feels like
Crisp outside, with a soft eggy layer at the base and a hollow middle.
- Food safety
Smoking fat at 220C is genuinely hazardous. Pull the tin onto the open oven door rather than carrying it to a worktop, keep sleeves clear, and never pour batter into a tin held in one hand.
- Where it goes wrong
- Fat that is hot rather than smoking, which is the cause of almost every failure.
- Not resting the batter.
- Taking too long to fill the tin, so the fat cools.
- Opening the oven door to look, which collapses them permanently.
- Overfilling — two-thirds is right, and full holes spill and stick.
- Self-raising flour, which gives a cakey texture.
- If it does go wrong
Flat: the fat was not hot enough. Risen then collapsed: the door was opened, or they came out too early. Stuck: the fat was insufficient or the tin is thin and warped. Soggy bottoms: underbaked; give them three more minutes.
- Making it ahead
The batter, overnight. Cooked puddings freeze and reheat better than almost anything.
- Keeping it
They keep a day and are never as good.
- Reheating
Three minutes at 200C brings them back surprisingly well.
- Freezing
They freeze well for a month and reheat from frozen at 200C for 5 minutes, which is the single most useful thing to know about them.
- Leftovers
Filled with leftover roast and gravy the next day.
- Scaling it
Two tins need swapping between shelves halfway, which means opening the door — better to cook in two batches.
- Substitutions
Plain flour only — self-raising makes them worse, not better, because the rise here is steam rather than chemical and the extra raising agent gives a cakey texture. Whole milk rather than semi-skimmed, which is noticeably thinner.
- Dietary swaps
Contains gluten, eggs and milk, all three structurally. There is no meaningful version of this without any of them. Nut free.
- Shopping for it
Beef dripping is with the butter or from a butcher.
- Keeping the cost down
Pennies each. Dripping saved from a roast costs nothing and is the better fat.
- Sustainability
Flour, eggs, milk and a spoonful of fat — a very light dish, and historically the point of it was to make a small amount of expensive meat feed more people, which is the oldest sustainability argument there is. Using dripping saved from the joint rather than bought oil wastes nothing. They also freeze and reheat perfectly, so a double batch made once is two Sundays covered.
- Nutrition
Flour, egg, milk and fat. Modest per pudding.
- Worth it?
Wait for the smoke. Everything else about them is easy and that one thing is not negotiable.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Yorkshire, and Britain more broadly.
- Also called
Yorkshire pudding; originally a dripping pudding.
- Said out loud
Straightforward.
- What the name means
Pudding in the old English sense of a batter or suet dish, savoury as often as sweet, rather than a dessert.
- History
A recipe for 'a dripping pudding' appears in The Whole Duty of a Woman in 1737, and Hannah Glasse gives it the name Yorkshire pudding in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy in 1747. It was cooked in a large flat tin under the spit-roasting joint, catching the fat as it fell, and — this is the part that surprises people — it was served first, on its own with gravy, so that a household ate a cheap filling course before the expensive meat. The individual bun shape is a twentieth-century development that came with muffin tins.
- Why it matters
One of the defining components of the British Sunday roast, and a matter of genuine regional pride in Yorkshire, where a proper one is large and served first.
- When it is eaten
Sunday lunch, and Christmas.
- The traditional way
Batter into smoking fat in a very hot oven, raised entirely by steam.
- How it changed
From one large tray under the joint to twelve individual ones in a muffin tin, and from a first course to a side dish.
- Regional variations
The large single pudding filled with stew or sausages — toad in the hole is the same batter around sausages.
- How this version differs
Nothing unorthodox. The rest and the smoking fat are stated with reasons, because they are the two things that decide whether it works and both are commonly skipped.
- Sources and credit
Hannah Glasse for the name, not the dish.
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