perfecting popovers

The popovers Avi made for Sarah's birthday were so good and the recipe was so simple that I decided to try it myself. I made two batches for comps cafe (food for CSS sophomores, who are having the worst week ever), and discovered a few things that I thought I might share:
-like Avi, I found that the popovers needed significantly less time at 375 than 20 minutes. Both batches were at the peak of golden crispiness around 10 minutes, and our oven doesn't run hot. I think it's probably a good idea to start checking around 10 minutes.
-I ran out of flour for the second batch, and ended up with 1/4 cup less flour than the recipe called for. Interestingly, the second batch popped higher and had a fluffier texture. I want to experiment further to determine if less flour really does consistently produce a better popover, but as of right now it seems like a runnier batter might not be a bad idea.

Yorkshire Pudding\ Popovers

Sarah Jeffrey's birthday was last week, and to celebrate we made her many of her favorite foods.(hence the crack pretzel post before this) On the list was Yorkshire Pudding\Popovers, which I had never made before, nor realized were basically the same thing. I also have no idea why Yorkshire pudding is called a pudding. Its not liquidy like an American pudding, and its not even sweet. The word supposedly comes from the French Boudin- meaning small sausage, which I guess used to be placed inside of puddings in Medieval times. This makes sense in terms of Yorkshire pudding, but doesn't really explain how it came to be a term used for dessert as well.

Anyway..

I was excited to try to make it because on the British version of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon Ramsay often gets mad at people for their inability to make a good Yorkshire Pudding. I was therefore also nervous that the recipe would be more difficult than I had expected. They ended up being really easy to make, and delicious. The recipe we used was from Sarah's grandmother.

For 12 Yorkshire Puddings\popovers you'll need
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups milk - we used whole
3 eggs
around 1/2 tbsp salt
a little less than a stick of butter

Preheat your over to 450 degrees, and place the muffin tin in the oven. Mix together all of the batter ingredients- not the butter. Remove the muffin tin from the oven once hot, and generously coat the cups with melted butter. It will probably start bubbling. Immediately pour the batter in the cups, and place back in the oven for around 20 minutes, they should begin to puff up after a couple of minutes. After the 20 minutes are up, turn the oven down to 375, and leave in for another 20 minutes or until the puddings are fully cooked and golden brown. For us this ended up being significantly less that 20 minutes, but we think are oven temperate is usually 10-20 degrees hotter than what it says.



Eat immediately with butter, or jam, or whatever else you'd like.

You can see that our oven temperature problems also meant they got a bit overcooked on top.