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We reported recently that the Royal Society has produced what they call the “perfect” Yorkshire Pudding recipe. As an old Yorkshire boy, I had my doubts. Surely no such recipe is “perfect” unless you were taught it by your grandmother. Nonetheless, in the interests of Science, I gave it a go.

I was pleasantly surprised.

First off, the quantities seem weird. One and a half tablespoons of flour is hardly any flour at all. For comparison, my grandmother’s recipe, if I recall correctly, has four tablespoons, and every published recipe book I consulted says four ounces, which would be a lot more than one and a half tablespoons. The Royal Society still tells you to make a well in the middle when you crack the egg in—I’m still not quite sure why this is necessary, but every recipe on the planet says to do it—and it’s a little difficult when all you’ve got is a light dusting of flour coating the inside of the bowl. I decided to make an artesian well, cracked the egg in, and was away.

Here I came up against the first failure in the recipe. It says to use enough milk/water mixture to make a “thin” batter with a “thin and smooth consistency”. Some actual quantities would be nice, or at least some sort of comparison. Later it tells you to get the oven “hot”, and to use “not too much fat”, without specifying what any of these things are. It seems that it’s not just celebrity chefs who make these sort of assumptions. Perhaps you do have to have been taught by your grandmother first.

Once you’ve added the egg and the milk/water mixture, you end up with about four, maybe five, tablespoons of batter. You don’t need a mixing bowl for this recipe. You could do it in a teacup.

I interpreted a “hot” oven as 240° (that’s Celsius for the benefit of the Leftpondians). The dripping didn’t start to smoke at that temperature, so I turned the oven way up, which, it turned out, was a maximum of 250°. I still couldn’t see any smoke, but my assistant insisted it was there, so in went the batter.

Fifteen minutes later….

Now that’s a pudding.

(Yes, I am using a loaf tin. That’s how they make the “man-sized Yorkshire puddings” at the Half Moon Inn in Skidby. I stand by my choice.)

Next: replicate the experiment, this time with miniature puddings. I used to go out with the great-great-granddaughter of the man who invented these, or so I’m told.

And for testing, hand them off to the most discerning pudding-eater I know:

They were damn nice. Light and crispy and not too rich, despite there being a whole egg for nearly no flour. Both versions were a little too dark on the top crust, which could have been fixed by turning the oven down half way through cooking. But they were a lot closer to a proper Yorkshire than anything I’ve ever been able to make in the past.

So the recipe itself is irritatingly vague, but the puddings themselves were damn close to perfect. We ate them with butter and sugar, a proper Yorkshire dessert.

It’s odd how much all the recipes differ for something so simple. “Liz” recounts an excellent recipe in the comments to this post, and she specifically says not to fill the tins more than half full. That’s what I did with the recipe recounted above, mostly because I didn’t have enough batter to do anything else. On the other hand, another excellent recipe I’ve used before came from the Pub Chef trade magazine, which said “fill the tinnies all the way to the brim—it really helps the little buggers to rise”. I tried that and it’s true. It rose, and rose, and rose, then it lost structural integrity, flopped out of the tin and spread itself over the oven tray. Then it rose, and rose, and rose some more. I ended up with a pretty good pudding, but not one that was exactly presentable.

Also, the Pub Chef recipe was the only one I’ve ever read that included BEER. I feel this is necessary for the creation of a proper Yorkshire pudding. It’s one bottle of good Yorkshire beer for the batter—Black Sheep is ideal—and one bottle for the chef. It’s the Yorkshire Way.

Has anyone else tried this, or would anyone care to share their own variation on the recipe?