Quick Yorkshire Pudding Recipes

Kenji is the former culinary director for Serious Eats and a current culinary consultant for the site. He is also a New York Times food columnist and the author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science.

Back when I was earning my wage as a cook at a co-ed fraternity house, I received a special dinner request from a few exchange students from Cambridge University: toad-in-the-hole, the classic British dish of sausages baked into a large Yorkshire pudding. Only problem? I had no idea what a Yorkshire pudding was. It was described to me as sort of like a batter and you pour it into a pan and you bake it. Rather than, say, doing some actual research, I decided to wing it.

I ended up with essentially that: sausages baked into a vast pool of eggy custard, their tops just poking through the surface, like a construction worker who's fallen into a vat of half-set concrete. (And the dish was just as heavy as it looked.)

No Fail Easy Yorkshire Pudding Recipe

The one good thing about cooking for a fraternity house is that college students will eat anything. Still, at the behest of the British students, I dove a little deeper and discovered that Yorkshire pudding is really nothing more than the British equivalent of the popovers that my mother loves. Sure, our popovers are baked in specialized tins and typically served sweet while Yorkshire puddings are served with beef drippings and gravy, but conceptually, they're pretty much exactly the same.

Yorkshire puddings are traditionally cooked in large pans, though most modern recipes call for muffin tins or popover pans. Serious Eats / J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

This was well over a decade ago and I've spent several months in northern England as well as many hours in the kitchen baking pudding after pudding since then.

How To Make Yorkshire Puddings

Printed recipes for Yorkshire pudding go back as far as the mid-18th century, and the dish likely existed long before that. It's simple—almost primal—in its ingredients and process: Mix together milk, eggs, and flour with a pinch of salt to form a batter (as for pancakes, according to the 1937 cookbookThe Whole Duty of a Woman), then pour the batter in a pan that has been greased with the drippings from a roast. Originally, that roast was mutton; these days, it's more likely beef.

A Yorkshire pudding works on the same principle as a Frenchpâte a choux, the thin pastry used to makecream puffs, Parisian-style gnocchi, andgougères. Those recipes all start with a high-moisture dough and rely on the power of steam to puff and rise into their light, crisp final forms. Yorkshire puddings and popovers take the same concept to the extreme, using a batter that is so moist that it pours out like cream and puffs up to at least quadruple its volume.

As with all simple recipes, Yorkshire pudding technique is steeped in rules designed to make you believe it's a tricky, fickle food and that following the wrong recipe or wrong technique will lead to disastrous results.

Perfect Mary Berry's Yorkshire Puddings Recipe

After dozens of tests and hundreds of puddings, I have some good news for you: It's nearly impossible to mess up a Yorkshire pudding (despite the fact that I managed to back in my fraternity chef days). You can play with the ratio of ingredients every which way and still end up with a batter that rises tall. You can bake it in any type of pan you'd like. You can rest the batter or bake it fresh. You can chill it or leave it out at room temperature. Heck, you can even break the cardinal rule of Yorkshire puddings and pour the batter directly into a cold tin. Break every one of these rules and your puddings will still puff and turn out light and crisp.

But of course, some puddings are lighter and crisper than others. I considered it my duty to investigate each and every rule and theory in the lore of Yorkshire pudding to figure out which ones rise to the top and which are simply puff pieces.

Before we dive in, a quick shout out to Felicity Cloake'sfantastic article on Yorkshire puddings, where, in the true intrepid spirit of an adventurous scientist, she tested a half dozen different recipes before landing on her own version. Her columns are always enlightening and this article hopes to pick up where hers left off.

The Best Yorkshire Pudding Recipe, According To Gordon Ramsay

I've heard this one over and over. Make sure your batter is chilled in the fridge and that your pan with drippings is ripping hot from the oven. But there is debate. TheRoyal Society of Chemistryrather imperiously advises against it, claiming that to place pudding batter in the refrigerator is a foolish act. (They, rather unscientifically for an organization of scientists, deign not to explain why.) However, most recipes, likeJames Martin's, tell you to chill your batter before baking.

This was a very easy one to test. I divided batches of batter in half, storing half in the refrigerator for an hour and the other half at room temperature. I also repeated the experiment with batter I'd refrigerated in its entirety for an hour, then divided, leaving half of it on the counter to come to room temperature before baking. I baked all the puddings in the same tin (repeating the test multiple times, of course) and compared heights and textures.

The difference wasn't as drastic as some other tests, but the fact is that the warmer your batter is to start, the better your puddings will rise. However, there is another thing to consider: Colder batter stayed pooled in the center as the edges rose from the heat of the pan, weighing down the center and creating a more distinct cup shape to the finished puddings.

How To Make Yorkshire Puddings Recipe

Verdict: Depends on what you want. Warmer batter will create taller, crisper puddings with a more hollow core (I kind of like them this way), but colder batter will create denser puddings with a more distinct cup. If you are the type who likes to make a separate onion gravy to pour inside the puddings as a first course, colder batter might be for you.

The idea of starting in a screaming hot pan makes sense for a couple of reasons. First, there's the idea of oven spring. A hot pan will get more energy into the batter right from the start, causing it to puff and rise while it's still relaxed and stretchable. Second is that with a hot pan, your batter is less likely to stick (think: pouring scrambled eggs into a cold pan vs. a hot pan), which means less resistance to rising.

 says you must start with a hot pan in order to get the tallest rise, some going so far as to tell you to preheat your beef drippings for a full half hour before adding your batter.* Still, for the sake of thoroughness, I better test it, I thought. I poured cold batter into a cold, greased tin, then placed it in the oven. At first it looked like not much was happening. But after a few minutes, the puddings started rising. And rising.

Simple Yorkshire Pudding Recipe

*This, for the record, makes no difference at all if you're using a tin. It is as hot after five minutes as it will ever be.

By the end of their 20-minute cook time, they were nearly (but not quite) as tall as any other pudding I'd baked thus far. Granted, they had slightly different and irregular shapes with less cupping. A couple of them stuck to the bottoms of their tins. Still, the results were far from the disaster I was expecting. When I repeated the experiment in a cast iron skillet, the differences were far more pronounced with the pre-heated pan producing a much taller pudding, and this gave me a clue as to the origins of this particular theory.

With the traditional baked-in-a-heavy-pan pudding, preheating is necessary simply because a cold pan will suck up so much energy from the oven before the batter can really begin to bake. In order to get the batter to heat quickly, your pan 

Super Cheap 8p Yorkshire Puddings

 be hot to start. With a modern popover/pudding tin, however, this is not the case. The thin metal is so light that it barely takes any energy at all to heat up. After a few brief moments in the oven, you're essentially in the same initial state as you'd have been if the pan had been fully preheated to begin with.

Verdict: True (sort of). Your puddings will come out slightly higher and better-shaped with a hot tin, but it's not the end of the world if you forget to preheat it. (Just don't try it in a full-sized skillet.)

Delia, the arch-queen of modern British cookery, declares inher recipe: There is no need to leave the batter to stand, so make it whenever it's convenient.Jamie Oliver agrees. His recipe has no rest at all (in fact, he doesn't even start making the batter until the tin is preheating in the oven). But Marco Pierre White, a Yorkshireman (as if that really matters), advisesletting your batter rest for at least an hour.

Mary Berry's Yorkshire Pudding Recipe

When