Wednesday - December 17, 2008

Good eats, maybe

Ok, the rib roast is out of the oven, and it looks like it came out just fine. We haven’t had a roast beef in so long. It’s just the two of us, and to make a good roast beef you need a nice big one. At least 6 pounds, 8-10 is even better. So we found this 4 pound prime rib in the grocery store ... and said WTH.

I gave it a nice rub with made from

1/4 cup Penzey’s addictive Turkish seasoning, dampened with 1 Tbs water
2 Tbs olive oil
a few shakes of pizza peppers

because a) Turkish seasoning is awesome, and b) we like things a bit spicy here

Okay, into the roasting pan, 10 minutes at 450 F, reduce heat to 250, come back in a couple hours. When I checked it, the internal temperature was 140 F, so that’s done enough. Looks great, smells heavenly. And there are drippings in the bottom of the roasting pan. And that means only one thing. Yorkshire Pudding!!

Ok, I know the English take a lot of grief for their cooking. I guess it just isn’t fancy enough for the rest of the world. Too bad. Properly made Yorkshire Pudding is a delight. And it’s dead easy to mix up.

1 cup sifted flour
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup milk
1 tsp salt only if you haven’t rubbed the roast with a seasoning with salt in it. I did, so no extra salt is really needed.

1/4 - 1/3 cup pan drippings, set aside

Heat the oven back up to 450 F. Mix the milk into the eggs, mix the salt into the flour, then pour the liquid into the dry and have at it with the mixer. Wipe a bit of butter around the inside of a glass baking dish and put it in the oven. Return to mixing the batter. When the baking dish has had a couple minutes to warm up, pour in the pan drippings. They will sizzle! Now pour in all the batter, and put it all back in the oven. Give it 15 minutes at 450 F, then reduce the heat to 350 F and give it 10-20 minutes more. It will puff up enormously and start to brown. Pull it out when you think it’s brown enough ... with luck it will look about like this:

And that’s all there is to it. This is an old recipe, and a simple one. And about 10,000 variations exist on it. I even asked my wife’s sister’s husband’s mother, who is an ACTUAL English Person^tm about the recipes, and [horrors!] not only does she make hers in fairy cake tins (muffin pans for us gauche Yanks), she doesn’t put in any drippings. And I gather she cooks them stone hard. I’ve gone to English restaurants (this is not an oxymoron! Visit the Ship Inn in Milford NJ, right around the corner from those idiot neo-Nazis I posted about earlier) and been served YP done the same way. It’s terrible. You get a giant crispy popover filled with air. Tasteless.  So don’t overcook it!

My mother’s YP always came out soft and chewy, with a consistency somewhere between jello and bread. It was truly beef-cake, and is slightly greasy when cold but just as tasty. She might have put in twice the amount of drippings?

Gotta go turn down the oven. It’s time. Mmmm, I can’t hardly wait.

PS - the zeitgeist of your seasonings will be magnified about twenty fold in the pan drippings. So be warned. Which means “Drew, you probably shouldn’t have put ANY pizza peppers in at all!”

Posted by Drew458     on 12/17/2008 at 04:39 PM   
Filed Under: • Fine-Dining •  
• Comments (10) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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