The yorkshire pudding is Britain’s favourite regional delicacy. According to a new survey of 2,000 adults, yorkshire puddings are now officially more beloved than cheddar cheese, bakewell tarts and scotch eggs. But, setting aside all regional biases, aren’t yorkshire puddings a bit, you know, bland? Made of flour, eggs and milk, they’re just pancakes cooked in a muffin tin, aren’t they?
But perhaps by only ever eating them with roast dinners, yorkshire puddings have been hiding their light from me under a bushel. With this in mind, I decided to venture into vast and unknown territories, by eating yorkies three different ways.
Using my family’s traditional yorkshire pudding recipe – AKA whatever comes up first when you Google “Yorkshire pudding recipe easy” – I tried three popular, if unconventional, uses for this supposedly wonderful dish. Here’s how I got on.
Using a yorkshire pudding as a lunch bowl
You may have seen this one in restaurants. Instead of plonking other ingredients around a yorkshire pudding, you plonk them inside it. People eat roast dinners out of yorkshire puddings. They eat sausage and mash out of them. One company, which shall remain nameless, sells ready-meal yorkshire puddings filled with lasagne. However, I quickly ran into two main issues upon attempting this: first, my yorkshires were made in a muffin tin and were therefore quite small; second, I had already made my lunch when this commission came through, and it was an omelette.
Which is too much egg, obviously. Yorkshire pudding batter is just eggy flour, and an omelette is, well, eggy egg. Nevertheless, once my puddings were ready, I gamely folded up my omelette and glumly stuffed it into the hollow. But here’s the thing: it was incredible. By some unknown sorcery, the omelette and the puddings cancelled out each other’s worst qualities. The omelette eradicated the pudding’s dryness, and the pudding helped to give the omelette some much-needed texture. It was amazing. Believe me when I tell you this: omelette-filled yorkshire puddings are the future.
Using the yorkshire pudding as a burrito
This is street food that appears to exist solely to offend residents of Mexico and Yorkshire in equal measure. It’s a flattened-out yorkshire pudding, filled with ingredients, rolled up and eaten on the hoof.
About those ingredients. You’d think that the yorkshire pudding burrito would require things like rice and beans. But no. People sell them filled with Sunday roasts. And this is a good thing, for me at least, because this loose definition essentially gave me carte blanche to shove whatever I liked into mine. And, since all I had in my fridge was bacon, cheese, a pre-packed salad and some sriracha mayo, that’s what went in. Also, again, since my puddings were small, I flattened out two of them and ate the whole thing like a sandwich.
But here’s the thing: it was incredible. It was like a cross between eating a bacon naan and a bacon muffin, and therefore quite easily the greatest food that has ever been invented. Believe me when I tell you: bacon and cheese yorkshire pudding sandwiches are the future.
Using the yorkshire pudding as a sweet dish
Obviously this always looked good on paper. After all, what is a yorkshire pudding if not a tiny Dutch Baby, the giant pan-sized pancake eaten as a breakfast dish with berries and syrup? However, lacking any foresight whatsoever, I made the mistake of making all my batter in one go, which meant that this one was seasoned with salt and pepper. Worried that I’d ruined a good thing, I overcompensated by filling it with Nutella and marshmallow fluff and prayed for the best.
Obviously, it was incredible. It was basically a handheld sugar bomb, gooey and warm and amazing. People should be eating these things all the time. Liberated from their Sunday lunch prison, it turns out that yorkshire puddings make the perfect vehicle for just about anything you care to stuff in them. Their blandness isn’t a weakness at all, it’s what makes them so brilliantly versatile. So, yes, I’m a convert – and sweet yorkshire puddings are the future.
