Giant Yorkshire Pudding with Sage

I was chatting with a friend and fellow food enthusiast recently about the best way to make Yorkshire Pudding and he recalled how his mum would prepare the mixture early in the day and leave it in the bowl to set for several hours before cooking.

Last weekend I decided to follow that approach when making my own super- size Yorkshire Pudding. I made the batter mixture at about half ten in the morning even though I wasn't expecting to cook it until about five in the afternoon after I'd had the chance to review the day's football results.

I weighed out four ounces of plain flour, dropped it into the mixing bowl and made a well in the middle of the flour. I then cracked open an egg and dumped the yolk and the white in the middle of the well and mixed it into the flour. I next measured out half a pint of semi-skimmed long-life milk and mixed half of it into the egg and flour. I thought at this point that the dish was going to be a bit boring so I picked twelve leaves of sage from the garden, washed them thoroughly, chopped them up finely and added them to the mixture. I made sure to mix the sage well into the other ingredients so as to avoid any bits of sage coming loose from the mixture during cooking.

In order to finish off the first stage of preparation I poured the remaining milk into the bowl and exercised the various muscles in my arms to mix everything together with a large wooden spoon. I then left it to set.

After fully digesting the afternoon's football results I returned to the kitchen at five o'clock and poured out enough cooking oil to cover the bottom of a high sided 15cm x 30cm baking tray. The oven was preheated to 210 degrees (220 degrees if you don't have a fanned oven) and I put the tray with the cooking oil in the oven for one minute to heat up the oil. I took the tray out, stirred the mixture in the bowl one last time, dumped it into the tray and stuck it in the oven.

After twenty-five minutes I removed it from the oven and found that the mixture had expanded into a mass of crispy batter perfect to go with many different dishes. In this case I served the Yorkshire Pudding with Lentils cooked in Red Wine and Shallots and it didn't take long for it to get eaten as half had gone by the time I even had the chance to take a picture of it.