Best Shop Bought Beef Dripping Yorkshire Pudding
Making your own Yorkshire puddings is not difficult, but mastering the skill – nay, the art – of creating truly great Yorkies is, arguably, a lifetime's work.
The ingredients list is deceptively simple – flour, eggs, milk, water – and the cooking process is rudimentary – sizzling fat, hot oven, bosh – but, in order to perfect your Yorkshire puddings, you need to make them regularly. You need to tinker with the ingredient ratios over a matter of years and repeat the process until it becomes intuitive – until a sixth sense tells you when the batter has reached the right creamy consistency or the fat is at its optimum smoking temperature. In those margins, in those split seconds, lies the difference between burned, desiccated husks and golden, soaring turrets with crisp edges and rich, lightly eggy folds at their base.
That may explain why you so rarely eat a good Yorkshire pudding in a pub-restaurant and why, when cooking a roast, so many of us fall back on ready-baked or frozen Yorkshires. The rise of market leader Aunt Bessie's is remarkable. It only launched its frozen puddings in 1995 but, by 2004, a reported 50% of Britons were eating them. Its parent company, Hull's William Jackson Food Group, has a rapidly growing turnover of about £300m a year.
For those traditionalists who serve batter puddings in the Yorkshire style (one large, light, super-crispy rectangle, eaten first), the idea of shop-bought Yorkshire puddings will be anathema. But do any of the supermarket own-brands trump the ubiquitous Aunt Bessie's or come close to what a practised hand might produce at home?
Sainsbury's, four rustic Yorkshire puddings, 168g, £1.50
Veritable paddling pools, these 10cm-diameter, chilled, fresh yorkies boast an attractive golden brown tan and, yes, a certain irregular, faux-rustic appearance. They look handsome. But, unfortunately, you have to eat them, too. The upper rims may be persuasively airy, light and crisp, but the bottoms of these Yorkies are so thick and galumphing (around 0.5cm), so sweet and eggy that it is more like biting into a brioche or a croissant than a Yorkshire pudding. They taste like something you should fill with egg custard, rather than gravy.
5/10
Aldi Specially Selected, four Yorkshire puddings, 160g, 89p
Warning: these wide, beef-dripping-cooked examples emerged from the freezer looking misshapen. Their 4cm rim shrinks to a mere lip on one side. Is it a manufacturing issue? Or what happens in a packed freezer? Who knows, but, aesthetic anomalies aside, they tasted fantastic. They are bangingly beefy, boldly savoury and texturally excellent. Up top, the puddings are as crunchy as good toast and, at their base, delicately layered, with light, eggy folds all glossy with hot beef fat. Excellent.
8.5/10
Aunt Bessie's, 12 Golden Yorkshires, 220g, £1.50
The nation's favourite, which, like Brexit, makes you wonder what sort of country we live in. These relatively uniform frozen yorkies, cooked in rapeseed oil, have a reasonable exterior crispness and a humdrum eggy flavour, but the texture is terrible. The interior is woolly, tight-knit, bready and thick, like a doughnut. Patches of that dense batter taste gluey and, small as they are (5.5cm), these are heavy going.
4/10
M&S, six Yorkshire puddings made with beef dripping, 132g, £1
Historically, Yorkshire cooked large rectangular puddings under large joints of meat to soak up their juices and also smaller, individual puddings referred to as "Yorkshire puffs". M&S is channelling both traditions in these muffin-shaped, air-light puds (several have almost no indentation), which are largely hollow, but for occasional, dangling gobbets of batter. They feel a shade thin, but the flavour is terrific. They are a seriously savoury, beef-dripping-spiked joy;, gleaming mouthfuls so good you could happily eat them on their own.
8/10
Waitrose, six Yorkshire puddings, 180g, £1.70
If you want visually appealing puddings, buy fresh ones. Protected in their plastic trays, they invariably look (like these 8.5cm-diameter beauties; ostensibly promising gravy wells) far nicer than their loose-bagged, frozen equivalents. Hot looks apart, however, these are dismal puddings, which – beyond a vaguely sweet, eggy flavour – taste fundamentally underseasoned and bland. Cooked in rapeseed oil, they are dry at their tips, stodgy below (the base is too thickly woven) and flatly greasy where, say, the M&S beef dripping puds feel luxuriously unctuous.
3/10
Morrisons The Best, 4 beef dripping Yorkshire puddings, 160g, £1.23
Less greasy than many and as tanned as a Mediterranean playboy, these frozen, 9cm-wide puddings look great – and sound good, too. Tap the rim with a knife and it emits a reassuringly hollow thwock. Sadly though, it is all show. The beef flavour here is negligible, a subtle suggestion (a mere 2% of the ingredients) that is lost once you dig down into thick bases that, again, like the Sainsbury's version, bring to mind patisserie rather than a partner for roast parsnips. Sweet anodyne stodge, frankly.
5/10
Tesco Finest, six beef dripping Yorkshire puddings, 195g, £1.60
If not as profoundly beefy as the M&S or Aldi examples, these Tesco frozen puds (7.5cm diameter) have good flavour and leave your lips satisfyingly coated with fat. At first tap and glance, they appear to be persuasively crisp and well-browned, too, not just around the rim but also under the base. Cut into them, however, and that promise goes south. The bases are about 6mm of compressed dough that tastes flabby, overly eggy and almost raw in places where, ideally, you would want finely delineated layers of batter.
6/10
Asda, four rustic style Yorkshire puddings, 160g, £1.50
You could go potholing in the gnarled hollows of these huge, primeval-looking puds, while wading through rivulets of rapeseed oil. Like most of the beef-dripping-free versions in this test, Asda's puds are bizarrely rich and sweet, a slight caramelisation on the surface adding to the feeling you are eating dessert rather than a roast-dinner component. The exteriors are impressively crisp, but the bases are ludicrously claggy (up to 1cm thick in parts; the first test pud was cold in the middle!). It all feels like a slog.
5/10
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/oct/19/supermarket-yorkshire-pudding-sunday-roast-ready-baked-fresh-frozen-shop-bought
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