there I was in the grocery store...
... looking at a pile of Meyer lemons, which to the best of my recollection my store has never carried before, and then somehow I ended up spending my afternoon making a Sussex Pond pudding. Yes, the British dessert brought to fandom's attention by 
rachelmanija's Yuletide Anthony Bourdain/Narnia crossover.
Don't believe me? Here's the proof:
(If you want to cut to the chase: it didn't turn out quite as advertised, due entirely to my own screw-ups, but it was very tasty nevertheless.)
When I first read the recipe, I was very intrigued, but I saw two major stumbling blocks: (1) it works best with thin-skinned lemons, and all I can reliably find are the kind with rhino-hide rinds, and (2) I do not have a pudding mold. Also (3) I have never made a steamed pudding before, but I can follow a recipe, right?
Yes, I can follow a recipe, but my ability to stand there in a grocery store and recall a recipe that I read once three weeks ago turns out not to be perfect. I looked at the thin-skinned, juicy Meyer lemons and thought they might work nicely for the pudding (in which a whole lemon is encased in a pastry crust and steamed for 3+ hours), and I tried to remember what else I needed. For some reason I was sure that I needed a 2.5-cup pudding mold. I went to the kitchenware section and found some nice plain white rice bowls, helpfully labeled with capacities. Hey, 20 oz., perfect!
Only, when I got home and re-read the recipe, it turned out to call for a 3-cup mold. If I had had to go back to the store to look for something else, it would have turned this from a fun whim into a chore, so I decided to press on. After all, the lemon fit in the bowl with no problem! But this decision turned out to have some non-optimal repercussions.
When I made the dough, I should have rolled it out and then scrapped 1/6 of it, to account for the smaller bowl size. But I didn't, I used it all. It fit, and the lemon still fit, but all the extra dough squished in there left less room for the butter and sugar that make up the sauce. I ended up using something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the amount called for.
The result was this:
See the lack of pond? The butter and sugar turned into a thick, lemon-perfumed toffee jam that clung to the crust. And the lemon rind never reached the promised candied/marmalade state -- it was still tough and inedibly bitter, even though it was, as requested, very thin. Presumably because it wasn't bathed in boiling sugar syrup the whole time the way it should have been; all the moisture seemed to get sucked into the crust.
OMG that crust, SO DELICIOUS. It still seems miraculous to me that something steamed in a vat of boiling water could get so deliciously brown, but it works! I am a convert. I want to make more steamed puddings. Send me your favorite recipes!
We all enjoyed this, even the kids. We just scooped some lemon pulp out for each slice, and ignored the rind. We ended up eating the whole thing -- and my quarter of it is now sitting like a rock in my stomach, and I don't even want to think about how much butter was in that serving, but it was TOTALLY WORTH IT.
This entry was originally posted at http://loligo.dreamwidth.org/415407.html.
comments on that entry. Comments on Dreamwidth preferred.
rachelmanija's Yuletide Anthony Bourdain/Narnia crossover.
Don't believe me? Here's the proof:
(If you want to cut to the chase: it didn't turn out quite as advertised, due entirely to my own screw-ups, but it was very tasty nevertheless.)
When I first read the recipe, I was very intrigued, but I saw two major stumbling blocks: (1) it works best with thin-skinned lemons, and all I can reliably find are the kind with rhino-hide rinds, and (2) I do not have a pudding mold. Also (3) I have never made a steamed pudding before, but I can follow a recipe, right?
Yes, I can follow a recipe, but my ability to stand there in a grocery store and recall a recipe that I read once three weeks ago turns out not to be perfect. I looked at the thin-skinned, juicy Meyer lemons and thought they might work nicely for the pudding (in which a whole lemon is encased in a pastry crust and steamed for 3+ hours), and I tried to remember what else I needed. For some reason I was sure that I needed a 2.5-cup pudding mold. I went to the kitchenware section and found some nice plain white rice bowls, helpfully labeled with capacities. Hey, 20 oz., perfect!
Only, when I got home and re-read the recipe, it turned out to call for a 3-cup mold. If I had had to go back to the store to look for something else, it would have turned this from a fun whim into a chore, so I decided to press on. After all, the lemon fit in the bowl with no problem! But this decision turned out to have some non-optimal repercussions.
When I made the dough, I should have rolled it out and then scrapped 1/6 of it, to account for the smaller bowl size. But I didn't, I used it all. It fit, and the lemon still fit, but all the extra dough squished in there left less room for the butter and sugar that make up the sauce. I ended up using something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the amount called for.
The result was this:
See the lack of pond? The butter and sugar turned into a thick, lemon-perfumed toffee jam that clung to the crust. And the lemon rind never reached the promised candied/marmalade state -- it was still tough and inedibly bitter, even though it was, as requested, very thin. Presumably because it wasn't bathed in boiling sugar syrup the whole time the way it should have been; all the moisture seemed to get sucked into the crust.
OMG that crust, SO DELICIOUS. It still seems miraculous to me that something steamed in a vat of boiling water could get so deliciously brown, but it works! I am a convert. I want to make more steamed puddings. Send me your favorite recipes!
We all enjoyed this, even the kids. We just scooped some lemon pulp out for each slice, and ignored the rind. We ended up eating the whole thing -- and my quarter of it is now sitting like a rock in my stomach, and I don't even want to think about how much butter was in that serving, but it was TOTALLY WORTH IT.
This entry was originally posted at http://loligo.dreamwidth.org/415407.html.
comments on that entry. Comments on Dreamwidth preferred.