So what on earth is a Yorkshire Pudding you ask. It is what you see above. Nope, it ain’t a dinner roll, it is really just a batter mixture that is baked in a really hot oven until risen and brown.  England still has it’s love affair with beef – more so than any other European country.  Strangely though, it also has the largest amount of vegetarians in the western world. A rebellion I guess!!

Back in England you would always have these with roast beef. They taste absolutely bloody amazing, especially when they have a little jus on them. Back in the day they were served before the main course of meat, so to fill you up which obviously meant that the meat went further. These days though they are normally served alongside the meat – and rightly so, they taste great with the jus or gravy, and are far to sublime tasting to be “just a filler”.

I am really trying to start up the English tradition of a Sunday roast dinner in our house again. As you may know, things have been crazy with the renovation, so regular plans have gone more than a miss. It is fantastic when a family gets together on Sunday to share a big meal, chat, drink a little, and then go out for a decent walk – to burn off some of what you have just eaten! This is really something that I want to teach Drake from an early age – it is honestly a great way for a family to get together, even if it is just once a week.

One of the great things about this tradition back in Blighty is that almost everyone does it. When you were a kid, you were always somewhere for Sunday lunch. You might be playing round at a friends house, out fishing, or whatever, but you always went home (or your friends house) for Sunday dinner. Traffic was always much lighter around 2pm on Sunday (everyone would normally aim to have lunch around 1pm, but these things always run late..). Even when I was a poor student at University, I would always cook some kind of Sunday roast.

It is only fitting that for the first week of this tradition I pick the English classic – roast beef. The cut I chose was a prime rib roast, big enough for at least 6 people. Danika’s (my wife) parents joined us, but even so we had enough meat left over for some rather tasty sandwiches. Why prime rib roast? Well, it is a decent cut for roasting, had a good layer of fat on it that would baste the meat as it roasted. It was also about all I could get my hands on late in the day. I planned this one in a hurry, so I didn’t have time to go visit the Skagit River Ranch boys at the Ballard market. Even if I did, their meat wouldn’t have defrosted in time. I could have run to whole foods, but I object to paying their ridiculous prices for their meat, which is no where close to the product supplied by Skagit. So, what did I do? I just happened upon this decent looking roast at Trader Joes of all places. It was organic, veg feed (not grass fed though..) and no hormones etc. Good enough for me.

Roasted Prime Rib, Yorkshire pudding, red wine jus

For the beef:

5lb joint of beef – Sirloin or Prime rib is great

Salt and Pepper

Olive oil

For the Yorkshire pudding:

3/4 cup of all purpose flour

3oz of milk

2 oz of water

salt and pepper

1 egg

some kind of fat – butter, or drippings from the roasting beef

For the red wine Jus:

1 bottle of good red wine

1 cup of carrots (sliced)

1 cup of onion (sliced)

1 cup of leeks (white to light green section only, sliced)

5 sprigs of flat leaf parsley

3 sprigs of tyme

2 bay leaves

salt and pepper

3 cups of beef stock

Turn your oven to 425. Rub the meat with some salt and pepper, and a little olive oil. Place the meat in a large roasting pan, and when the oven is up to temperature bung it in for 30 minutes. Now turn the oven down to 350, and roast for about 25 minutes a pound for medium. The meat is cooked medium when the center of the meat is at about 145 on a meat thermometer. When the meat is done, you can take it out of the oven, and let it rest for about 20 minutes, covered with some foil.

Whist the meat is cooking, get cracking on the red wine jus. In a large saucepan put in the wine, vegetables seasoning and herbs. Bring this to a boil, and simmer for about 50 minutes, until a lot of the red wine has reduced away. Now add the beef stock, and simmer for a further 20 minutes. When this is done, strain it through a really fine sieve at least once, and put this into a clean pan. About 5 minutes before you are ready to serve the beef, bung some heat under the pan to heat the red wine jus back up. You want this nice and hot. Make sure when you strain it not to try and push anything through the strainer. We want this jus pretty free of any bits. If you need to, strain it a couple of times.

Now for the “Yorkies”. Put the flour in a bowl, and break the egg into it. Slowly add the milk and water whilst mixing with a hand blender. Stop blending when everything is combined. Lightly season.

About 10 minutes before the meat is done, turn the oven up to 450. In a muffin pan, put a teaspoon of fat into 6 muffin holes (what are those called?) Butter works well if you don’t have much fat from the beef, however the roasting does pretty much nuke it, so you will get little black specs on your Yorkies (as you can see on mine..). The best thing to use is the fat from the roasting pan if you have enough. Put this pan in the oven until it is really hot.

When the pan is hot, take it out of the oven, and working very fast spoon batter into each of the 6 muffin holes. You want the batter to go about half way up the muffin hole (god I wish I knew what they were called..) Get this back in the oven as fast as possible. The longer the pan stays out the oven, the more it cools, and the less chance you have of these things raising spectacularly. Let these roast for about 20 minutes, until they have puffed up and gone golden brown. Try to resist the temptation to open the door and take a decent peak. You risk them flopping if you do. Instead, get a decent look through the oven door.

The turnip gratin is covered in a post a few days ago.

Carve the beef into thin slices. The British way is to cut wafer thin slices, however in the US the proper thing to do is thicker slices (a sign of generosity). Put the slices of meat on the plate, and pop a Yorkie or two next to it. Spoon over some au jus, and get stuck in.