The April 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Esther of The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet. I had two different attempts at this challenge, both sweet. I had planned for a savoury pudding, but the last month just flew by! I will make a steak and ale pudding with a suet crust at some stage though, just not this month! My two tries were a steamed rhubarb pudding (made with butter, not suet) and a steamed treacle pudding (pictured above) which was a bit of a disaster! 😀 I really enjoyed this month’s challenge – I just wish I had more time! Thank you to the challenge host Esther for a challenge that taught me a completely new method of cooking – and it’s not hard at all. I remember my aunt steaming Christmas puddings when I was young, but I had never tried that method myself until now.
So the required elements of this challenge are:
1) to make a suet pudding using real suet or as close a replacement as you can manage or is acceptable to you; and
2) to cook it by steaming or if you want to be even more traditional by boiling tied up in a cloth.
Notes: Fresh suet should be kept in the fridge or do what I do and freeze it. I crumble off what I want as I go straight from the freezer. The boxed stuff can live in the cupboard.
The easiest way to steam a pudding is in a dedicated steamer as the water is kept away from the pudding so it can’t boil over. If, however, you don’t have a steamer use a pan large enough to easily fit the bowl you are cooking. Don’t fill the water more than about a third of the way up the bowl or it may boil over and into the bowl. Keep an eye and top up as needed with boiling water.
You need to lift the bowl off the bottom of the pan. This can be done with a steamer stand, an upturned plate or even crumpled up kitchen foil — anything that can stand being in boiling water and lifts the bowl off the bottom of the pan will work.
Make sure you have a well-fitted lid on the pan as you want the steam to cook the pudding not to boil off.
Make sure you put a pleat in the foil or paper you cover the bowl with to allow for expansion and then tie down tightly with string.
Variations allowed: You are allowed completely free rein on flavours and fillings and I am very much looking forward to seeing where the Daring Bakers take a very traditional dish like this.
Any variations due to restricted diets are of course allowed. Due to the way these recipes are cooked it’s very easy to substitute for gluten-free flours and get very much the same results as wheat. Do try your favorite flour mix as these are much more tolerant of flour changes than most pasty.
They can be made vegetarian and even vegan just by using the vegetarian replacement suet and an appropriate flavour/filling.
Preparation time: Preparation time is 5 to 20 minutes depending on the filling. Cooking time is 1 to 5 hours so do this on a day you have jobs around the house to do or are popping in and out as you need to occasionally check the pan hasn’t boiled dry! However it is otherwise a very low time requirement dish.
Equipment required:
• 2 pint (1 litre) pudding bowl or steam-able containers to contain a similar amount they should be higher rather than wide and low
• Steamer or large pan, ideally with a steaming stand, upturned plate or crumpled up piece of kitchen foil
• Mixing bowl
• Spoon
• Measuring cups or scales
• Foil or grease proof paper to cover the bowl
• String
I used recipes from two different sources. The steamed rhubarb pudding recipe came from the BBCGoodFood website. The treacle pudding recipe came from Tamasin Day Lewis’s Kitchen Bible.
Let’s start with the Steamed Rhubarb Pudding. There is no suet in this recipe, we use butter. But it is steamed so I thought it was a good place to start to get familiar with the whole steaming process. I used half the amounts listed in the recipe as I wasn’t sure how big the pudding was going to turn out, plus I only had a little rhubarb.
What you need:
175g fresh rhubarb, cut into 4cm lengths
100g caster sugar
1/2 tsp ground ginger
60g unsalted butter
few drops natural vanilla extract
85g self-raising flour
What to do:
Pop the rhubarb into a saucepan with 35g of the sugar and the ginger. Cook over a low heat until the rhubarb is starting to soften. I put a lid on to speed things up here. When it’s done, take off the heat and set aside.
Grease a pudding basin. Get the steaming apparatus ready – I used a large saucepan with an up-turned side plate on the bottom. I poured in enough water to just cover the plate, popped on the lid and put it on the cooker to heat up.
Cream together the butter and the remaining sugar. Add the vanilla extract and then beat in the eggs a little at a time. Sift in the flour and fold in gently.
Place the rhubarb (and any syrup that is in the saucepan with it) in the bottom of the pudding bowl and gently put the sponge mixture on top.
Smooth down the pudding mixture so the surface is level.
Next prepare the lid. Grease a piece of parchment paper slightly bigger than the top of the pudding bowl. Make a pleat in the centre and secure over the top of the bowl. I used a rubber band for this.
Use a similarly sized piece of aluminum foil, with a pleat in the middle, to cover the parchment paper. Secure with string. If you are fancy you can make a string handle for ease of moving the pudding in and out of the saucepan, but I didn’t bother.
Place into the pot, pop the lid on and steam for 1.5 hours. Make sure that the pot doesn’t boil dry.
When it’s done, remove from the pot (carefully! this is where the string handle comes in handy), remove the foil and parchment paper.
Turn the pudding out onto a plate and gaze in wonder at what you have created.
Ok, so the green tint on the rhubarb looks a bit odd, but judge not! This pudding was just fab, so delicious! The sponge was so light and the tartness of the rhubarb came through. Really delicious!
So, next up, the steamed treacle pudding. I went for a sweet suet pudding as time wasn’t on my side, and the stewing steak I bought just for this job needed to be used for dinner today, not tomorrow, so 4.5 hours of steaming before we could eat said steak was not going to happen. So the suet had to go into the dessert instead 🙂 The main reason for my disaster with this recipe is that I didn’t give it enough time to cook thoroughly. I used a lower water level in the pot than Tamasin advised, so 2.5 hours just wasn’t enough to cook the pudding through. It did taste great though, and I tried to rescue it by dividing the sloppy mess (with little spongey bits) into ramekins and whacking them into the oven for a while. This did cook them through, but it also dried them out. Anyway, lesson learned 🙂
Here’s the recipe, from Tamasin’s Kitchen Bible.
What you need:
225g flour
100g suet
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
200ml milk
170g light or dark muscovado sugar (I used light)
225g golden syrup
zest of a lemon (I left this out)
What to do:
Sift the flour into a large bowl, add the other ingredients and mix well.
Here’s a picture of the suet used in this recipe. It’s a vegetarian version of suet available in the supermarket:
When everything is mixed together, you get quite a runny mixture. Pour into a greased pudding bowl. Tamasin recommends a 850ml/1.5 pint bowl. My bowl is bigger than that but still seemed too small during the steaming as the pudding bulged over the edges.
Cover the pudding bowl as before (parchment paper with a pleat, secured with an elastic band; foil with a pleat secured with twine) and pop it into the saucepan, sitting on an upturned plate.
So this is the point where things started to go wrong. Tamasin recommends to steam for 2 hours, with the water in the pot reaching about halfway up the sides of the bowl. I erred on the side of steaming caution and kept the water level lower but still steamed for the same amount of time. This was a mistake. Next, rather scarily, after about an hour and a half of steaming, the top of the pudding had bulged the foil lid up so much it was touching the top of the pot. After 2 hours, it was pushing the lid up, gleefully letting all the steam out of the pot. WTF??
This, I thought, is a sign that it is ready. So I took it out of the pot. This was also a mistake. I removed the bulging lids and this is what I saw:
This looks great, I thought. And it smelled divine, all syrupy. So I released the edges with a palate knife and turned it out onto a plate. This is what happened:
DISASTER!!
So, I bundled it all into little ramekin dishes and put them in the oven. I didn’t know if that would fix the problem at that stage (maybe the mix was too runny, maybe some steam got in to the pudding while steaming) so I couldn’t bring myself to package up the ramekins and resume steaming. And yes, the oven did cook it all nicely. Well it looked nice, and some bits were spongey and delicious. But some bits were all dried out. The result of not steaming, I guess.
They did look nice, turned out of the ramekins, and the taste was definitely good enough to have me consider making this pudding again. Though I will need to allow more time than with this effort 🙂
So thank you Esther for a great challenge and for opening my eyes to a whole new area of cooking and baking. When I read the challenge first, it all seemed a bit daunting, but it’s really not difficult at all, and it was fun to have so much freedom with flavours and types of pudding we could make for this challenge.
Cheers!
Don’t forget to visit the other Daring Bakers to see an incredible variety of Traditional British Puddings!
Both your puddings look fantastic! I’m a bit jealous of the rhubarb, as it’s still not ready here. My post isn’t up yet, but I’m enjoying all the ones in earlier time zones!
Thanks so much Mary! I really love rhubarb – I wish every dessert had rhubarb in it! I’m seriously jealous of your savoury pudding. It looks sooo good! 🙂
Both puddings sound really delicious. Mm, rhubarb. Great save with the treacle pudding too. It looks perfect – like nothing had happened!
I’m definitely a steaming convert now.
Thanks Suz! I know, that treacle pudding looks alot better than it tasted tho! 🙂
WOW love the rhubarb one but that golden syrup one has a special place in my heart. Love the photos also well done on this challenge. Cheers from Audax in Sydney Australia.
Thanks so much Audax! I am blown away by the effort you put in and the variety of your puddings! Thanks for dropping by!
i agree it opened my eyes to a new way of cooking. i particularly like your rhubarb one.
Thanks for dropping by my blog! The rhubarb one was so tasty – you can’t beat rhubarb and ginger! 🙂
Well, it certainly sounds like you had a lot of fun with this one. I think your rhubarb one looks fantastic. Had similar problems with
mine as your treacle- just did not steam properly. 😦
Is it bad that it still tasted good even when it wasn’t cooked properly?? 😀 Thanks for the comment!
The proof is in the pud, and since it tasted good, I’d say you won on this one.
Seriously though, I find the mistakes can be a bit disheartening but they help me make a better dish the next time. 🙂
Thanks for the comment Aparna! I will try a suet pudding again – I have a packet of dried suet in the cupboard for when the urge hits me! 😀