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Pop-overs (Cup milk egg teaspoon salt cup)
1 cup milk 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup sifted bread flour Break the egg into a mixing bowl, and add the milk and salt. Beat with a batter whip enough to mix the milk and egg. Stir in the flour and beat till the batter is smooth, which will require beating about one minute. Pour into pop-over tins or heated gem irons, and bake in a well-heated oven.
A minimal popover batter — no butter, no sugar, no leavening but steam. Everything depends on the pan being hot and the oven being hotter than most cooks expect.
- The hinge: heat the pan"Heated gem irons" is the whole trick. Set the empty cast-iron or steel pan in the oven while it preheats, grease it, fill the cups no more than half full, and get it back in immediately. Batter poured into a cold pan will rise sluggishly and stay dense.
- "A well-heated oven" in numbersThe recipe gives no temperature. Modern practice for a batter like this is roughly 450F for the first 15 to 20 minutes, then a drop to about 350F for another 15 to 20 to dry the interior. Keeping the door shut during the first stage is usually advised, since the batter rises on trapped steam.
- Gem irons and pop-over tinsGem irons are heavy cast-iron muffin pans, usually with deep oval or round cups. A modern popover pan with tall narrow wells gives the best lift; a standard muffin tin works but yields squatter results.
- Bread flour is deliberateThe higher protein builds a batter strong enough to hold a hollow shell. All-purpose will work but rises a little less. Sift, as directed, and measure by spooning into the cup rather than scooping.
- BeatingOne minute with a whisk is right — smooth and thin, roughly the consistency of heavy cream. Overbeating is less of a risk here than lumps; strain the batter if any remain. Some cooks rest it 20 to 30 minutes, which relaxes the gluten and does no harm.
- YieldRoughly six to eight in standard muffin cups, fewer in a deep popover pan, depending on how full the cups are filled.
- ServingEat them within minutes of coming out, while the shell is crisp. If they must wait, pierce each one with a knife tip to let the steam out or they will collapse and go leathery.
Popovers are generally regarded as an American relative of English batter puddings — the same flour, milk and egg mixture that was baked under roasting meat and became Yorkshire pudding, here moved into individual iron cups and raised on nothing but its own steam. The name is usually traced to the mid-nineteenth century, and is traditionally explained as describing what the batter does as it climbs and topples over the rim of the tin, though that explanation is folk tradition rather than established etymology. The absence of fat and sweetening is worth noting: the dish is plain, cheap and quickly mixed.