Home › Biscuits, Breakfast Cakes, Etc › Breakfast Puffs
Breakfast Puffs
1 cup flour 1/2 cup milk 1/2 cup water Mix milk and water; add gradually to flour, and beat with egg-beater until very light. Bake same as Pop-overs.
A three-ingredient batter that relies entirely on steam and a screaming-hot pan. The cross-reference to Pop-overs carries all the technique, so here it is spelled out.
- Bake same as Pop-oversFarmer's popover direction is to beat the batter until very light, pour it into hot, well-buttered iron gem pans, and bake in a hot oven; she gives no numbers. A modern reading of that is roughly 425F for the first 20 minutes and 350F for another 15 to 20, with the door left shut early on.
- The pans must be hotGrease the gem pan or popover tin and heat it in the oven until the butter is sizzling before the batter goes in. The initial blast of heat is what drives the steam that lifts the shell; a cold pan gives you dense, damp cups.
- There are no eggs hereUnlike the popover recipe it points to, this one has none. With less structure in the batter, expect a plainer, less dramatic rise and a shell nearer a crisp hollow crust than a custardy popover.
- Add saltThe recipe gives none, though the Pop-overs it refers to do call for salt. A scant 1/4 teaspoon in the flour is worth adding.
- Batter consistencyOne cup flour to one cup total liquid gives roughly heavy-cream thickness. Beat hard with a whisk or run it briefly in a blender until smooth and foamy; lumps mean uneven rise.
- Gem pansAn iron gem pan is a heavy cast-iron tray of cups, a forerunner of the modern popover tin. Deep, straight-sided cups work better than a shallow muffin tin, which encourages spreading rather than climbing.
- Yield and servingAbout six puffs in a standard popover pan. Serve straight from the oven with butter and jam; they deflate within minutes and do not reheat well.
Popovers and their many relations " "puffs," "gems," "breakfast puffs" " are generally traced to Yorkshire pudding, the batter that rose in the dripping under a roasting joint, adapted in American kitchens to individual cast-iron cups and moved to the breakfast table. Fannie Farmer's book, which grew out of the teaching kitchen of the Boston Cooking School, is full of these stripped-down variants: the same technique with an ingredient dropped or a liquid swapped. Losing the eggs, as here, makes a thriftier and markedly plainer puff, and the whole family of them belonged to a period when a hot iron gem pan was standard equipment.