Culinary World Tour England: Yorkshire Pudding

The culinary world tour finally continues! After our trek to Ireland for shepherd's pie we now move on to England, the heart of the U.K.

If you missed the previous entries in our world tour, check them out using these links:

Ireland: Shepherd's Pie
Iceland: Lamb Pie With Rye Crust
Greenland: Suaasat
Canada: Poutine
Mexico: Posole

Picking what to make for the English stop of the tour involved a bit of debate, as we've already made quite a few distinctly British meals in the past, like bangers and mash, wellington, and cottage pie, and we didn't want to re-tread that ground.

Instead we went with something that's actually fairly simple on it's own: Yorkshire Pudding. While the pudding itself isn't too tough to put together, it does require pan drippings, which gave us the opportunity to do something more fancy with the meat main dish.

To start our meal we've got a tender pork loin, which Megan is rubbing down with garlic and onion powder. You may be asking yourself though, just what is that bacon doing there?

If you couldn't tell from our previous blogs, we love to wrap just about anything in bacon! It adds another layer of texture, and it will make the drippings even more delicious. For some extra flavor, Megan is rubbing down each piece of bacon with a Jack Daniels bacon flavored mustard (yes, there is such a thing as bacon flavored mustard!). The strips are then lined up in a row to make it easier to wrap them around the meat.

Here's the pork loin fully wrapped up in bacon love:

While the pork loin is cooking, we start putting together the batter for the Yorkshire pudding. This is actually very simple: it's just eggs, milk, salt, and flour (although we're using wheat flour instead).

Whip it up until you've got a batter ready to pour into a muffin tin, but don't pour yet, because we've got to wait on the meat first.

Here's the tender pork loin wrapped in crispy awesome bacon. But where's all the pan drippings?

They've gone here, into the bottom of the muffin tin to flavor the Yorkshire pudding.

Next we fill up the rest of the tin with the pre-made batter.

And a few minutes later they come out like this! These are tricky though - they can easily develop air pockets and sink while cooking, so don't open the oven until you are sure they are done, and avoid moving around in the kitchen during the cooking time if possible.

Here's one straight out of the pan with a slight indentation in the center. Unfortunately it didn't come out quite as pretty or with much of a pronounced indentation as those we've seen elsewhere, so we'll have to try them again some time. For a complete look on how to put these together, check out this recipe.

While the meat and pudding were both cooking, we also had rice going in our rice cooker, which has a top attachment for steaming veggies. We steamed slices of squash and zuchinni along with baby carrots and asparagus.

Here's the cooked vegetables ready to hit a plate:

This is my plate, with a generous helping of rice and veggies, along with slices of the bacon wrapped pork loin.

And here's Megan's plate with a delicious looking pudding!

We're still deciding where to hit next in the culinary world tour, but check back soon for plenty of upcoming delicious entrees, including a spicy strawberry chicken pizza, asparagus grilled cheese sandwiches, and more!