Lard Glorious Lard!

There’s been a few things missing in my life of late, but one of them it turns out is Lard. In my 23 years of existence I have never cooked with, or remember eating anything which was fried in Lard. Weird isn’t it?

So . . . . this leads me on to the serious 1^st world problem of what is the best fat to cook your Yorkshire puddings in? I’m told this issue is being discussed in the House of Lords as we speak.

 As I said earlier I’ve never cooked with lard before but all that changed the other day when I decided to use the lard that had been sat in my fridge for 6 weeks to cook my herby toad in the hole in. I bought the Lard to make some pastry object out of Paul Hollywood’s latest book but never got round to it. So it’s been sat in my fridge for a while now forgotten the last few times I’ve made Yorkshire puds.

I cant find the name of the amazing young chubby woman that said  on the telly she only uses lard when it come to Yorkshire puds, I’ve scoured the internet but to no avail. She was on channel 4 about 2 weeks ago and had a black beehive.

So I made my toad in the hole using Nigel Slater’s Yorkshire pudding recipe which is shown below. I’ve tried a few recipes now and a lot of them seem to come out to stodgy I think due to the higher egg content. I’m blaming this stodginess problem solely on the fault of the other recipes and not my wildly varying cooking skills.

Nigel Slater’s Yorkshire Pudding Batter

2 Eggs

125g Plain flour

300ml of milk

Salt and pepper

Anyway I put way more lard than is healthy in the tin (approx 1.5cm deep when melted) and hey presto it was bloody lovely. I thought it was slightly crispier than Yorkshire puddings done in oil, but the main difference was the flavour. It had a deeper meatier flavour than oil and left me feeling like it was really bad for my heart, which on a cold winter’s night I think is a good thing.

Here’s my attempt at some little individual toads in there holes, with a few sprigs of rosemary and some crushed garlic (Controversial).Apologies for the cheap Richmond sausages and the fact that they look like a mans genitals, but my girlfriend maintains she doesn’t like posh sausages and it was the only way I could get her to eat toad in the hole.

So there you have it lard makes the world go round, along with Crude oil and cheap 3^rd world labour.