First I did a bit of reading. The biggest pieces of advise I got from this is that you need a very thin baking tin. Don't use a casserole dish or pyrex dishes. The oil needs to be super hot and thicker dishes make this more difficult. Second you CANNOT use olive oil. You can use fat (duck, veggie, lard, ect) or vegetable or sunflower oil. Third don't over do the oil. That was my downfall. Since I'm not an old pro at making this, I used Jamie Oliver's recipe. It said use just under 1/2 in of oil in the bottom of the pan and in my cake pan I used it was most definitely too much. Next time I going with 3 tbsp of lard/fat that I saw in some other recipes.
Ok here's what you need:
-Sausages- JO said 8. I used 6 because that's how many came in the package I purchased. I used pork but I've had it made with veggie and I'm thinking of using chicken next.
-Butter- I'd say about 1/2 a stick
-Yorkshire pudding batter:
-285 ml milk
-115 g plain flour
-3 eggs
-pinch of salt
With this dinner I suggest garlic mashed potatoes and caramelized red onions (My take on the traditional onion gravy).
The best advise I remember from my friend Jess during a small lesson on this dish last spring was to make the batter first. It needs to rest. The longer it rests the better it will be. Correct ratios are also extremely important so I followed Jamie's instructions to a tea. Mix the milk, flour, and egg together and let rest. (Apparently once you're a real pro, you can mix this without measuring..)
While sausages used for Toad in the Hole are easily found in England (maybe there are just less choices), there seemed to be WAY more options available at my little grocery store in the midwest. I finally decided on a green pepper and onion pork sausage.
See it's still resting...
Now comes a very important step. Find your thinnest baking pan. I used this thin tin cake pan. Add your fat. As I said before this is WAY too much oil. Now crank your oven up to 475 f. Seriously 475 f. This oil needs to be as hot as possible. Once the oven is preheated pop the pan with just the oil in for about 10 minutes.
After the oil is heated up, CAREFULLY pop in the sausages as it might cause the oil to bubble and pop. Once the sausages brown up on one side use a pair of tongs and carefully flip the sausages. Give them a few minutes to cook and to let the oil heat back up.
Since I had a few minutes I started the onions and potatoes. To caramelize onions cook with butter over low until they bypass translucent to a golden-y brown. Taking a note from Jess, I added a splash of sugar towards the end.
Now you're ready to add the batter to the sausages. I wouldn't suggest removing the tray from the oven like I did (I wanted the photo op). Simply slide the rack out and pour in batter as fast a possible. If done correctly it should almost immediately rise. The biggest thing is to keep the oil hot. AKA keep the baking tin in the oven as much as possible.
As soon as I poured the batter in I knew something was wrong... I popped it back in the oven anyway. Here's another really important note. The batter needs about 20 minutes to rise and you need to keep the oven closed for this WHOLE time. That means as much as you want to peek in and check on it, you need to make do with what you can see through the window with the oven light. This was seriously hard on me but once it started to rise I started to victory dance.
Meanwhile this was happening on the stove top.
So while this did work out (mostly) the middle of the pan didn't rise because of the excess oil. Also this stuck to the pan (apparently another sign it turn out quite right). I ended up pouring the excess oil out of the pan and baking for another 10 or so minutes in hope it would rise a bit more.. It didn't really work, but it was still mightily tasty!
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