Ellie’s Christmas Pudding Chronicles: Steaming the Pudding

Welcome back to my Christmas Pudding Chronicles. This is a festive series in which I, an outsider to the British tradition of making fig pudding, try to make it. I hope you enjoy my reflections on this experience and maybe even be inspired to join in. Making Christmas pudding traditionally starts five Sundays before Christmas, but if you decide to join in later, that’s totally fine. If you wish, you can steam this thing and set it on fire the same day. (If you read last week’s post about soaking fruit, it will make sense, I swear.) Otherwise, you’ll be “baking the cake” with me once a week with a dose of brandy until the big day. But before I get ahead of myself, today is important. It’s a hot day.

Christmas pudding is a steamed cake and, as I said, it is made five Sundays before Christmas. It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving, so if you start this around this time, you’re right on time. Also called Stir Sunday, this is the day you mix all the ingredients and make wishes while you stir. You can put blank tokens in the dough for a lucky person to find on Christmas Day, or you can do without them. I don’t like surprises in food, so I abstained. Then you will cook the pie for a couple of hours, five. I know it will take a while, but pick a day when you spend most of your time near the kitchen and the time will fly by.

Ingredients and Considerations

If you didn’t already know, I’m using Nigella Lawson’s recipe as a guide. I made a couple of minor changes here and there, which I’ll talk about in a second.

Here are the ingredients I used:

• Soaked fruits from week 1 (minus 50 grams, read note below)

• 50 grams candied orange peel , chopped

• 150 grams (¾ cup packed) dark brown sugar

• 100 grams all-purpose flour (about 1 cup minus one tablespoon flour)

• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

• ¼ teaspoon ground cloves

• 1 teaspoon baking powder

• ¼ teaspoon salt

• 125 grams fresh breadcrumbs

• 75 grams beef tallow (substitutes available below)

• 75 grams butter, frozen and grated

• 3 eggs

• Zest of one lemon

• 1 small apple, grated

• 2 teaspoons honey

This Christmas pudding experience is a small window into how I work with recipes in general. I use Nigella’s recipe, but I also study a lot of other recipes to compare the tools they use, how they wrap the pudding for steaming, and what ingredients they mirror, omit, or add. If necessary I use all these tidbits and figure out what I want to put in my pudding.

The first change I made was to the dried fruits. Last week I wrote about preparing fruit for soaking and did it almost exactly according to the recipe. However, a few days later I was looking through other recipes and saw that some people like to add dried candied orange peel. I really love candied orange zest. So instead of feeling like I missed out on trying citrus, I bought some candied fruit, dammit. This morning I scooped out 50 grams of soaked fruit and replaced it by weight with freshly purchased orange peel. This was my choice, but you can follow the recipe. I think the point is that you can use other things. Use dried cranberries, cherries or apricots. Some people add nuts to the pudding. If you have about four cups of dried, chopped fruit and maybe some nuts, Bob is your uncle. (Really? No? It’s okay.)

Apart from some quick regional changes (the dark brown sugar is very similar to the muscovado sugar in Nigella’s recipe), I only had to deal with fresh breadcrumbs and beef tallow. I don’t hear the term “fresh breadcrumbs” often, but it’s simply making your own breadcrumbs rather than buying them in a jar. I used about five and a half slices of regular sandwich bread – soft and light – dried them, and then pulsed them in the food processor until crumbly. You can leave the bread to dry overnight or dry it in the oven instead.

Then there was lard. This is food from a different region, so some foods are more available in different places. Nigella’s recipe, like many others, uses ground beef fat. Beef tallow is the hard fat found around the kidneys of cows. Although this ingredient may be readily available in the UK, it is not a popular cooking or baking fat in all parts of the United States. After looking online for where to buy shredded beef lard , I got confused about beef lard online and ended up accidentally ordering lard. Lard is fat obtained from beef fat.

Some recipes use lard, others use butter, and others still combine shredded butter and shortening. I decided to use half grated butter and half shortening. I’m hoping that I can still get the buttery bits from the grating of the hard fat and all the valuable meatiness that can be obtained from the fat. That being said, I think you can use whatever saturated fat you have on hand, and even better if you can grate it. I have to say, the fat is a little spicy. Not beef, but more fat. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either. Let’s see if the smell continues after five weeks. Keep this in mind when choosing fat.

How to make pudding

I had a lot of fun making this pudding. It’s like a cross between making a cake and making meatloaf. The best part is that in almost every recipe I’ve read, you can just mix all the ingredients together however you want, just stir them together. My baking habits led me to mix the dry ingredients first. I mixed the flour, spices, salt and baking powder and poured them into the bowl with the breadcrumbs. Then I added brown sugar to the fruit mixture. I took a large bowl and whisked together the eggs, grated Fuji apple, lemon zest and honey. I then added the fats to the egg mixture and stirred. I added the fruit mixture and stirred. I added the dry ingredients and mixed. With so many cakes and dishes to mix, fold, or whip up just because, I had a great time mixing it up because it felt like I couldn’t do anything wrong. I made a few wishes along the way (part of Sunday morning) and was ready to go.

Preparing the vessel and pot

I needed:

• 1 glass bowl for 6 cups

• 1 large saucepan (large enough to hold a bowl)

• 18 inches aluminum foil

• 16 inches parchment paper

• kitchen string

I greased a 6 cup glass bowl and cut a small circle of parchment paper to place in the bottom. I’ve read that this helps the pudding come out later, and the last thing I want to risk is my meatloaf sticking to the bowl. I cracked the mixture into an oiled glass bowl to squeeze out as much air as possible and smoothed the top. One blog mentioned running your finger along the edge to “seal” it, so I did that too. At least it made my pudding look neater. Then I covered it with another circle of parchment.

This is the slightly annoying part. You want to cover the pudding very well, but allow it to expand, creating steam inside. Since the pudding will be in a pan of boiling water for some time, there is a chance that condensation may get into the pudding if it is not sealed tightly. This will create a soft pudding. So, I learned how to make a cover out of parchment and foil with a fold in the middle to allow for expansion. Who knew I’d do it this year?

To do this, spread a sheet of foil. Place a sheet of parchment on top of it in the same direction. Trim the parchment so that it is about a half-inch smaller than the foil on all sides. Both materials should be larger than the top of the bowl by at least an inch all around, but it’s better to have extra length because we’ll trim it later.

Using your fingers on opposite sides, hook the center of the foil and parchment. Push it forward about an inch to overlap the bottom. Then press it into the crease.

Now you have a fold that allows steam to escape from the pudding without opening the seal. Turn the parchment paper side down and place it on the pudding bowl with the crease in the center. Press the foil tightly on all sides.

Use kitchen string to go around the edge of the bowl twice. Make sure it is tightened as tightly as possible without tearing anything. Tie the rope. Now you can go around the bowl and trim off all but an inch of overhanging foil and parchment. Tuck the foil in to keep the parchment in place and press it into the bowl to tidy it up. If you want, you can make a small “handle” out of the string, but this is not necessary. Simply thread kitchen string through the bowl, securing it to the string you used to seal the foil. Be careful not to break the main string. This may help later when you need to remove the hot bowl from the pan.

Steam it

To steam the pudding, you need to have something at the bottom to prevent the bowl from coming into direct contact with the heat source. This can be a steamer basket if you have a short one, but keep in mind that the lid must close tightly after adding the pudding. I didn’t have a short enough steamer basket, so I used a mason jar lid ring. Place the pudding on a steamer (or jar ring) and use a kettle to pour hot water into the pan. You want to add enough water so that it comes about an inch or halfway up the sides of the bowl. Make sure the waterline does not reach the foil lid.

The first thing I did was immediately pour water onto the foil lid. It was amazing. (Don’t do this.) Luckily, my lid was secure, so I wiped it off and then carefully added water to the pan. I covered it with a lid and turned on the heat. I turned the heat to medium and waited about five minutes until I heard the water boil. Then I turned the heat down to low. I just wanted to stew. As long as it’s smoking, we’re in good shape. I set the timer for five hours and continued with my day.

Keep in mind that you don’t want the pan to boil dry, so after an hour, open the lid and see if you need to add water. If you have a tight lid, you may only need to top it up once or twice. My lid was somehow loose. I could always see steam coming out of the edge. I kept the water kettle full and hot so I could top it up once an hour.

When the time was up, I turned off the heat and set the pudding out to cool on a wire rack. There is no good way to check if your pudding is ready. You should not open the top because it will be difficult to reseal if it takes longer. But I wasn’t worried. Honestly, if it doesn’t cook in five hours, there’s something wrong with this cake and more time isn’t going to fix it.

After cooling it for about 20 minutes, I cut the threads and removed the lid. It smelled like someone had just opened the door to the gingerbread bakery in my house. I’m telling you, it smelled like Christmas. Any doubts I had about the pudding looking like meatloaf, smelling like beef tallow and having to make a pleated outfit for his steaming debut were put to rest. I’m really excited for this pudding to work. I wrapped it in plastic wrap and placed it securely in the microwave. (Not to cook it. My microwave doubles as storage space sometimes. This is New York.) Now I just have to feed him brandy for a month and hope for the best. I’ll buy some good brandy and see how it goes next week.

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