Popovers from Heidi Swanson's Near and Far cookbook. Secret bonus inside the batter...freshly cracked black pepper and sesame seeds!
Popovers, for me, have an allure similar to that of soufflés, or the fireworks show on the 4th of July, or Michael Jackson doing The Moonwalk. A good amount of work, much anticipation, and maybe even the planets, all come together so that we may experience this short-lived but very glorious moment of sensory pleasure. The secret about popovers that I hesitate to reveal is that, unlike the Moonwalk, they don’t take hours of technically rigorous training to master. Popovers are actually pretty easy to make. Whisk up a bunch of eggs, add some warm milk, mix in the dry ingredients, pour the batter into a pre-greased pre-heated pan, put it all in the oven, and wait. The most difficult part of making them is probably denying the urge to open the oven door to check the height of the slowly rising beauties.
Once ready, they are a blank slate, well a steaming, egg-y, temptingly hollow blank slate, screaming to be filled with Jam! or Honey! or Butter! I can never seem to remember to wait for them to cool down before ripping open one of those golden crusted steam chambers and I inevitably end up burning my mouth or fingers, or on those days when I’ve completely forgotten I’m an adult, both.
But, as much as I love them, I’ve always had a twinge of guilt making popovers. Do they have any redeeming nutritional qualities on their own? Wait, stop! Do not even attempt to answer that question. No one wants to know the answer to that. Ear muffs everyone! But when I read Heidi’s recipe for Popovers I knew she had wiped away my last line of defense, I’d no longer be able to resist making these regularly. She had deftly resolved my only moral qualm against popovers by adding a sprinkling of millet and some whole-wheat pastry flour. Let the games begin.
POPOVERS
— adapted from Near and Far: Recipes Inspired by Home and Travel by Heidi Swanson (Ten Speed Press, 2015)
INGREDIENTS
2 cups whole milk
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 cups whole wheat pastry flour or all-purpose flour
1 1/4 teaspoons fine-grain sea salt
3/4 teaspoon non-aluminum baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
5 eggs, at room temperature
1/4 cup raw millet or sesame seeds
METHOD (ABRIDGED)
Preheating the oven to 425 degrees, with a rack in the low center. Butter your pans and place on a rimmed baking sheet. Feel free to use muffin tins if you do not have popover pans or timbales.
Warm the milk and butter until it is warm but not hotter than 115 degrees. Remove from heat and set a side. Sift the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt) together and stir in the black pepper.
Using an electric mixer whisk the eggs on medium high speed for several minutes. Slow the speed and pour in the milk mixture. Slowly add the flour mixture and beat for an additional minute. If your bowl does not have a pouring spout transfer to a pitcher.
Preheat the buttered popover pans in the oven for a few minutes, not more than 3, and then remove from the oven. Be careful not to let heat escape from the oven when you are taking these in and out. Fill each 2/3 of the way full with the batter and sprinkle with the millet or sesame seeds. Put the filled pans back in the oven and turn down the heat to 400 degrees. Bake for 30-45 minutes, depending on your oven.
The trick here is not to open the oven while the popovers are baking. Peek through the window if you can and let them bake for as long as you can stand it. The goal is golden crusts that have risen about 2 inches out of the pans.
Notes from Leslie
I have one popover pan with 6 wells. This recipe would easily fill 2 of these pans. I ended up using 4 additional ramekins to make use of the extra batter.
Don’t be a dingbat like me and put your buttered pan in the oven for 10 minutes instead of the prescribed 3. I’ll kill the suspense for you. The butter burns and you have to start over. Not fun.
Her recipe calls for a topping of a few tablespoons millet or sesame seeds, offering a welcomed textural garnish. Given that my constitution is 50% curiosity, I therefore needed to know what both options tasted like, so I did a 50-50 split. Half the batch got sesame, half millet.
While it doesn’t sound like a lot, 3 TBSP of seeds went pretty far, and in some cases seemed to weigh down the top of the popover. Next time I will try a smaller quantity of toppings to see if I can get more of that coveted height.
At 30 minutes mine were very, very brown. About a smidge from burnt. Next time I’ll check in at 25 minutes and tomorrow I’ll be checking my oven’s temperature gauge.
Diving into this my first-ever savory popover I was instantly struck with visions of future batches… Everything Popovers with Onion, Garlic, Sesame, and Poppy Seeds. Toad in the Hole Popovers with a tear of thick country ham bobbing about. A few shreds of Asiago or Gruyere flecked with fresh Rosemary.