How to Make Pudding Pastry

There's nothing like a steaming hot pudding on a cold day to bring the colour back to your cheeks and give you that nice full feeling around the waistline.

The British Are The World's Pudding Masters
The British are surely the world's pudding masters. A pudding in Canada is usually a light dessert made with milk, but in Britain there are more varieties of pudding than you can shake a wooden spoon at.

The secret of a truly great British pudding is in the pastry. Pudding pastry is a heavy mix of flour and suet. You can substitute suet with other kinds of fat (e.g. butter or lard) but you won't get the authentic flavour of a good traditional British pud.

Blighty's Britfood Tips wrote about suet recently in our post "How to Use Atora Suet". Today we'll discuss a recipe using Atora suet. Unfortunately, regular Atora beef suet isn't allowed to enter Canada so we'll be using Atora Light Vegetable Suet instead. But look on the bright side, Atora Light Vegetable Suet tastes every bit as good as traditional beef suet yet it contains 25% less fat.

Suet Pastry For Steamed and Boiled Puddings
Ingredients:

• 250g McDougall's plain flour (use All Purpose Flour if you can't find McDougalls)
• 125g Atora Light Vegetable Suet
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 pinch of salt

Preparation:

• Mix the flour and suet together in a large bowl
• Add the baking powder and salt and mix again
• Add sufficient cold water to turn the dry ingredients into a stiff ball of dough
• For desserts (e.g. Spotted Dick, Treacle Pudding) keep the dough in a ball and add whatever other ingredients the recipe calls for.
  
• For filled meat puddings, knead and roll the dough on a floured board.

Caution: never prepare suet pastry in advance, especially if you plan to store it in the refrigerator, you should always use it immediately and keep it at room temperature. Make it right and good traditional suet pastry will make your puddings memorable!

Footnote: Blighty's British Recipes mailing list subscribers recently received a recipe for Steak & Kidney Pudding using this pastry. Steak & Kidney puddings are a staple for many British people, especially in the northwest of England, but are nearly impossible to get in Canada.