The Popover Conspiracy

Everyone is wrong about the ingredients

What you’ll need:

• 4 eggs at room temperature

• 1 1/2 cup milk, warmed

• less than 1 1/2 cup sifted all purpose flour, maybe 1 3/8 cup

• 1/4 tsp salt

You’ll need a couple of popover pans, or failing that, a couple of cupcake or muffin pans. I use seasoned iron muffin pans. Do not use teflon coated pans. The teflon starts to wear off with use and the popovers start sticking to the pans. The pans should be preheated in a 450 degree oven. Beat the eggs, then pour the milk and salt into the beaten eggs and beat them all together. Pour the mixture into the sifted flour and mix them together gently. Don’t beat the liquid ingredients into the flour. Mix them together just until they are barely combined.

Take the preheated pans out of the oven and lightly spray them with PAM olive oil cooking spray. This will prevent the popovers from sticking to the pans. Pour the popover mix in, filling each cup about 3/4 of the way. Popovers sticking to the pan so that they are difficult to extract is an existential danger, and the PAM spray fixes this problem entirely. The pans should be hot enough so that the batter should sizzle a little as it pours in.

Put the pans in the oven and bake for 15 minutes at 450 degrees, then turn the heat down to 350 degrees and bake for about 20 minutes more. When they’re done, put lots of butter in them and wolf them down without pausing for breath.

The danger with popovers is that they don’t pop. With the recipe above, they always pop. The key item is using a little less flour than milk. Every recipe in the world says to use equal amounts of milk and flour. They vary in the relative level of milk/flour to eggs, but they all say to use equal amounts of milk to flour. This is the conspiracy that is causing so many failed popovers, and it has to stop.

Many recipes call for some melted butter to be added to the batter, but I find it doesn’t do anything and is a pain to prepare. And while we’re on it, the salt doesn’t seem to do anything either. I keep it in because I’ve always done it and it’s not hard to do.

Vegan Popovers

Between the eggs and the milk, not to mention the prodigious amounts of butter, popovers are not very healthy for either your body or the planet. Vegan popovers are the holy grail. I get excited just thinking about them. But try as I have, just substituting in almond milk for cow milk and JustEgg for chicken eggs has been miserably unsuccessful. I can get popovers to pop with almond milk substituted in for cow milk, but they don’t pop as well and don’t taste as good. Substituting for eggs hasn’t worked at all. Work will continue, but for now vegan popovers will remain an unfulfilled dream.