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 flour, maybe 1 1/4 cup

• 1/4 tsp salt

You’ll need a couple of popover pans, or failing that, a couple of cupcake or muffin pans. These should be buttered and put into a 450 degree oven until just before the butter burns. Beat the eggs, then pour the milk into the beaten eggs and beat them together. Pour the mixture into the sifted flour, add the salt, and beat them all together.

Sprinkle a little flour into the bottom of each cup of the tray and then pour the popover mix in, filling each cup about 3/4 of the way. This is an effort to get the popovers to stick to the sprinkled flour and not to the pan itself. For that matter, greasing the pans with butter in the first place is part of the same effort. Popovers sticking to the pan so that they are difficult to extract is an existential danger here. The pans should be hot enough so that the mix 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 add.

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.