Sunday Roast: Toad in the Hole and Roast Potatoes

A Traditional Sunday Roast: Toad in the Hole and Roast Potatoes

A very traditional English recipe which combines sausages (preferably high quality, hand-made using locally reared "happy" pigs from your neighbourhood butcher) and the world famous Yorkshire Pudding.

It makes an excellent centre piece for a Sunday Roast rather than the more usual meat/chicken. And it is always better with loads of home made gravy.

1. Put two roasting tins in your oven and turn it on to Gas Mark 6 or about 200'C or 400'F. The first tin needs to be large enough to hold all your spuds with room to move them around a bit and it should have about 1/8" of vegetable, olive oil (yummy but expensive) or beef/goose fat (yummy again but no good if your wife is vegetarian). The other roasting tin will hold the Toad-in-the-Hole so it needs to be big enough for your sausages with plenty of room around the edges. Again, it needs a liberal covering of oil or dripping.

2. Peel your potatoes and put them whole (or halved if very large spuds) into a large pan of cold salted water.

3. Bring the pan to the boil and par-boil your potatoes for about 8-10m maximum.

4. Whilst the potatoes are coming to the boil make the Yorkshire Pudding Batter. Add all the ingredients (flour, eggs, milk and salt) to a large bowl and whisk into a fairly thin batter consistency (I use am electric hand blender for this). Then leave to to stand for at least an hour.

5. Now you drain off the potato water, put the lid on the pan and give them a good shake to scuff up the edges (this helps to crisp them up in the oven and gives lots of nice crunchy bits) see photo. Now take the hot roasting tin out of the oven, put your potatoes in and turn them so they are all covered in oil. Put them in the oven. They will take about 1 1/2hrs at this temperature turning every half hour or so. Because my oven isn't that large, once they've had an hour and are nicely browned I put them on the lower shelf and move the Yorkshire' tin up to the top shelf. But you need to be careful about opening the oven door once the Yorkshire pudding is cooking well; if you are two aggressive with the door and cool the oven down too much your pudding will sink!

6. Whilst the spuds are cooking now cook your sausages in a pan or under the grill. This is really just to make sure the skins are nicely browned before they go into the oven so they look better when served. Then set aside.

7. About 40m before you want to eat, take the very hot Yorkshire tin out of the oven, add your sausages and then pour over the batter. It should sizzle (if it doesn't your oven ain't hot enough). Quickly put back in the oven and shut the door. You don't want to open it again until it is cooked if you can help it, or like a soufflé, it can collapse...

8. It should rise slowly on all sides and turn a wonderful golden to dark brown colour. Depending on your oven it should take about 30-40m to cook.

Once it is done, serve quickly and enjoy.

Today for our Sunday lunch I steamed some Carrots and Broccoli to have with it, made a vegetarian gravy and used a little of the Yorkshire pudding batter to make mini-puddings (popovers) for my vegetarian wife. It was delicious - according to the family of course ;-)