Well, uh, if you’ll excuse me now, Sire, uh, I better find a place to keep this little froggy. Can’t have him hopping around loose. Oh, I should say not. For one thing, he eats all the popovers.

Well, welcome everyone. Today, we’re going to do something super fun, which is we’re going to make popovers. This is a recipe that I developed for a friend of mine. It’s super easy, but it makes really great popovers. [music] And as an extra bonus, we’re going to cook it in this fantastic Rational iCombi oven. This oven costs about the same amount as a high-end regular home kitchen oven, but it is so, so, so much better in so many ways. So, I’m not going to get really too into it today. I’ll do future videos showing this oven and some of the stuff that it does. But anyway, we’ll be making the popovers in it so you can see a little bit of of what it does. So, to begin with, the ingredients for this recipe are 160 g of AP flour that has been sifted, 320 g of regular whole milk, 3 and a half percent milk, four eggs, 20 g of first butter, just any regular grocery store butter is fine, 20 g of second butter. The first butter was actually will go into the popovers. And then the second butter is going to be used for greasing the tins right before we put it in. And then I’ve got four grams of salt as well. So that’s it. The key to success to really having good popovers that rise really well in this recipe is the sifting of the flour is important. It’s mixing everything in a homogeneous way and letting the flour fully hydrate and letting everything really set and mix together. So, the way that we do that is again we sift the flour and then it’s really important to temper your milk and your eggs and have your butter be melted and around room temperature to 120°F. Anywhere in that range actually for any of these ingredients that range is just fine. You can use any kind of large bowl that you’ve got. I have these hotel pans, so I’m I’m just using this. I filled this with hot water right out of the tap. And hot water at at your home is probably around 120°F. And that is perfectly fine. That’s not going to cook the eggs. Eggs need to be cooked to around 140°F. Some proteins coagulate a little bit lower than that, but basically 140°F and above. So, tap water, put your eggs right in that. It’s never going to cook them. That, by the way, is a great trick, which I will tell you about another day for making poached eggs, too.

I do that first and then I gather the rest of my ingredients. And by the time I’m all ready, this is all perfect temperature to start my recipe. For the butter, it needs to be melted. And you can do that a couple ways. You can try putting in your microwave, but a lot of microwaves will cause the butter to explode. So, you have to be really careful. And if you do want to try in your microwave, I would do it in short bursts and make sure your butter is covered or you can have a huge mess in your microwave. So, I like to do it with a torch because first of all, torches are just fun. But, you do have to be careful not to overheat one little area. It can kind of crackle a little bit. I can show you that.

That’s not going to hurt anything. Be careful. It’s probably hot if you’re using a torch. and just kind of stir it around. All right, the next step is you want to crack your eggs into… I like to use this four cup measuring cup because it’s the perfect size. It’s got a little spout which makes it easy to pour your batter into the tins when you’re ready to do that. And then I just use a little whisk. If you want to make this a little faster and you have an immersion blender, you can use that as well.

And then we’re going to put our salt directly into the eggs and start mixing this together.

When you first start whipping the eggs, they’re going to be kind of clumpy, you know, the egg whites in particular. And you want to mix them completely until they’re like water. And you’ll see that in just a second.

So you can see they’re already a lot thinner.

[music]

All right. So now you can see it’s just super watery. There’s no clumping of the eggs. They’re just very liquidy. So that’s what you’re after. Next, I’m going to thread in the milk. So, I’m just going to pour this in in a little stream while I’m whisking to integrate it really nicely.

And then last is the butter. Same thing with the flour. You want to do this about a quarter of your flour at a time so it’s not clumping too much when you’re mixing. It just makes it a little bit easier. And this being warm will also allow the flour to integrate a little bit more easily.

Now, I know that you guys are all dying for popovers, but it’s super important that you let this hydrate for at least 20 minutes. If you want, you can even make it the day before, get it really nicely mixed, and then cover it and put in your fridge overnight, and then take it out the next day, and it’ll work great. Some people prefer to do that. In my testing, hydrating it for 20 minutes and overnight, you can’t see any difference. All right, so this is nice and mixed. And now I’m going to just clean up stuff a little bit and wait for 20 minutes. And then I will come back and we’ll finish the recipe.

All right. So, it’s been about 15 minutes. We got about 5 minutes left for this to sit. But I just want to talk about the baking process and the difference between how you’ll cook this if you have a conventional oven or a convection oven or if you are lucky enough to have a Rational iCombi oven and how this can be programmed to make the popovers. So, in a conventional oven, you want to heat your oven to about 450 degrees Fahrenheit. And you want to heat it, in all cases, you want to heat it with your popover tin in the oven so that when you’re pouring your batter in, it’s super hot and then it will start to rise immediately. If you’ve got a convection oven, then I would set it to about 425 Fahrenheit. And on the iCombi, what I’ve done is I actually created a program already. So, it starts by preheating the oven, which in this oven is super fast. It takes about 5 minutes. And then I have a brush step, which is a step that allows me to open the oven, grease my tins, put the batter in, and then get it back in the oven. And then when I close the door, it’ll automatically start the next step, which is the combi mode. So, for the first 15 minutes, it’s going to do 415° Fahrenheit at 30% humidity, and then it’ll automatically go into the next step, which lowers the temperature down to 325 and takes away the humidity. So, it’s this is a hot air step with 0% humidity. It will cook that for 15 minutes and then it will be done and it’ll be perfect. If you’ve got a regular home oven, if it’s a conventional oven, after 15 minutes at 450 degrees, you’re going to lower it 100° to 350 and cook at the last 15 minutes at that temperature. If you’ve got a convection oven, then you’re going to go from 425 down to 325 and cook it for the last 15 minutes at that temperature. So, they’re all pretty much going to be the same. Convection ovens are a lot more efficient and that’s why if you’re using a conventional oven, you want to have it be a little bit hotter to make up for that loss of efficiency. So, first thing I want to do is put my tin in. And I’m putting on this sheet pan just so it’s a little easier to get this in and out.

And then I’m going to choose my recipe. I favorited my recipe so a little easier for me to find because there are hundreds of recipes built into this oven. So, this is it right here. Popovers. I’m going to choose that. It’s a preheating step. And in a second, it will tell me to close the door, which it just did. And then you’ll see the little progress bar at the bottom. In this oven, it takes about 5 minutes to fully preheat. And then it will tell me when it’s time to open it up, pull out my tin, butter it, put my batter in, and then stick it back in the oven. And then the rest will be all automatic after that. [music]

All right. So now it’s done. Open this up.

Pull this out.

So, it’s telling me to load now, which I’ll do in just a minute. So, I’m going to grease all my tins.

Ever made Yorkshire pudding? It’s a similar recipe, but it it traditionally uses lard and it’s put in ahead of time and heated up in the oven. And the batters is slightly different, but it’s pretty similar. All right, so these all look pretty good.

And give this one last little stir.

I’m filling these up about 3/4 of the way full. All right, that is all. And then this will go back in the oven.

So there they are. This is by friend, Tim.

Tim: “They’re really light. I like this. There’s only air inside. Really good crunch. They’re beautiful.”

Michael” With a little butter and jam?”

Tim: “Yeah. Or just plain. I like them plain!”

Michael: All right, thank you, Tim… for being the inspiration for this. And then I will post in the notes a dairy-free recipe and also a gluten-free recipe.

Tim: “The crunch is amazing.”

Michael: And that is all. And we’ll watch it cook.

[music]