Many families have tried and true recipes for Christmas puddings that have been passed down through the generations. Over the past 60 years or so though, way too many of these recipes have been changed to adopt the “low fat is best” mentality - much to the detriment of the flavour and texture of those classic puddings our great grandmas used to make.
So today we’re talking about Suet! This delicious fat is the secret ingredient to a moist, flavoursome and light Christmas pudding.
How you may ask? Why can’t you just use butter? Suet has a higher melting point than butter which means the pudding is able to cook for longer before the suet melts. If you think about a steamed pudding cooking away, if you’re using butter it will melt as soon as the mixture gets warm and amalgamate with it.
With suet, it’s usually broken up into quite small pieces which spread throughout the mixture. The pudding is able to cook for a while and start to set before the suet slowly melts into the surrounding pudding, creating little pockets of air that make the pudding lighter.
Think butter = potentially greasy and heavy pudding, Suet = light, moist and delicious.
Does it make my pudding taste “beefy”? That’s a valid question but the answer is no. When you’re dealing with strong other flavours of fruit, brandy and zests the very mild suet flavour is non detectable.
When should you ideally make your Christmas puddings? The suet in a traditional pudding helps to keep it rich and moist so you can make it around 5 weeks before Christmas and leave it to mature in a cool, dry place.
So now is the time to start planning for your Christmas puddings. If you don’t have a traditional recipe that uses suet, the internet is a fantastic resource.
Here are a couple of recipes we’ve discovered that you can use your York Foods Grass Fed Beef Suet Drippings in - be sure to take some photos and put
them on our Facebook page!
