Daring Bakers' Steak and Mushroom Pudding

The April 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Esther of The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet.

Whoopsies, i'm a day late! The thing is, i was sooo close to skipping this challenge after i realized a traditional British pudding isn't really a pudding. A British pudding is"any dish cooked in a pudding bowl or pudding cloth normally steamed, boiled but sometimes baked". The steaming part dissapointed me a little since i really wanted to use the oven after such a long cooking-break. It wasn't until the posting day (yesterday) that i decided to maintain my 7 month DB streak and skipped a day of school to complete the challenge (FYI: i'm not a bad student, we're allowed to skip one day out of our 3 week dermatology course!).

The "Steak and Kidney pudding" recipe Esther posted on the forum caught my eye so i went that direction and made a Steak and Mushroom pudding since kidneys aren't easy to find here. I used butter instead of suet and made the pastry with a food processor. And because i used a food processor for my dough, my mind automatically switched to "pie crust" mode and i forgot to add baking powder to the mix, DANG IT! I should've paid more attention to the instructions... Esther even kindly reminded us to find substitutions for self-raising flour but i was dumb enough to miss it. Ah well, lesson learned!

But despite that HUGE mistake, i was thrilled to find out that my pudding still flipped out to be a perfectly unscathed dome. The best part was when the juices from the beer and beefspilled out at the first cut. Oh, if only i had recorded it... it would be one of those videos i'd play over and over again on my bad days =D. I had to peel off the entire suet crust since it was inedible without the effects of baking powder, but JLo and I still enjoyed a wonderful meal of steak and mushroom filling that night. Thanks, Esther, for hosting such an interesting challenge this month!

Steak and Mushroom Pudding

from wonderhowto.com

INGREDIENTS:

• For the STEAK FILLING:
• 450-500 g casserole beef, diced
• 1 onion, peeled and chopped
• 1 tablespoon fresh thyme
• 200-250 g button mushrooms
• 2 tablespoons plain flour
• Salt and pepper, to taste
• 150 ml Guinness beer
• Worcestershire sauce
  
  
• For the SUET PASTRY:
• 250 g self raising flour for pastry (If you cannot find self-raising flour, use a combination of all-purpose flour and baking powder.)
• 175 g shredded suet or suet substitute (i.e. vegetable suet, crisco, lard, butter)
• 150 ml water for pastry (only an estimate)

DIRECTIONS:

1. For the Steak filling: Add everything to a bowl and mix this all up so meat gets coated with the flour [picture 1].
2. For the Suet pastry: add flour and and suet into bowl, adding salt and pepper [picture 2].
3. Add the water, a tablespoonful at a time, as you mix the ingredients together [picture 3].
4. Make up the pastry to firm an elastic dough that leaves the bowl clean. Don’t over handle the pastry or it will be too hard.
5. Now roll this out on the work surface, lifting and turning it so it doesn't stick to the surface. Cut out a quarter of the dough to use for this lid [picture 4].
6. Place the rest into the bowl, pressing it to seal it against the sides of the bowl and bottom and top [picture 5].
7. Now put filling inside the pie [picture 6]. Add worcestershire sauce to guinness and pour over the top [picture 7].
8. Roll the final piece of pastry out into a circle big enough to cover the top of the basin, dampen the edges and pinch the edges together to seal [picture 8].
9. Seal well and cover with a double sheet of foil – pleated in the centre to allow room for expansion while cooking. Secure with string, and place it in a steamer over boiling water.
10. Steam for 3 - 5 hours, you may need to add more boiling water halfway through or possibly more often [picture 9].
11. One way to tell that it is cooked is when the pastry changes colour and goes from white to a sort of light golden brown.

Steak and Mushroom Pudding