Is the Oven Actually On?? (Tesco Yorkshire puddings)

Member Name: Meggysmum

Product:	Tesco Yorkshire puddings
Date:	16/06/09 (87 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Less salt and fat than competitors

Disadvantages: Do not cook in 4 minutes or even 14 really!

I can make Yorkshire Puddings quite successfully from scratch. However my family like them with any roast meal (they very rarely get Beef!) and with my small oven I struggle to fit everything in. For this reason I often resort to using the quick-bake frozen variety of Yorkshire puddings. I normally buy Aunt Bessies but when a recent Tesco delivery came they were out of stock and they had substituted them with the Tesco Own variety. I have found many own brand goods to be fine so I accepted them and promptly put them in the freezer.

A week or so later whilst cooking on a Sunday I went to get my trusted Aunt Bessies and remembered that I had the Tesco ones instead. The plastic packaging was a nice bright red colour and had a tasty looking picture on the front of one of the puddings, golden brown and covered in gravy. I checked the cooking instructions, 4 minutes at Gas Mark 6. I swiftly put them on a tray and popped them in my oven.

I carried on laying the table etc and then started serving up the dinner. When I went to get the Yorkshires out of the oven (after a very generous 6 minutes or so) they were still looking very flat in the middle and a very pasty beige colour! I checked the oven temperature (and even checked that the flame hadn't gone out!) and increased it to 7 and put them back in. By now the rest of the meal was ready so I decided to let everyone start without the Yorkshires (cries of complaint from my Yorkie loving family!). After about another 6 minutes I checked on them again. This time I decided to serve them as the rest of the dinner was disappearing.

On serving the top rims were welldone but the bases were flat and doughy-really still not cooked. There was very little flavour and there was a distinct taste of uncooked flour about them. The family were not at all impressed and my daughter left some of hers which has never happened before!

I decided to look at the nutritional content of the puddings and compare them to the Aunt Bessies(AB). Here Tesco scored quite well, each pudding contains 46cal (AB 53cal) but only 1.5g Fat (AB 2.1g) of which 0.1g (AB 0.2g)was saturated. Tescos also only contained 0.1g salt as opposed to 0.3g in Aunt Bessies. Unfortunately it is probably the lack of fat and salt that makes them taste so boring!

The pack of 12 cost £1 which is about 30p cheaper than its rival. However I will not be buying these again. I found that they just did not want to cook and bore no resemblance to a light and airy pudding at all!

Summary: Make your own or buy another brand.