Toad in the Hole : Lower Carb Recipe

I have fond memories of eating my dear Mum's lovely Toad in the Hole, it was a real family favourite, and we often enjoyed it for Saturday lunch!

If you are interested in food and it's History let me tell you, that the original 'hole' dish was created no earlier than the first half of the 18th Century, when batter puddings first became popular. The earliest 'in the hole' dishes make no reference to toads or frogs! In a 1747 book The Art of Cookery by Hannah Glasse there is a recipe for 'Pigeon in the hole' ... then in a diary entry of Thomas Turner in 1757 he mentions a dinner of 'sausages baked in a batter pudding'. It wasn't until 1787 that the first recorded Toad in the Hole was mentioned in the Oxford English Dictionary!

As time went by however, toad in the hole hopped its way into the museum of Treasured British Dishes, enjoyed by all classes, and celebrated as a national dish. Food shortages during and after the war meant that for a while you were more likely to find a toad made of spam than sausage-meat, but eventually the trusty banger (sausage) emerged as the go-to star of the dish.
These days, old toady is even good enough for the royal baby's Auntie, Pippa Middleton, who featured it in her tome Celebrate. Though, admittedly, she does add Parma ham.

This lower carb version of the recipe I'm sharing uses a mix of almond flour and coconut flour.

Ingredients:
Serves Four
75g coconut oil
olive oil
8 strips of streaky bacon
8 pork or chicken sausages (lowest carb variety)
375ml milk
80ml buttermilk
4 eggs
5ml Dijon mustard
3/4 cup almond flour
1 cup coconut four
2.5ml fine salt
250ml sour cream, to serve
watercress / green salad, to serve

Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 200°C  400°F  Gas Mark 6
2. Heat a pan over medium heat and add a splash of olive oil. Wrap a piece of bacon around each sausage and fry it for 2-3 minutes each until browned all over.
3. Add the coconut oil to a large baking dish and place it in the oven for 10 minutes until warm and melted. Whisk the rest of the ingredients together and carefully pour it into the warm oven dish with the coconut oil. Place the sausages on top. Lightly push them into the batter to submerge slightly. Bake for 15 minutes.
4. Reduce the oven’s temperature to 180°C and continue cooking the dish for another 10-15 minutes until cooked through. Serve each portion with a dollop of sour cream and some watercress /green salad on the side.

Tip:
Serve it with a smooth onion gravy that can be made by gently sautéing 1 large onion (200g) in 30ml butter and 5ml xylitol granules over a very low heat for 30 minutes until soft and caramelized. Add 2 cups of beef stock. Allow it to bubble away over medium heat for 10 minutes. Purée it until fine and season it to taste.

For help with measurement conversion please see here
http://startcooking.com/measurement-and-conversion-charts

From an original recipe idea here
http://www.food24.com/recipes-and-menus/low-carb-recipes/banting-toad-in-the-hole-20150525

You can read more about the history of Toad in the Hole here
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/10185830/Potted-histories-toad-in-the-hole.html

Enjoy ...

All the best Jan

Sometimes ... it's good to bump up a recipe

If you are into low carb and getting a little fed up with the Christmas/New Year Chicken or Turkey, you could try a low carb version of 'Toad in the Hole'

You will find the recipe above ...

What is also quite interesting (well I thought so) is the History of Toad in the Hole ...

"Britain abounds with bizarrely-named dishes – from bubble and squeak to jam roly poly, via spotted dick and stargazey pie. The king of them all is toad in the hole, a homely dish of sausages cooked in batter that has perplexed etymologists almost since it first started appearing on our tables over 200 years ago.

The most common explanation for the name is that the sight of the bangers poking through the rich batter somehow resembles frogs peering out from a crevice – though generations of confused schoolchildren, faced with the unsavoury prospect of amphibian for lunch, would be no doubt be quick to disagree. Other, more fanciful theories include the idea that the dish was invented in Alnmouth, Northumberland, to mark a chuckle-inducing golf tournament where a toad pushed his head up from the 18th hole and dislodged the star player’s ball. No doubt a fine story for Alnmouth's tourism chiefs, but unfortunately, when it comes to accuracy, as wobbly as undercooked batter.

What we do know is that the dish was probably created no earlier than the first half of the 18th century, when batter puddings first became popular. The earliest “in the hole” dishes make no mention of our froggy friend: in her 1747 book The Art of Cookery Hannah Glasse includes only a recipe for “pigeon in a hole”. The Oxford English Dictionary's first recorded example of the phrase "toad in the hole" isn't until 1787, though references to a dish that sounds rather like it can be found far earlier - in a diary entry for 1757, for example, the Georgian shopkeeper Thomas Turner notes a dinner of "sausages baked in a batter pudding".

Turner’s bangers are actually rather unusual for the time, as most early recipes for toad in the hole call for any meat that was available, most often beef. Alexis Soyer’s The Modern Housewife (1850) suggests using “any remains of cooked beef, veal, mutton, pork, roasted or boiled, salt or fresh, or game and fowl”, while a few years later Queen Victoria's cook Charles Elme Francatelli recommends buying the cheapest meat available – adding, rather unappetisingly, that cooks should check if they needed to “pare away some tainted part, or perhaps a fly-blow, as this… would tend to impart a bad taste to the whole, and spoil the dish”. (Presumably, he wouldn't have skimped so much for the monarch.)

The thrifty nature of “toad in a hole”, as it was more commonly known back then, made the dish a perfect choice for struggling labourers, or the penny-pinching middle classes. The more affluent, however, could be rather sniffy about its charms. Writing in 1797, the novelist Fanny Burney mentions disapprovingly the trend for “putting a noble sirloin of beef into a poor paltry batter-pudding”, while the dish is described in several places as “vulgar”. In her excellent blog Homo Gastronomicus, India Mandelkern ties distrust of the meal to the social anxieties of 18th century England, where homegrown roast beef was seen as a proud symbol of the country’s identity and prosperity: “If toad-in-a-hole was admitted to the British culinary repertoire, how would anyone know what the jolly roast beef of old England tasted like?”

Words above, and more to read, taken from here

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/10185830/Potted-histories-toad-in-the-hole.html

All the best Jan

Jan1 wrote:

I have fond memories of eating my dear Mum's lovely Toad in the Hole, it was a real family favourite, and we often enjoyed it for Saturday lunch!

If you are interested in food and it's History let me tell you, that the original 'hole' dish was created no earlier than the first half of the 18th Century, when batter puddings first became popular. The earliest 'in the hole' dishes make no reference to toads or frogs! In a 1747 book The Art of Cookery by Hannah Glasse there is a recipe for 'Pigeon in the hole' ... then in a diary entry of Thomas Turner in 1757 he mentions a dinner of 'sausages baked in a batter pudding'. It wasn't until 1787 that the first recorded Toad in the Hole was mentioned in the Oxford English Dictionary!

As time went by however, toad in the hole hopped its way into the museum of Treasured British Dishes, enjoyed by all classes, and celebrated as a national dish. Food shortages during and after the war meant that for a while you were more likely to find a toad made of spam than sausage-meat, but eventually the trusty banger (sausage) emerged as the go-to star of the dish.
These days, old toady is even good enough for the royal baby's Auntie, Pippa Middleton, who featured it in her tome Celebrate. Though, admittedly, she does add Parma ham.

This lower carb version of the recipe I'm sharing uses a mix of almond flour and coconut flour.

Ingredients:
Serves Four
75g coconut oil
olive oil
8 strips of streaky bacon
8 pork or chicken sausages (lowest carb variety)
375ml milk
80ml buttermilk
4 eggs
5ml Dijon mustard
3/4 cup almond flour
1 cup coconut four
2.5ml fine salt
250ml sour cream, to serve
watercress / green salad, to serve

Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 200°C  400°F  Gas Mark 6
2. Heat a pan over medium heat and add a splash of olive oil. Wrap a piece of bacon around each sausage and fry it for 2-3 minutes each until browned all over.
3. Add the coconut oil to a large baking dish and place it in the oven for 10 minutes until warm and melted. Whisk the rest of the ingredients together and carefully pour it into the warm oven dish with the coconut oil. Place the sausages on top. Lightly push them into the batter to submerge slightly. Bake for 15 minutes.
4. Reduce the oven’s temperature to 180°C and continue cooking the dish for another 10-15 minutes until cooked through. Serve each portion with a dollop of sour cream and some watercress /green salad on the side.

Tip:
Serve it with a smooth onion gravy that can be made by gently sautéing 1 large onion (200g) in 30ml butter and 5ml xylitol granules over a very low heat for 30 minutes until soft and caramelized. Add 2 cups of beef stock. Allow it to bubble away over medium heat for 10 minutes. Purée it until fine and season it to taste.

For help with measurement conversion please see here
http://startcooking.com/measurement-and-conversion-charts

From an original recipe idea here
http://www.food24.com/recipes-and-menus/low-carb-recipes/banting-toad-in-the-hole-20150525

You can read more about the history of Toad in the Hole here
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/10185830/Potted-histories-toad-in-the-hole.html

Enjoy ...

All the best Jan

Makes a great December meal

All the best Jan

Funny, this I don't recall from my childhood. Bubble and squeak and bangers and mash yes. We had a Victorian gadget that squeezed a whole potato through a mesh of small holes to produce the mash. I was never that fond of commercial sausages but they are something that has improved out of sight in recent decades, every butcher and farm shop has their specialities.