The Best Vegan Yorkshire Puddings (2024)

These vegan Yorkshire puddings are perfect and delicious with their golden, crispy crowns and an elusive ‘well’ ready to fill with gravy! A rewarding bake that is great served with a mushroom wellington and all the trimmings.

🌟 Why this recipe works

Practice makes perfect – we practiced and practiced until we got this vegan Yorkshire pudding recipe just right. Dan spent literally years trying different tins, ingredients and temperatures. We always want Yorkshire puddings with a vegan roast dinner, so it was a labour of love to create a decent vegan version – especially ones with the crispy outside and the hole in the middle. There are many factors at play to get them to rise nicely, but if you're as obsessed as we are, it's completely worth persevering for. Plus, we use a similar recipe for this vegan toad in the hole too.

Detailed notes and tips – this is by no means the most straight-forward recipe and there's no guarantee of the perfect vegan Yorkshire puddings first time. Different ingredients and ovens can lead to slightly different results, but what we can offer you is a comprehensive guide to making vegan Yorkshire puddings along with all the tips and tricks to help you succeed.

Great for lots of dietary requirements – this vegan Yorkshire pudding recipe is vegan, of course. That makes it suitable for dairy free and egg free diets. Gluten free? Don't worry, while the recipe calls for half-and-half regular flour and chickpea flour, you can use all chickpea flour and still get a delicious Yorkie.

🍽 Equipment

When making vegan Yorkshire puddings, there are some essential bits of kit needed to give you the best chances of success.

Muffin tin – Yorkshire pudding or popover tins don't cut it here. When making vegan Yorkshire puddings a metal muffin tin or cupcake tin is essential. The vegan Yorkshire pudding mixture doesn't cook exactly like a traditional one does, so the shape of the muffin tin is really important. And it has to be a metal muffin tin to distribute the heat evenly and to hold its shape while they cook. We've tried a silicone muffin mould and it doesn't work.

Whisk – it doesn't matter whether it's a hand whisk or an electric whisk. A whisk is important for mixing and helping to achieve a smooth batter.

Measuring equipment – kitchen scales along with cup and spoon measurers. When it comes to baking, nothing offers the accuracy that a good set of digital kitchen scales offer. This is needed to measure out the flours. And when it comes to measuring liquids and spices, we find cup and spoon measurers are best for consistency.

📋 Ingredient Tips

Yorkshire puddings traditionally contain a couple of animal-derived ingredients – milk and eggs. We've utilised a few less traditional ingredients to help us create a vegan Yorkshire pudding. The full ingredients list and measurements can be found in the recipe card below.

Chickpea flour – also known as gram or garbanzo flour. It's a gluten free flour that's made with dried chickpeas. When it comes to making vegan Yorkshire puddings, chickpea flour offers a few benefits:

It helps to create a slightly lighter batter that will rise better.

The yellow hue of the flour helps to produce a classic looking Yorkshire pudding, which would otherwise gain a slight yellow colour from the yolks of the eggs used. This recipe also calls for a little turmeric powder to enhance the colour further and produce truly golden vegan Yorkshire puddings. Chickpea flour is also great in a vegan omelette.

Aquafaba – this is the egg replacement in this recipe. It’s the water that beans or other pulses have been cooked in. You know, that kind of weird smelling liquid that most people pour down the drain when you open a tin of chickpeas? Aquafaba isn’t just found in tins of chickpeas, though most references to it mention chickpeas. We’ve successfully made this recipe using aquafaba from tins of kidney beans and butter beans, so if you’re making our famous vegan fish pie, keep the aquafaba from the tin!

Baking powder + apple cider vinegar – both of these ingredients work together to help the mixture rise in the oven. Baking powder needs a liquid and an acid to activate, which is where the apple cider vinegar comes in. Once activated, baking powder produces carbon dioxide which helps baked goods to rise and become fluffy.

Plain flour – or all-purpose flour, it's just the regular old kind of white flour. There's a simple reason why we don't use self-raising flour – we like the control of adding our own baking powder. Self-raising flour is just flour that's been mixed with baking powder. You can use it as an alternative, but we found better results when mixing the two ingredients separately.

🔪 Step-by-step instructions for vegan Yorkshire puddings

This is a step-by-step overview for making vegan Yorkshire puddings. The full recipe, along with measurements and detailed instructions can be found in the recipe card at the bottom of the page.

1. Preheat the oven to 220°c / 425°f. Sieve the dry ingredients into a mixing bowl and stir to combine.

2. Mix the aquafaba, water and apple cider vinegar in a large measuring jug.

3. Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry and whisk until smooth.

4. Let the mixture rest for at least 15 minutes.

5. Pour the oil into the wells of the muffin tin, allowing 1 tablespoon of oil per well. Place the tin in the oven until smoking hot – this should take around 10 minutes, but keep an eye on it.

6. Once the oil is hot, work quickly (but safely) and pour the batter mix into each well of the tin. Don't overfill them. Leave a gap of around 5mm from the top of each hole. Put the filled tin back into the oven as soon as possible and leave to bake for 15 minutes.

7. After 15 minutes, turn the oven temperature down to gas 190°c / 375°f and leave in for another 15 minutes.

8. Remove from the oven and allow them to rest for a further 30 minutes.

Use a spoon to carefully remove them from the tin. Great served with stuffed acorn squash and vegan roast potatoes for a roast dinner, and they're great for a Christmas roast too!

👩‍🍳 Expert Tips

Preheat the oven and the oil – turn the oven on when you start making the recipe and let it come fully up to temperature while you get the batter mix ready. It should be on gas 200°c / 425°f to start off with.

Then, while the batter mix rests, preheat the oil. It has to be smoking hot, so pour it into the muffin tin and get it into the pre-heated for at least 10 minutes.

Resting time – much like the preheating, there are two times when resting is essential in this vegan Yorkshire pudding recipe. First – rest the batter. You can transfer the batter once it's mixed into a jug so that it’s easier to pour later. Rest it for 10-15 minutes, but don't leave it any longer than that because the baking powder has a limited life on its effectiveness once activated.

Then be sure to rest the Yorkshire puddings once they've baked. The rest time helps the base of them to firm up, so leave them for 15-30 minutes before serving up.

Work fast but carefully – the faster you can pour the batter into the tin and get it back in the oven, the better your chance of success. Every minute the oil is out of the oven it's cooling down, especially once the batter is poured in, so be careful but try your best to get it back in the oven quickly.

What not to do

Don't overfill it – the amount of batter to pour into each well will come with practice, there should be a gap of about 5mm from the top of each one. Once you’ve made them a couple of times you should be able to tell by eye and have them in the oven within a minute.

Don't rush it – we know it’s tempting to rip one vegan Yorkshire pudding straight out and dunk it in gravy to toast your victory, but hold off. If you give them 15 minutes (or longer) to sit on the side, the middle of the pudding will continue to cook and, more importantly, set. In addition, they’ll be easier to get out of the tin. Otherwise the middle will be soft and gooey, which is not how they should be.

Don't skimp on the oil – we know oil isn’t healthy in large quantities, but there’s no way to get the hole in the middle without it. You need a good few millimetres of oil in each well of the muffin tin. The oil should pool in the batter and weigh down the centre of your vegan Yorkshire puddings, leaving the sides to rise and get crispy.

💭 FAQs

🍽 Serving suggestions

• Cheezy Cahew Nut Roast
• Vegan Cauliflower Cheese
• Easy Vegan Stuffing
• Swede Mash
• Vegan Pigs in Blankets

🍛 More recipes to try

📖 Recipe