Hand-Made Australian Christmas Puddings From Pudding Lane

From an inherited prize-winning family recipe, Pudding Lane award-winning Christmas puddings are proudly hand-made in Australia with the finest quality fruit selected from Australia's pasturelands and well sourced fresh ingredients; fresh free range eggs, fresh butter, fresh breadcrumbs (crumbed by hand), flour, sugar from Australia's tropical north, spices and the finest brandy, matured in American Oak, from the world famous Barossa Valley wine region of South Australia.
Pudding Lane Christmas Fare:

(1) (2) (3)

(1) Classic Christmas - Australia's finest handmade prize-winning Christmas pudding
(2) Date & Toffee Log - a delicious sticky date texture with luxurious toffee
(3) Australian Macadamia Nuts and Barossa Valley Brandy - Organic Macadamia Nuts, finest matured in oak Bandy and some gourmet magic

Available to purchase from: www.porterfoods.co.uk

Food miles and the environment

'In Australia we talk about "paddock to plate", (field to fork) but the meaning is the same, no matter where in the world you are, most people want to know what food companies like Pudding Lane are doing to help and minimize their impact on the natural Environment.

Pudding Lane has a unique handmade method that has been unchanged for 100 years or more. Unlike most other pudding manufacturers, who ship all their many ingredients from the corners of the world, we use only locally sourced ingredients, and so, even though our puddings come from Australia, ours create far fewer food miles and energy waste than a pudding that is made in the UK.

We have based our reputation for quality on the "boiled-in-the-cloth" method. That is, we select the finest ingredients, local, combine these ingredients by hand, including fresh bread (from a local bakery that we hand-crumb) add the "wet-mix" of fresh butter, fresh Free Range eggs (hand cracked), Brandy and then hand-mix the mixture. This pudding mixture is then hand-weighed with spoons into lined boiling cloths. The cloths are actually "squares" of unbleached calico and are reused over and over to make many hundreds of puddings.

If the calico square develops a small hole, then we cut it down neatly to make another (smaller) size of pudding and so the process continues. The puddings are hand-tied with twine, then cooked (boiled) in (gas fired) "coppers" before being hung, again by hand, individually on a line to age and mature in advance for Christmas.

When the puddings have been hung and dried we then take them off the line, cut them out of the cloth, dress them in plain cotton fabric to sell and the only disposable part of our pudding making process is a short piece of cotton twine used to tie the pudding cloth up with prior to cooking. The puddings are packaged in cartons made from 100% recycled material and dispatched.

In this way, we do not use any automated processes, no production lines, no electric steam ovens (in fact we don't even have a conventional oven in our pudding kitchen), we do not use plastic basins, plastic bowls or moulds to shape the puddings, each and every pudding is different, only the same supreme moist taste is the same - but each and every pudding is unique!

Many people who know our method and also who visit our pudding kitchen are amazed at the level of detail, at the hand-made method, the hard work, but also that we can make many many tonnes of puddings every year - but each and every one, without ever changing the method and almost no machinery whatsoever, is made individually by hand.

These days however, we are less accidental in our philosophy of the environment. We have a practical commitment to community involvement and make sure that our ingredients are; fresh and local, that our method is maintained by our strict Haccp controls and that we just make traditional Christmas puddings in the old-fashioned (environmental) way.'