Skip The Cooking Spray If You Want The Best Popovers

Popovers are proof positive that simple recipes with high-quality ingredients can produce delicious and satisfying results. A U.S. variant of the savory Yorkshire pudding, popovers can be flavored in all sorts of ways (including a very American steakhouse-inspired ranch popover). However, these crispy delights typically have just five ingredients: flour, salt, eggs, milk, and unsalted butter.

With straightforward recipes like popovers, you've got to use the best ingredients to get the best flavor, because there's nowhere for shortcuts to hide. Every ingredient and every step in the recipe can be tasted in the final product, as can any mistakes.

So, while a modern home kitchen often revolves around convenience, extra effort is usually worth it to create a superior dish. In the case of popovers, a quick hit of cooking spray to grease up your pan can be tempting, but it's a fast track to mediocrity. Butter — high-quality, unsalted butter should be your go-to for cooking – is essential to get your popovers golden and tasty.

When making popovers, the butter doesn't simply grease the pan to keep the dough from sticking. Instead, during cooking, the butter mingles with the eggs in your batter to produce that light, puffy, toasted quality that's essential to a good popover.

Cooking sprays, which are not just oil but a formulation of different oils, emulsifiers, flavorings, and some kind of propellant like propane or butane, cannot do the job of real butter. When you use cooking spray instead of butter, you're adding the ingredients in the cooking spray to your popovers, which can be slightly unpalatable. And while you can make your own pan-greasing alternative at home, it would still pose the problem of adding extra elements, which will contaminate the popover flavor.

While cooking spray is generally safe to consume (don't be scared by the chemical components on the label as they are only present in very low amounts), it is an unnecessary shortcut and adds potentially conflicting flavors to the recipe. For rustic, simple dishes like popovers, the toasted butter finish really can't be beaten.