The Food & Drink Innovation Network

November 30th, 2010

From an inherited family recipe, Pudding Lane’s new 2011 Christmas puddings range is hand-made in Australia.

The puddings are made with fruit selected from Australia’s pasturelands and sourced fresh ingredients; free range eggs, butter, breadcrumbs (crumbed by hand), flour, sugar from Australia’s tropical north, spices and the brandy, matured in American Oak.

Pudding Lane’s Christmas pudding range includes:

Classic Christmas – Australia’s finest handmade prize-winning Christmas pudding 10 x 500g = £65.25, 10 x 1kg = £99.23

Date & Toffee Log – A sticky date texture with toffee liqueur 2 x 500g = £78.30, 10 x 1kg = Special rate £74.45

Australian Macadamia Nuts and Barossa Valley Brandy – Organic Macadamia Nuts, matured in oak Bandy  – 10 x 500g = £69.75, 10 x 1kg = £101.05

Michael Pudding from Pudding Lane told FDIN how the company concern themselves with food miles and the environment when designing and making their products.

He said:

“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.

“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.”

To purchase and for more information click here to visit the Pudding Lane website.