The Secret to the Perfect Christmas Pudding

According to experts, the secret to Christmas pudding perfection is to heat it to precisely 71 °C. If it gets hotter than 89 °C, the sugars within the fruits in the pudding start to caramelise. So no matter how luxurious its ingredients are, your precious pud will taste bitter.
The best tool for checking your Christmas pudding is perfectly cooked is an instant-read food thermometer like the Thermapen ONE. Not only can you use it for your pudding and other Christmas cooks like turkey and pigs in blankets, but you can also use it year-round for all your roasts, BBQs and baking.
Carole Taylor of the Ultimate Plum Pudding Company has been cooking Christmas Puddings for thirty years and supplies puddings to Fortnum & Masons and Harvey Nichols. She uses her British-made Thermapen to ensure that each one is perfectly cooked.
Carole says, “People often don’t realise how important temperature is in ensuring that they maximise the flavour and texture of their Christmas pudding.
“Most of us, including me, use the microwave for cooking our pudding. However, they’re often just whacked in on ‘high’ for a few minutes until they look cooked.
“Quite frankly, overcooking Christmas puddings kills the flavour, and that’s a shame after all the effort and wonderful ingredients I’ve put into it!
“Just follow the instructions carefully, make sure that you have the wattage of your microwave right and check the temperature of your pudding frequently with a Thermapen.”
The ultimate tool for perfecting every dish, the Thermapen One has unrivalled speed and accuracy and comes with a five-year guarantee.
Find more information on Carole’s Christmas Puddings here.
Hi. I have tried cooking my 600g puddings I make for family in a slow cooker for several amounts of time. This week I cooked one for 6hrs, I cooked one for 9hrs , one for 2hrs in a pan of simmering water then transferred into a slow cooker over night for 9hrs. I try every year but the vegetarian suet can still be seen even though the pudding is cooked. I make them for gifts and I’m at a loss. please could you advise. Maybe I should give up. kind regards
Eileen
Hi Eileen, sorry to hear you’re not having any success slow-cooking your puddings. Perhaps the slow cooker temperature isn’t high enough to fully melt the suet? Suet needs to simmer at around around 90–95 °C to melt. If the cooking temperature is high enough, you could try to continue to cook the pudding until it reaches an internal temperature of 71 °C, at which point the suet should have broken down. Hope this advice helps!