Raised pies

This is another traditional English dish that Darren was missing last week. I'm going to take him a taste, but most of it will end up in my lunches.

I meant to make pork pies, one round and one long with boiled eggs in. My volume estimation was a bit off though, and I ended up making one pork pie and one beef one - good thing I'd bought two lots of the blade steak I used for the potted meat!

Raised pies use a funny sort of pastry made with hot water. Lard is melted in hot water (or water and milk), then it's brought to boiling point …

… and poured into flour with a little salt.

The mixture is worked into a ball, working reasonably quickly because it needs to stay warm. No huge panic though, I discovered that you can re-heat it in the microwave quite successfully.

I cut my ball in half, then cut 1/3 off each of the halves to keep warm and use for lids. I'm nowhere near expert enough to be able to raise a pie by hand, so I covered two dishes with GladWrap and moulded the pastry over them thus:

Then I stuck the in the fridge to set.

While they were cooling down in the fridge, I hard-boiled two eggs, then diced my bit of pork shoulder quite finely, and mixed it with some salt, pepper, a little Cayenne pepper, and a bit of finely chopped thyme from the garden:

Oblong is not the best shape for a free-standing pie! I had to prop up the edges so they wouldn't collapse until I'd filled it. I think I should have made the pastry a bit thicker too.

I packed the meat into the pie, tucking the peeled eggs in the middle, then pressed out the pastry lid …

… and carefully placed it on top of the pie:

I filled the round pie with beef seasoned with salt, pepper, Cayenne, and a bit of anchovy sauce:

I pressed the lids onto the cases firmly, trimmed the ragged bit off, cut little holes in the top (for pouring in jelly when cooked), made some pretty little leaf decorations, and wrapped paper around them so they wouldn't collapse in the oven as they heated up:

Then I brushed their tops with beaten egg and they went into a 200°C oven for 20 minutes, followed by about an hour and a half at 160°C. I took the paper off about half way.

I need a bit more practice at this - despite all my precautions I ended up with some small holes from which cooking juices leaked …

… and one side of the pork pie collapsed. I removed the paper a bit too soon.

And that made filling it with jelly just a tad difficult. I had some pork jelly in the freezer, it was left over from making porchetta di testa at Christmas time. I melted it down and added the cooking juices that had escaped from the pies (I sucked them up with my turkey baster) and let it set again to make sure it would be solid enough:

Then I melted it and very carefully poured it into the pork pie through the collapsed side in several stages, leaving the pie propped at all sorts of angles as the bits of jelly set. I had to plug a few small holes with bits of solid jelly too, but it all worked out quite well in the end:

The slices of pie don't look half bad. And it tastes good too.

I didn't bother putting jelly in the beef pie, so it was a little dry, but tasty.

Recipe

Hot water pastry

Ingredients:
 225g flour
1/2 tsp salt
100g lard
110ml water

Method:
Melt the lard in the water, then bring to boiling point
Mix into the flour and salt, work into a ball.
Use while warm. If it gets too cold and stiff, warm it briefly and carefully in the microwave.

Potted beef

Potted beef is a traditional English thing. It's similar to the little pots of fish paste you can buy in the supermarket, but far superior. A bit like a paté actually, but containing no liver.

One of the guys at work was bemoaning the fact that you couldn't easily get it in New Zealand, so I made him some. It's pretty easy.

You start with some beef. Blade steak was on special on Friday, so that's what I got …

… ~600g of it. I chopped it up, removing most of the fat and sinew …

… then put it in the steamed pudding bowl with salt, pepper, nutmeg (I had no mace), a bit of cayenne pepper, a good dollop of anchovy sauce, and 75 g of butter:

The lid went on …

… the bowl went into a pot of boiling water …

 … and it simmered away for about four hours. By that time the meat was falling to bits tender.

The whole lot went into the food processor and got blended to a paste. It goes through a sort of tough matted fibrous stage for a while, but then the fibres get chopped smaller and it becomes spreadable.

I put it in some small ramekins …

… poured strained brown butter over (should have been clarified, but I was in a hurry and I like brown butter) …

… and left it to set:

The layer of fat over the top makes it keep quite well in the fridge.

But it doesn't need to keep for long, because it's delicious and gets eaten pretty quickly. I still have three of the pots, at least one of which I'll be taking in to Darren tomorrow.

Auckland shoes

These shoes I bought in Auckland have peep-toes, so I really should have waited for summer and worn them with bare feet. I'm too impatient though, and these really thick tights don't look so bad - you can't see the toe seams, and the toes and legs are equally opaque.

I love the spotty hairy bits at the back. They're surprisingly easy to walk in for such high shoes too.

Pies

The pie is the quintessential New Zealand fast food. You can buy them in any dairy (convenience store), petrol station, bakery, or lunch bar. Traditionally they're filled with mince or beef stew, and have either a pastry lid or potato top. Bacon and egg pies have always been around, although not as ubiquitously as the mince ones. Over the last 15 years or so there has been a trend towards up-market trendy pies like chicken and apricot, or venison and red wine.

Today I made pies from what I had lying around. They're a bit like quiches, but with a stronger pastry. I intend to take these pies to work for my lunches this week, and a pie needs strong pastry so as not to fall to bits in one's hand.

I grated 90 g of cold butter into about a cup and a quarter of standard flour …

… added half a teaspoon of salt and tossed it all to mix …

… slowly added cold water with a little vinegar mixed in until it almost came together …

… then kneaded it a bit to get it all into a lump.

Then I took the rolling pin to it, and rolled and folded it a couple of times as you would with flaky pastry, just to get it well combined and in a sort of rectangular shape:

By this time it needed a bit of a rest, as it was becoming difficult to roll. I started on the filling.
I fried some of my home made bacon …

… and when that was nearly done I added some caramelised onions from the fridge …

… and cooked them all together for a while before leaving the mixture to cool.

Back to the pastry. I rolled it out, not too thinly (remember, these pies have to be eaten by hand) and cut it into six bits. The two smaller bits will get layered on top of each other and rolled out to make one pie.

This is a commercial pie dish, I have five of them:

They're about five inches long. Those sharp edges are very handy.

Once you've lined the dish with pastry, you roll the rolling pin over the top:

The sharp edges cut the pastry off exactly where you want it trimmed:

Five lined pie dishes:

I stack them on top of each other and put them in a plastic bag in the fridge for half an hour or so to rest.

While they were resting I dealt with the scraps. In our house when I was small, it was traditional for any small pile of pastry scraps to be turned into a jam tart for Dad's, or an especially well behaved child's, dessert. I keep the tradition going, although there is no longer any Dad to get the tart - my turn now!

Firstly I pile the pastry scraps up. This is not really flaky pastry, but I treat it as though it is. It's a bit of a cross between flaky and short crust, I suppose. There will be a few layers from the folding, but not many.

Again, I roll and fold to get a tidy rectangle …

Usually I make a turnover, but I decided to be a bit fancy today, and made a braid:

I wasn't particularly fussed about letting it rest - it's scraps, after all, and destined for my stomach. I baked it while the pie pastry was resting.

Back to the pies. The bacon onion mixture went in first …

… followed by a little frozen grated cheese …

… some slow roasted tomato halves …

… and some egg beaten with milk and salt. I ground some pepper over the tops:

Then into a hot oven for 15 minutes, after which I turned the heat down to cook the fillings for a further 30 minutes or so. I sat them directly on the preheated pizza stone to make sure the pastry bottoms wouldn't become soggy.

In this photo you can see the slight layering of the pastry in the jam tart:

I showed a great deal of self restraint, and only ate the ends. I'm saving most of it for lunch.

Ginger again

I made another batch of crystallised ginger last week, and saved all the boiling water changes to make syrup.

I ended up with more then two litres of ginger-lemon syrup, of which I use about 20 ml for a cup of hot lemon-ginger drink.
Hopefully this batch of ginger will last longer too. I took the last lot to work and it disappeared in a couple of days.