I made a pie

[igenlode]

(Click to enlarge)

I bought some scrap chicken carcases at the market last week and spent a long time cutting as much of the remaining scrapings of meat off them as I could, before boiling up all the bones in my biggest saucepan to create five or six pints of stock. It set beautifully, and I had the idea of using the assorted shreds of chicken to make a chicken and ham pie -- or, in my case, a chicken and luncheon-meat pie, because I still had about a quarter of a tin of luncheon meat that I'd bought and frozen after I'd opened it. So I consulted "Good Food on a Budget", which has a general section on raised pies, and successfully constructed one :-)

According to the recipe book, the vital thing is to make sure the ingredients include enough fat to moisten the filling, and the author suggests slivers of very fat bacon (I couldn't even get streaky bacon the last time I tried; I think they breed lean pigs nowadays). But I'm pretty sure luncheon meat has a fairly high fat content, and she also suggested lining the inside of the pie with sausage-meat.

So I dissected a sausage from its skin, cut a rasher of bacon up small, and sliced the rest of the meat as small as I could; you were also supposed to put in 'spices' (unspecified), but I reckoned the luncheon meat was probably sufficiently spiced as well. And then I mixed the hot-water pastry (made with a whole seven ounces of fat, mostly beef dripping) and managed to raise a pie-case in the traditional way, by 'drawing up' the sides by hand. Not through choice but because I couldn't find a single straight-sided, smooth-bottomed object five inches in diameter and suitable for use as a pie mould! (The recipe book suggests "a 2lb jam jar", but all my larger jam jars are double height, not double width -- and have concave bases.)

But with the aid of a doubled strip of greaseproof paper and two bands of string, I did achieve a reasonably stable five-inch pie shell about a quarter of an inch (a little fingernail) thick; some kind of outer support is absolutely essential, or the dough will slump. Then I squeezed half the sausage meat over the base of the pie, inserted a hard-boiled egg in order to fill up the space -- because I didn't have nearly enough meat available otherwise! -- and filled the shell as directed with alternating layers of finely-chopped chicken, thin slivers of luncheon meat, and sprinklings of bacon, adding salt, pepper and mixed dried herbs at intervals, and smeared the top with the rest of the sausage (luckily a big one) before trying to crimp on the lid.

The latter was more difficult than I was expecting because my paper band came up above lid level, so I couldn't roll it out over the sides as illustrated. I thought I'd got a good seal, but in fact you can see where the juices leaked out down the sides of the pie during cooking. :-(

Then I tried to pour my stock in through the hole in the centre of the top, which didn't work too well, even though I'd tried to make holes down through the layers with a skewer; the filling was really packed too tightly to let the stock soak down, and the sausagemeat made a waterproof layer under the lid. I think most of it boiled out while the pie was in the ovebn.

At any rate, at various points during the 2–3 hour cooking process the pie appeared to be sitting in a pool of liquid, although I don't know if that was escaping meat juices or simply fat melting out of the pastry. I didn't manage to get the oven hot enough before the pie went in, so I was worried that the crust hadn't set hard enough in the first 20 minutes, and then the oven thermometer consistently showed temperatures below the thermostat setting, so I really wasn't at all sure the pie would have worked. The last time I tried this, about twenty years ago (with very much more expensive ingredients; this pie was basically made from leftovers!) I ended up with flavourless dried-out filling and rock-hard crust that was a chore to eat.

Having (I suspected) lost most of my stock during the cooking process, I then attempted to fill the pie up to the top again as directed, removing the 'tassel' (added halfway through baking to cover the hole in the centre of the lid) and trying to pour in the rest of my half-pint of stock. But I simply couldn't get very much to go in; the filling had cooked pretty much solid and sealed up the hole, even when I tried poking around with a knife to reopen it.

So I left the finished pie to chill overnight, and cut into it at lunchtime today. And it was a great success. :-)
The pastry was crisp and crumbly and very tasty (a little thicker than it ideally should have been, but that was because I didn't have a mould), such that I was eagerly eating up the broken fragments of tassel. I suspect it probably helped from the flavour point of view that it was made with dripping instead of lard, even though the recipe recommends that lard should be the majority component if at all possible!

The contents smelt delicious and tasted every bit as good; it wasn't dried out at all. I think that, ironically, the luncheon meat may well have been the magic ingredient, because it was highly spiced and rich in fat, thus improving both flavour and texture, but you could definitely taste a trace of the herbs, and I'm sure the bacon helped add salt and flavour. The one obvious problem was that -- as is clearly visible in the picture -- there were a lot of empty spaces inside the pie that were supposed to have been sealed up by the jellied stock, both to improve its keeping qualities and to moisten the interior. The stock simply hadn't managed to penetrate beyond the original opening

So having cut the pie in half, I've now re-liquefied the rest of the chicken stock and endeavoured to pour it into the two halves lying on their backs on the plate -- which absorbed a great deal more of the liquid than my first attempt! And I'm now waiting for it to set again before I attempt to cut up and freeze the uneaten portions. It's a big pie. :-p

(I was taken aback by just how *heavy* it was when I was trying to take it out of the oven; you've got a pound of dense pastry (12oz flour plus 7oz fat) plus what was supposed to be a pound of meat in the filling, though mine was padded out with an egg, plus the weight of the stock poured into it, all in a five-inch container.)

But perhaps the most satisfying thing is that it really does *look* like the pies in the delicatessen -- unlike, say, home-made Chelsea buns :-p

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

I congratulate you on your victory.

[igenlode]

I'm now feeling a little ill after eating three or four slices of pie ;-p

I have the other seven slices safely frozen down for consumption one at a time, though -- I would have taken one for a packed lunch tomorrow, but I've really had too much of it of late!

[watervole]

It looks very professional.

[igenlode]

Thanks -- presentation has never been my strong point, so it's very satisfying.