Chicken Pot Pies

Ok, so what happened with that pastry...?

Well I have to say it made quite a sturdy pastry that needed a lot of elbow grease to roll out, ideal for Cornish Pasties. I dare say should you chance upon a hungry Cornish tin miner and lobbed one of said pasties at his noggin, it would probably knock him out! However, the pastry was tasty, flaky, a little spongy but not bad all the same.

On to the pies...

For the filling I chopped up and onion and a couple of rashers of back bacon. Cooked them off and added some mushrooms and a small tin of sweetcorn. Then added the cooked chicken to warm it through. Sprinkled a good tsp of cornflour into the mix to thicken for a couple of minutes. Added salt and pepper, a splosh of wine (that's I all I could spare), a quarter tsp of turmeric (optional), some thyme and a good splosh of cream and let it bubble through for a couple of minutes.

And this is how they turned out...

As you can see the pastry has shrunk away from the sides. This might be due to the high fat content or maybe because I didn't let the pastry come to room temperature after taking it out of the fridge but very nice they were all the same.

Next... what I made out of the left overs and some cake!

In search of perfect pastry...

So, I followed this "Fabulous Baker Boys'" recipe for pastry:

600g strong white flour
150g beef dripping
150g butter
2 tbsp water*

I usually like recipes with lots of reviews but this didn't seem to have any. I gave it a go anyway.

I assume when then say "mixer" they mean a "stand mixer" as there is no way this amount of dry ingredients would fit in a food processor. Well not my Magimix anyhow.

So in my mixer it went. It's nothing posh - in fact, it's about a third of the price of a Kitchenaid, although not as pretty. I only went upto speed 3. Any faster and my mixer did a little dance on the worktop.

I mixed in the dripping until I could hardly see any lumps then added the butter. It takes a while to resemble breadcrumbs and I'm not that patient so it was kinda crumby/lumpy - but isn't that how they make rough puff anyway?

Now the water*... 2 tbsp? WEIGH OFF! And by that I mean way off. More like 20. OK, 10 to 20. Your guess is as good as mine. And that is what I did. I just kept adding the water with the mixer set on 1 until the mixture formed clumps, gathered it up into a couple of fat sausages and put it in the fridge.

I'm going to make chicken pot pies. I'm not very hopeful when it comes to making my own pastry so watch this space...