Cooking Pies

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ChrisGreaves
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Cooking Pies

Post by ChrisGreaves »

This YouTube video has got me into a serious effort at making pies. Pies appeal to me because they offer a meat-and-veg snack when I feel I am too busy to cook; as well, a slice of apple-pie is a sweet alternative to toast-and-marmalade when I wake up at 1am or 2am.
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One of the two major benefits (for me) of the video was when I learned that my rolling pin (a clear-skin wine bottle) was too short for pie pastry (6m53s). So I switched to a left-over piece of drain-pipe from last year when David renovated my kitchen and laundry. Yes, I have washed it thoroughly. At over 24” (61 cm for our American members), it easily straddles the pastry so that it can rest on the two paint-stirrer sticks (7m17s) that I stole from Swyers Hardware when no-one was looking. The pipe is a good diameter, light, and sufficiently rigid to satisfy me.

The second benefit was learning that if I place the pies (on a tray) close to the bottom element (12m11s), then the pies bases will bake solid. (All bets are off with apple-pies that have sat in the refrigerator for twenty-four hours (“one fourteenth of a fortnight for our American members.))
Everything else was icing-on-the-cake (like the egg-glaze). The pie filling will be whatever meat protein I have to hand, plus vegetables that look as if they will turn to mold any day now.

I miss the W.A. Steak-and-Kidney pies of my school days. I ever get back to WA I will probably be disappointed because (a) my school days are gone and (b) the S&K pies are probably manufactured on an assembly line in Argentina, or Brazil nowadays. Besides which, Kidneys are unavailable here in Bonavista. I have a spare one, but given my lifestyle of the 70s and 80s its utility is doubtful.

Today I am starting a fresh batch of pies, with ground-beef (“mince”), stewing steak, and apples. I bought a $31.31 frozen leg of NZ lamb yesterday as a treat, so I might make a few lamb pies on the side. Photos later.
Cheers
Chris
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An expensive day out: Wallet and Grimace

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ChrisGreaves
PlutoniumLounger
Posts: 15498
Joined: 24 Jan 2010, 23:23
Location: brings.slot.perky

Re: Cooking Pies

Post by ChrisGreaves »

ChrisGreaves wrote:
06 Apr 2022, 14:59
.... Photos later.
2022_20220408_104556_HDR.jpg
Lunchtime Chorus: "Oh No! Not Cornish pasties again!! We had them last year ..."
Relax - they aren't Cornish Pasties and I am not going down a tin mine.
For one thing I had no peas(1), so I didn't put them in. So these are not Cornish Pasties.
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I rolled out my pastry, used a side-plate to cut the circles, and found that the circle was still too small to fit into the foil tray with sufficient overlap to hide the edge.
I tried rolling my circles a bit more, but that made them a tad irregular, rather, I thought, like a Cornish Pastry shell.

So I compromised ("gave up") and did the egg-wash thing around the rim, piled in as much meat as I could, folded over, crimped, made holes with the plastic nozzle of an tube of icing that I bought for a bed-time treat last month, tipped a teaspoon of beef gelatin in each hole, then used up as much egg-wash as I could (all of it) to coat the outsides.

The image above shows that the plate has not enough margin.

Have you ever tried rolling out a side-plate to make it thinner but with a larger diameter? I haven't.

The latest change-order is to use my kitchen shears to trim a bit off the circumference of the pie tins, pie tins being cheaper than side plates; especially in Bonavista.

(1) We need more peas in the world ...
Cheers
Chris
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An expensive day out: Wallet and Grimace