All About Cooking - About Pies

About Pies

Never under-estimate the value of a good pie - it can be your best friend, especially when using up what otherwise might be unappetizing leftovers.

For example, the mid-week clear out of my fridge yielded some cold roast veggies, a pasta sauce that my wife had made, some cooked but plain pasta shells, a mushroom, one piece of bacon (?) and some steamed broccoli florets.

Now what can you do with a mix like that? You guessed it - turn it into a pie!

Apart from the mushroom and the bacon, everything else is cooked and those two will cook inside the pastry shell. Brilliant. Just the pastry to make. Here’s my quick, simple and very short version.

8 oz flour
6 oz salted butter
4 fl oz icy cold water
Flour for handling.

Sift the flour, cut the butter into dice and press into the flour. NB. This is important. Do NOT work the butter into the flour as you normally would. It’s just about impossible to do with those measures anyway, but if you try you’ll end up with very tough pastry.

Simply take each dice of butter between finger and thumb and squeeze it flat in the flour. That’s all you need to do.

Add the water and mix all together using a knife blade. It will be very loose and ‘wet’. Don’t worry, it will work fine.

Flour your work surface. Tip the dough on to it and scatter some dried herbs on it, then some flour. Flour your rolling pin and roll the pastry out into a rough square. Use as much flour as you need to keep things moving. (This is why you don’t rub the butter in. You want it to cut the extra flour).

Now fold the pastry in half, give it a quarter turn and fold again, just as you would a tea-towel you had just ironed.

Now roll it out once more and repeat that process three or four times until the dough feels elastic and springy. Put the final fold in the fridge to relax for at least 30 minutes and preferably longer.

Then use as normal. I just rolled mine out thinly, chucked the leftovers in the middle, grated some Pecorino on top of them and folded the sides over to form a parcel.

Before baking I painted the pie with a little beaten egg and milk, and scattered some caraway seeds over it. It was ready in 25 minutes flat at 200C, 400F.