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Pie lids

Redder Lurtz

By Redder Lurtz,
in GF - General Forum

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Pie lids   

29 members have voted

  1. 1. Should pie lids be short crust or puff pastry?


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Mudface Grand Master

Mudface

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https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/jan/14/how-to-make-the-perfect-pie-kitchen-aide

 



What’s the secret to the perfect pie?
Steffi, Chichester

This sounds like a job for a proper, old-school butcher, Steffi. Not just any butcher, either, but Jon Thorner’s in Somerset, the nation’s reigning pie champion. And it turns out there’s no secret at all, says general manager Dan Snook: “Just lots of care and attention, plus quality ingredients of good provenance.” So a bit like just about any culinary endeavour, then.

 

But there are a few basics that anyone in pursuit of pie perfection should maybe bear in mind. First off, the pastry: whether you opt for puff, shortcrust or pâte sucrée, don’t overwork the dough, or it will be dry and tough; and only add enough water just to bring it together, or it won’t bake through properly and will end up unpleasantly rubbery and chewy.

 

Thorner’s pies are all made from scratch by hand, and they all feature a shortcrust pastry that just happens to be vegan by default, rather than by design. This came in very handy indeed last year, when their curried butternut squash and sweet potato pie took the top prize at the annual British Pie Awards in Melton Mowbray. The gong turned Thorner’s vegan pie from something of a niche product at their Shepton Mallett shop, where they shift about 3,000 pies a week, into a much more mainstream one, though Snook doubts it’ll ever rival their bestseller. “That will always be the steak and ale,” he says. “With pies, people are traditionalists.” Still, a much-hyped vegan product never did Greggs any harm, did it?


What you put in your pie obviously depends on what you fancy at the time, while the filling to pastry ratio depends mainly on how many it’s feeding. “With our small, individual pies, that works out at roughly 50:50,” Snook says, “but with larger ones it’s more like 65:35.” And never, ever cheat on the filling, he warns: “Few things are more disappointing than cutting into a lovely-looking, golden pie only to find it’s half empty. That’s why we fill ours almost to the brim.” But only almost, or that delicious filling you’ve spent time and money on will very likely bubble up during the baking and turn the lid soggy, or burst through entirely, leaving your pie looking like an unholy mess and the inside of your oven even worse.

 

Whenever possible, make the filling ahead of time, advises the UK’s unofficial pie king, Calum Franklin, executive head chef of Holborn Dining Room in London and purveyor of some of the most staggeringly intricate and beautiful pie-based creations known to humanity. “Not only because the filling needs to be cool before going into its pastry parcel,” he says, “but it also gives you the luxury of time to build a spectacular pie without the pressure of having to do everything at the last moment and your guests starting a riot because it’s midnight and they still haven’t eaten.” And if the filling features gravy or sauce of any kind, “make sure it’s thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, or it will be very hard to cook the pastry well – watery sauces just soak into the dough.”

As for the baking vessel, Franklin prefers a spring-form cake tin to more traditional pie-ware: “It’s a cracking mould to build a pie in, because it’s so easy to remove the finished article from, and it guarantees you a gorgeous, high-sided, deep-filled pie.”

 

Franklin doesn’t have much truck with obsessives who argue that, to qualify as a pie, the filling has to be fully encased in pastry, and who dismiss anything else as just a stew with a lid. “It would be more accurate to call that a ‘pot pie’, but while I personally prefer the spectacle of a free-standing, fully wrapped pie – historically, it’s more accurate to say that that’s what constitutes an actual pie, anyway – it’s not something to get stressed about. It’s your dinner, so you can call it whatever you like.”

 

Surely you'd have to use shortcrust pastry to fully encase the pie anyway. If you used puff pastry for anything but the lid, you'd just end up with an unpuffed, soggy mess. As you'd likely want the lid to match the rest of the pie, then a 'proper' pie would generally have a shortcrust lid then?

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1 hour ago, Mudface said:

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/jan/14/how-to-make-the-perfect-pie-kitchen-aide

 

 

 

 

Surely you'd have to use shortcrust pastry to fully encase the pie anyway. If you used puff pastry for anything but the lid, you'd just end up with an unpuffed, soggy mess. As you'd likely want the lid to match the rest of the pie, then a 'proper' pie would generally have a shortcrust lid then?

If that's what the unofficial pie king says, I'd like to see what the official pie king has to say. Anyone seen him?

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1 hour ago, sir roger said:

Pah , I reckon some of the cheaper versions don't even have any shepherds in them.

I don't think I will ever order a cottage pie again. 

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Curly Grand Master

Curly

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15 hours ago, Sugar Ape said:


My workings are something like this:

 

You don’t like gravy on chips or butter on your cheese on toast. 
 

That therefore makes you a deviant and de facto wrong on any subsequent food related subjects. 
 

Which means that as you voted ‘puff’ (unsurprisingly), I am confirmed as correct in voting for short crust.

 

 

F2FDDD07-2046-4F58-A880-E81004971B2C.gif

Butter on cheese on toast?

 

My oh my.

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Redder Lurtz Grand Master

Redder Lurtz

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On 23/01/2020 at 06:42, Bruce Spanner said:


It’s not a fucking pie!

 

Its filling with pastry on the top.

 

Filling should be incased, not this bourgeois bullshit you’re claiming is a pie.

It WAS a pie mate. It was encased in pastry. I just prefer short crust case and puff lid. This was all short crust. Disappointing pie. 

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