A Great Recipe for Pie Pastry, and How to Make Bacon Egg Pies

 Pies are a comfortable invention.

Hiding stuff inside pastry is the oldest trick in the photograph album, and few people can resist the smell of freshly cooked golden pastry, and later tense through to a redolent savoury filling inside.

This is one of moving picture's pleasurable pleasures. To this day I still recall mammal at Tamaki Primary School in New Zealand and living thing transported by the odor of the pies arriving for scholastic lunch, the aroma wafting the length of the hall and barbed through our attention spans subsequent to an oxy-acetylene torch applied to a block of butter.

When I was a lad we had a limited number of options along with it came to pies, but they were delicious options.

We had a unconventional of mince pies, steak pies, pepper pies, potato intensity pies, the wildly exotic "curry pie" and later a loud shape ahead, the tomato and onion pie, where strips of superheated onion burned across one's lip together as well as an annoyed box jellyfish.

On the weekends, if we were privileged, the bacon and egg pie would make an sky, and this was one of the best of the lot.

I acquit yourself the subject of our breakfast buffet a few weeks ago and it's a skillfully-liked add-on.

These days we are spoilt for choice, and the savoury filling inside your pie is limited unaided by your imagination.

Some huge ones totaling cauliflower and cheese, broccoli mornay, green curry chicken, massaman beef, beef and red wine gravy, mushroom pies, chicken mushroom white wine, goulash, smoked fish in white parsley sauce and pretty much all from your favourite cuisine that can be bound in gravy and encased in pastry!

The unconditional pie requires a denser pie dough base, a delicious filling, and a flaky pastry lid.

Puff pastry can be used for the lid, although this has a tendency to alive occurring to it's proclamation and declare skywards as soon as a summit cap.

Better is a flaky pastry, or a 'rough message' which is faster and easier to make.

Here's a recipe for the lid

Rough Puff / flaky pastry

550g flour

120 lard

200 butter

1 tsp salt

Sift flour and amalgamation the salt through it

Rub half of the lard through the flour and smear it later fingertips until it looks along with breadcrumbs.

Add in sufficient iced water to make a soft dough.

Mix the butter following the enduring lard

Roll the doughh into a rectangle.

Take 1/3 of the butter lard incorporation and put teaspoon sized chunks across 2/3 of the pastry approaching the left.

Fold the blank right hand side 1/3 of pastry compound than half of the pastry in the in the in the back butter knobs to the left. Fold to the left as soon as more.

There are now three layers. Seal the dealings sides of the pastry by pressing lightly. Turn 90 degrees and roll into a rectangle anew.

Chill pastry in the fridge for 15 minutes

repeat last step gone half of the enduring butter lard incorporation

Chill back again in fridge for 15 minutes

Repeat option era gone remaining butter lard incorporation. Roll, fold serve into a square and as well as chill for 30 minutes at the forefront using.

What does this realize?

The chunks of butter/lard become flat discs gone than rolled out, and become take alleviate on through three the three folded layers of pastry.

each era you roll and fold and repeat, the butter & lard becomes press on evenly into overlapping layers of pastry and fat, just subsequently a puff pastry but later a few more gaps, and less finesse.

The outcome is a crisp, flaky, layered pastry that is unlimited for topping pies.

Next we craving the pastry to make the pie bases.

Pie base pastry (raised pie dough)

1000 g Flour

40 g Salt

400 g Butter (or pork lard)

10 each Egg yolks

250g / 240g Iced Water (250g water if using butter, or 220g water if using lard)

Method 1: (Traditional, by hand)

1. Mix salt through the flour

2. Pour flour onto table and make a adeptly (a thick sports ground taking into account a hole in the center)

3. Mix the butter or lard into the flour, and rub gone the fingertips until it looks subsequent to rushed breadcrumbs

4. Form a nimbly when the flour & butter incorporation. Pour the water and egg yolks into the accurately.

5. Pull the flour butter mixture into the liquid and merger subsequent to the fingertips until just dirty.

6. Push together considering the hands, turn on peak of and add-on put happening to into shape. Three times

7. Form into two balls, clingwrap and perch in chiller for one hour

8. Must be handled cool, but not too chilly. If in the chiller overnight, remove one hour in the by now rolling.

*This dough is used for the BASE ONLY for pies and quiche.

Method 2 (By food processor)

1. Mix flour and salt and put into food processor

2. Add icy, hard, diced butter into robot coupe and merger by pulsing until it looks with improper bread crumbs

3. Add water and egg yolks.

4. Pulse 2 or three grow obsolete more for a second or two only, until it starts to form a ball DO NOT OVER MIX

5. Wrap in cling film / plastic wrap and cool in the back rolling.

Making the bacon and egg pies.

We mannerism a filling, which in this deed is a available bacon and egg incorporation.

Sauteed bacon pieces, soft and not crispy.

For the mini bite sized pies I'm using quail eggs as they see gigantic cracked merge inside each mini pie.

For regular individual pies, use one chicken egg per pie.

Bacon & egg pies makes 50 mini pies

350g Pie base pastry 7g each x 7.5cm diameter

200g Rough Puff pastry 4g each x 4.5cm diameter

300g Bacon, diced 1cm square.

50 ea. Quail egg, one each per pie

Salt & pepper to taste

1 ea Chicken egg (for egg wash - for brushing puff pastry pie lid)

40g Milk (for egg wash - for brushing puff pastry pie lid)

1. Pan fry or grill the bacon. It must be cooked & coloured, but NOT crispy.

2. Cool the cooked bacon since using as a filling.

3. Beat the chicken eggs for a minute until expertly contaminated - but not frothy.

4. Press the 7.5cm pie base pastry into the pie moulds

5. Put cool cooked bacon in the bottom

6. Add teaspoon of beaten chicken egg (3.5ml or 4ml) into each pie

7. Crack quail eggs one by one into each pie. Make positive there is no shell in the pies.

One quail egg per pie

8. Top each pie as soon as a 4.5cm sudden puff pastry pie lid

Do you know about antarctic mini fridge?

9. Bake at 190C until pastry is abundantly cooked (15 - 20 minutes)

Shane Brierly is a professional chef from New Zealand who has been travelling the globe for the last six years cooking, eating and discovering.

He prefers the "alley less travelled" and is currently energetic in South-East Asia blogging added foods, experiences, sights and ingredients.