Steve Cavers – Page 7

What are pasties? Depending on how you Google it, pasties are either a delicious meat and veg pie or nipple tassles. Some readers will be disappointed that this blog entry is about the pies. If you’re here for the other kind of pasties, you’ve come to the wrong blog.

Pasties are a traditional Cornish pie filled with simple meat and veg and lightly seasoned with just salt and pepper. If the sound of such simple seasoning and filling sound boring, a great thing about pasties is that you can actually fill them with whatever meat, veg, and seasoning you like, and they’ll probably turn out great.

I only recently learned how to make them, and it turns out to be pretty easy. They freeze well, so you can fill your freezer with these insta-meals.

How do you make them? Simple: wrap a seasoned raw meat-and-veg mix in pastry dough and bake. Done.

What? You want more detail? Alright. Here we go. This recipe makes six 15 centimeter pasties. More or less.

Pastry ingredients

1.5 cups all-purpose flour
0.25 cups cold lard
0.25 cups cold unsalted butter
1 tsp salt
5 or 6 tblsp cold water
1 egg, beaten, for finish

Filling ingredients

quarter of a yellow turnip (aka “swede” or “rutabaga”)
half of a potato
1 med carrot
quarter yellow onion
roughly 500 g meat of your preference, cut in 1 cm cubes (traditionally, it’s whatever meat you can get your hands on, but these work well: flank steak, lamb, chicken, goat, pork, guinea pig, rabbit, camel, wild boar, wildebeest, etc.)
salt, pepper
optional: 3 cloves garlic, minced
optional: spices of your choice (like Italian, curry, or whatever you like on your meats)

Make the pastry dough

Sift the flour and salt together into a bowl.
Cube the cold lard and butter and add it to the dry ingredients. Using only the ends of your fingers (to avoid warming the butter/lard), squish the butter/lard between fingers continuously until you get an even breadcrumb-like texture.
Add the tablespoons of water and gently cut it into the mix with a knife a little at a time until all the water is evenly added. Using hands, gently press the mix into a consistent ball. Do not knead or gluten will be released. Doesn’t take very long at all.
When you have a round, even ball of dough, wrap the dough tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes so that it can hydrate.
Here’s a good video from “Cornish Nan” on making the pastry:

Prepare the filling

Prepare the veg. Cut the peeled, washed veg into little 1 centimeter cubes. Mix the raw cubed veg (and optional garlic) into the raw meat. Adjust the meat-to-veg ratio as you like. I prefer a 2 to 1 meat-to-veg ratio.
Season the mix with salt, pepper (and optional other meat spices). Cover and put in fridge until the dough is done resting.

Assemble the pasties

Gently press and roll the dough flat until it’s about the thickness of a Loonie. Be sure to dust the surface and rolling pin with flour to keep the from sticking to everything. Dust your face with flour so everyone knows how hard you’re working.
Place a 15 centimeter (~6 inch) plate on the dough and trace a circle with a knife. Do this as many times as you can, setting each aside on a flour-dusted surface. There may be leftover dough that you can use to patch holes if you make mistakes. You now have several circles of dough.
Dollop the meat/veg mix in a line in the centre of the circles. About the size of an elongated golf ball plus any extra you can fit. You’ll figure out how much can fit inside with a couple of tries. Don’t use an actual golf ball.
Paint half the edge of the circle with beaten egg mix and wrap the meat/veg up like a dumpling, gluing the circle edges like a ridge along the length of the pasty (see photo).
Using fingers, press a wobbly pattern along the ridge of dough to strengthen the join (see photo), and then stab a few holes in the sides with a fork.
Cover a cookie sheet with baker’s parchment and put the pasties on top, spaced evenly.
Paint the pasties all over with the egg mix.

Bake the pasties