Mmmm … pie. Is there anything nicer than pie? No there is not. The eternal meal, enjoyed from Samuel Pepys to picnickers, they are the very king of British tuck. I've made a pork pie (once). This time, the challenge is a chicken and ham pie. And - this is a big secret - it's VERY EASY. Everyone should be making pie - ALL THE TIME.
Gather round, ladies and gentlemen. Here's how …
Chicken and ham is an easier kind of pie. With a pork pie, there's a lot of titting around with stock. You dice the meat raw, and then have to make a stock separately. The advantage in making a pie with pre-cooked meat is that the cooking liquid IS stock. And if that meat has a whole load of bones, that stock is going to turn into jelly, and that's just what you need.
1) Chicken and stock. For this particular dish, I pressure-cooked a whole chicken with a carrot, a celery stick, several peppercorns, a bay leaf and an onion. Also a few chicken feet, which the delightful folk at Sussex Fowl in Borough Market threw in to help with the gelatination.
Stripped the meat from the chicken, removing all skin, bones and cartilage, keeping the meat in fairly large pieces. And strained the stock to set overnight. There's no need to set it, except to see how good a jelly it's going to make. If it's too thin, reduce it some.
2) Ham. I wanted to add ham flavour to the jelly, so added the now-set jelly to the ham hocks to pressure cook. In theory, the chicken and ham could be done together - if my pressure cooker were big enough. Clearly you could do this in an ordinary saucepan but it'd take 5 times the time and wouldn't concentrate the flavour in the liquid as much.
3) Pastry. Easy as - well - pie! I used the Nigel Slater recipe. Stick a lump of lard and some water together, boil, add to flour. Mix. Put in a cake tin, and squodge up the sides, adding the filling as you go. I alternated the ham and chicken with some sausagemeat extracted from nice bangers. I forgot about any other seasoning till the top, where I put some black pepper.
4) Bake. See the Nigel Slater recipe for details.
5) Jelly. As well as the hole in the top, I made supplementary holes around the edges of the lid, to ensure full jelly penetration (shudder).
Results: good!
A dense, meaty and attractive pie. A minute but fatal breach in the pastry wall led to the jelly soaking into the base, which prevented it being crispy, but in any case, whereas in a pork pie plenty of meat fat melts and dribbles to the bottom, the meat here is mostly lean and already cooked, so there's not so much of that.
However - though I say so myself - it was A FYNE PIE.
More? DDD cooks spice cake, venison (4 ways) and Sussex pond pudding.
Oh, that does indeed look like a VERY FYNE PIE.
Posted by: Su-Lin | 08/18/2010 at 06:07 PM
Absolutely, lovely! I do enjoy gelatin/jelly dishes that do not have the transparent vibrting stuff... but use it as a tool to hold everything together and solid.
http://hippressurecooking.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Laura Pazzaglia | 08/19/2010 at 06:05 AM