Chicken Pot Pie From Scratch

April 19, 2012 7 Comments

I insist on rubbing it in, I made this pie from scratch!

I decided to make chicken pot pie for no reason whatsoever yesterday and I wanted to make it from scratch. That meant making my own pie crust. And rolling it out. I’ve done it before but with two pastry chefs next to me to hold my hand through it in the comfort of a cooking show set. I wanted to do it alone in the discomfort of my tiny kitchen which made me very nervous but hey, I like to live on the edge like that.

I found this godsend of a recipe for pie crust (lots of helpful tips, too!) while browsing for one that didn’t require a food processor. A pastry cutter! Of course! For the filling, I loosely followed the ingredients of this recipe but prepared it a slightly different way.

To make the pie crust, you’ll need:

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour plus extra for dusting

1 T sugar

1 t salt

1 cup butter

3/4 cup ice water

1. I think this is the first time I didn’t have to worry about my butter not being at room temperature. How refreshing! The butter actually has to be very cold. So. Cut your butter into cubes like this and leave it in the freezer while you get everything else ready.

2. By ‘everything else’ I mean not only the other ingredients but your tools and working area, too. Keeping everything cold really is the name of the game so once the dough comes together and has been rested, you need to work pretty fast to keep the temperature of the dough from dropping too much. Now would be a good time to get your rolling area ready with cling wrap, rolling pin, pastry cutter, measuring spoons and cups, flour for dusting and whatever else you think you’ll need. I personally recommend a glass of wine to calm the nerves. Oh, and a bowl with about a cup of water and ice cubes. That’s not a suggestion. Once your station is ready, whisk the flour, sugar and salt in a big bowl.

3. By now, the butter should be ready. Retrieve it from the freezer and add to the bowl. Break up the butter pieces with the pastry cutter until they turn into roughly the size of peas. They won’t all be even and that’s fine. The most important thing is to work fast so you still have little pieces of very cold butter mixed with the flour.

 

4. When done, drizzle in 1/2 cup of ice water (don’t include ice cubes). Switch to a silicone spatula and mix the dough. You’ll need to add about 1/4 cup more ice water but add them in gradually a tablespoon at a time (that’s 4 more tablespoons) between mixing with the spatula to see how it comes together.

5. When big clumps of dough start to form like this, you’re done.

6. Get your hands in there and knead it gently into a mound.

Halve this dough and cover each half with cling wrap. As you bring the sides of your cling wrap to the middle, press down to flatten so you end up with a disk. Refrigerate for at least an hour, preferably 2. It will keep in the refrigerator for a week, longer in the freezer, if you want to do this ahead of time.

While the dough is resting in the fridge, we can make the filling. You’ll need:

3 skinless chicken breast fillets

1 1/2 t dried thyme

olive oil to drizzle

1 cup carrots

1 cup frozen peas

1/2 cup celery

1 medium onion

1/3 cup butter

2/3 cup all purpose flour

1 1/3 cups milk

About 3 1/2 cups chicken stock

1/2 t garlic powder

1/2 t celery seed

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1. For some reason, I was very averse to boiling the chicken with the vegetables. I roasted my chicken instead. Preheat the oven to 175 C/350 F. Generously season the chicken breast fillets with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Sprinkle dried thyme and drizzle with olive oil on both sides. Roast for 35 minutes. Set aside to cool when done. While the chicken is roasting, chop up the carrots, celery and onion.

2. Melt the butter in a medium skillet over medium heat. Add in chopped carrots, celery, onion and the frozen peas. Cook until the vegetables lose their firmness, about 12 minutes.

3. Add in the garlic powder, celery seed, salt, freshly ground black pepper and flour. Stir until all the flour gets absorbed.

4. Gradually pour in the milk. Keep stirring to help dissolve the flour. Gradually stir in chicken stock. Lower the heat and stir frequently until it thickens.

 5. Chop the roasted chicken breast into bite-sized pieces. Add in to mixture in the skillet and stir. Chicken pie filling, yay! Taste and adjust seasoning to your taste. Cover and set aside.

By the time my filling was ready, I had a few minutes left for my resting dough to hit the one hour mark. I gulped down some wine and willed myself to stop hyperventilating. Besides, you can always bring back the dough to the fridge if you think it’s becoming too soft. Lezdodis.

1. Preheat the oven to 190 C/375 F. Liberally flour your rolling surface. Don’t be afraid of flour, you can always tap off the excess. Have your pie dish nearby. The most suitable rolling surface I could manage was my biggest chopping board with cling wrap wrapped around it.

2. Retrieve one of the dough disks and unwrap the cling wrap. Place on top of your floured rolling surface. Liberally flour the top of the dough. Roll out with a rolling pin until you reach the desired thickness, flouring along the surface and dough as needed. There seem to be some rules about rolling in one direction and rotating and whatnot but I just rolled it out as I saw fit being careful not to tear it. Even if I did, I’m guessing you can tear off a piece and do some patchwork magic? I don’t have a rolling pin so I used the cardboard center of an old roll of cling wrap. Hee.

3. When done, loosely fold the dough into quarters (or you can loosely roll the dough around the rolling pin like a scroll) and bring it to your pie dish so the corner sits on the middle of the dish. Unfold the dough and lightly push down so it covers the inside of the pie dish. Tear off the excess and push the dough on the sides outward so it adheres. All this probably sounds like gibberish to you so do yourself a favor and click here.

4. Retrieve the second disk and roll that out, too. When it’s ready to go, fill the pie dish with the chicken filling.

5. Bring the rolled out dough to the pie dish the same way you did the first one. Tear off excess so you have a sheet of dough that is slightly larger than your pie dish. Lightly press down so it meets the pie dish. It will naturally also meet the first sheet of dough and they will seal. Fold over the excess and press a fork down the edges to decorate. My pie filling was still very warm and it was starting to make my dough a little sticky. My first attempt at cutting slits on top (to allow air to escape while the pie bakes) turned out looking really sloppy. It’s much better to stab the dough. Stab it! This dough is not the boss of me!

6. Bake in the oven for 45 minutes. I watched the thing like a hawk. I guess it was the boss of me. I didn’t mind. Just look at this thing.

‘Did I really make this thing or am I drunk?’

I had some leftover dough and pie filling so I made 2 mini chicken pot pies. Only had enough dough to cover the top actually. But I was emboldened by my first pie and made leaves with the scraps. I don’t know what business leaves have hanging out on top of chicken pies but whatever. Check check check it.

And now, for a look inside. You’re supposed to let the pie set for 10 minutes before serving but I just couldn’t help hacking into the thing.

The crust is delicious – buttery and flaky, so worth the trouble. I think the pie filling was a bit underseasoned. When tasting the pie filling, remember that you’ll be eating it on and under a crust so season juuuust to the left of over. Also, keep an eye on it as it bakes. Some of the stabs I made on the pie crust closed at some point like some miraculous healing because the dough was so sticky. If they do, just stab it again. I should really stop saying ‘stab’.

All in all, I couldn’t be happier with my first pie from scratch. That’s right, from scratch. Yay! I love pie! I love life! I love you all!

Fun Food Fact: The crust of the world’s first pot pies were not eaten. Its purpose was to create a barrier between the filling and the metal pot that it was cooked in.

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North Korean Cupcakes

April 15, 2012 3 Comments

Don’t get too excited. It’s just that these cupcakes have something in common with the recent North Korean rocket launch – failure. I’m a little perplexed that my experience was so different from everyone else’s in the comments section but then again, I did make a couple changes to the original recipe and maybe they tipped the scale. Like using Cerveza Negra in lieu of Guinness. And swapping the vegetable oil with applesauce. I also reduced the sugar by a quarter cup so my recipe looked like this:

1 330 mL bottle Cerveza Negra

1/2 cup whole milk

1/2 cup applesauce

1 T vanilla extract

3 eggs

3/4 cup sour cream

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1 3/4 cups sugar

3/4 cup natural unsweetened cocoa powder

1 1/2 t baking soda

1/2 t salt

Unsalted butter, melted, to coat muffin pans

1. Preheat oven to 350 F/175 C. Grease muffin pans with melted butter and set aside. Put the Cerveza Negra, milk, applesauce, and vanilla in a large bowl and whisk together.

2. Add in the eggs one at a time and whisk. Whisk in the sour cream.

3. Whisk the flour, sugar, salt, cocoa powder and baking soda in a medium bowl to get everything combined. Pour this dry mixture into the big bowl with the wet ingredients and whisk. I think this step might have been my first red flag but more on that later.

4. Pour the batter into prepared muffin pan. Pop in the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes. A toothpick inserted into one of these babies should come out dry when they’re done. I was a little concerned because this batter was really runny but they were fine. My muffin pan is smaller than the standard ones and they were done in about 15 minutes.

Well, OK, they weren’t really fine. I tried one of them after they’d been cooled and it was too…fluffy. This was to be expected since they are introduced as “light in texture” but it wasn’t welcome. It made me think about how beer is used in deep-fry batter sometimes to make it light and crispy and how I really shouldn’t be reminded of that when I’m eating a cupcake. As for the promise of “heavy in the chocolate department”, well, it must be a very small department. Worst of all, some of my cupcakes were really lopsided. Dark brown and lopsided, they looked not like they came out of the oven but out of my ass.

5. I had to do something about the flavor and texture so I decided to throw in whatever chocolate I had lying around the house. I dumped in a handful of leftover semi-sweet chocolate chips. A few small blocks of unsweetened baking chocolate were grated in. It probably made about 3/4 cup chocolate.

Some of them were lopsided still but the chocolate was an improvement. For your viewing pleasure, I chose the least turdly looking cupcake and frosted it with cardamom lemon cream cheese frosting (leftover lemon cream cheese frosting + 1 t ground cardamom).

A few reflections on hindsight. Apparently, the lopsided cupcake problem has to do with baking in a convection oven which I do. The batter is too delicate for the air coming out of the fans. Some people even go as far as saying their muffins got molested and I totally get it. The red flag I mention earlier has to do with whisking my dry and wet ingredients. The original recipe says to fold in the dry ingredients which, to me, implies that the wet ingredients have some body like whipped cream or whipped egg whites. My wet ingredients came together with very little body and my attempt to fold ended up in blobs of cocoa-flour floating around in the bowl. Whisking was the only way. Something must have already gone wrong here. Which brings me to the Cerveza Negra. It’s sold in 330 mL bottles which I thought was the equivalent of a 11.2 oz bottle of Guinness. It is in US fluid ounces but I probably should have converted with UK fluid ounces. There is approximately a 12 mL difference. Aside from the different make of the beers, could this be the reason for my cupcakes’ texture and flavor in the scientific world of baking?

These question will haunt me, I tell you! Any kind of enlightenment will be most appreciated.

Fun Food Fact: I’m too deflated to do one today.

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Trio of Soup: Tarragon Pea, Curried Carrot & Roasted Tomato

April 5, 2012 1 Comment

My boyfriend is a candy fiend. He likes them all – jellies, taffies, gummies, rocks – and at all times. I found him a couple times fast asleep while clutching a bag of insert candy of the day here. So it wasn’t an absolute shocker when he was told by his dentist about a week ago that he needed six root canals. The real shocker was that my boyfriend went to his next appointment for his first three root canals and decided that he might as well just get it all over with. Six root canals in one sitting. Nucking futs.

Like the caring selfless girlfriend that I am, I decided to turn all this into a bloggable event. I picked up some pretty tea cups, decided on three different kinds of soup and documented the whole thing. All for my boyfriend.

Tarragon Pea Soup

I had a lot more peas than the original recipe states so I adjusted the rest of the ingredients as I saw fit. Once I started pureeing it in the blender, it became obvious that I had way too much liquid and I had to throw out maybe half of it to achieve the consistency that I wanted. I shouldn’t have sneaked in the leftover milk I had in the fridge. On the bright side, the consistency is easy to correct since you’ll be pureeing this in batches. Oh, and no Parma breadsticks for us.

For the tarragon pea soup, you’ll need:

600 g frozen peas

1 large onion

butter (about 2 T)

1 L chicken stock

a small bunch of tarragon (I used about 2 T)

142 mL cream

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1. Thaw the frozen peas and put them on a strainer to drain. Chop the onions. Melt the butter in a large pot and throw in the onions. Cook until they turn translucent.

2. Add stock, peas and chopped tarragon and leave to simmer for about 3 minutes. I don’t cook much with tarragon so this was really the first time I had a moment with it. It’s really unlike anything although it smells kinda like licorice.

3. When done, add the cream. Remove from the stove and puree in batches in a blender. Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

 

Curried Carrot Soup

This soup was delightfully easy to make! I went through some of the comments on this recipe and decided to reduce the curry powder (much easier to adjust something you have too little of instead of too much) and add some cumin instead of cayenne pepper because I didn’t have any. I would’ve added cumin with or without the cayenne, really.

To make curried carrot soup, you’ll need:

4 large carrots

1 T olive oil

2 T butter

1 medium onion

6 cups chicken stock

1 generous T curry powder

1 1/2 t ground cumin

salt to taste

cream to garnish

1. Melt the butter in olive oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add in chopped onions and carrots and cook for about 15 minutes. That’s much longer than the original recipe states. One of the commenters pointed out that the longer they’re cooked like this the better the caramelization will be. Sounds good to me.

2. Add in 4 cups of the stock, curry powder, cumin and about a teaspoon of salt. Once it comes to a boil, cover and simmer until the carrots are tender, about 15 minutes. When done, puree in batches in a blender. The leftover stock is for you to adjust the consistency. You can bring the pureed soup back into the pot and do that as well as adjust the seasoning.

 

Roasted Tomato Soup

Last but definitely not least in flavor is this roasted tomato soup. It turned out a bit too tart for my taste but that’s adjustable with some stock and salt so no problem. I added some Italian seasoning but opted not to use cream since I already had a creamy soup in the mix.

To make, you’ll need:

1 14.5 oz. can diced tomatoes

olive oil (1/4 cup as stated is too much. Drizzle as you see fit.)

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1 stalk celery

1 small carrot

1 medium onion

2 cloves garlic

1 cup chicken stock

1 bay leaf

2 T butter

a dash Italian seasoning

1/4 cup basil

 

1. Drain the diced tomatoes on a strainer set on top of a bowl. Set aside tomato juice for later. Spread out the drained tomatoes on a baking tray and drizzle with olive oil. Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper and roast in an oven preheated to 230 C/450F. Original recipe says they should be done in about 15 minutes but I found that mine took much longer and even then not quite satisfactorily roasted. Probably because they go in the oven still pretty wet. This is how they looked after about 30 minutes in the oven. I would have liked to char them more but my boyfriend was gonna be home soon so I had to make do.

2. While the tomatoes are roasting, chop up the celery, carrots, onions and garlic. Heat some olive oil in a medium saucepan. When ready, add in all the vegetables and cook until softened, about 10 minutes.

3. Add in chicken stock, reserved tomato juice, butter, bay leaf, Italian seasoning and roasted tomatoes. Cover and simmer until all the vegetables are very tender, about 15 minutes.

4. When done, remove from heat and add in chopped basil. Discard the bay leaf and puree in a blender.

I poured each soup into a tea cup and garnished the pea soup with a lone tarragon leaf, the tomato soup with basil and the carrot soup with a sloppy swirl of cream fanned outwards with a chopstick. For a more elegant result, make sure the swirl is much thinner and use a toothpick.

The tarragon pea is a little boring. I see why the original recipe included Parma bread sticks. And I’m on the fence about tarragon. I can see how it could be good in some other preparation but I don’t think this was it. The curried carrot is delicious. It’s so sweet that for a second I wondered if I put sugar in it! I had to marvel at the natural sweetness of carrots and onions. The roasted tomato is really good, too. I couldn’t resist and had to have some this morning with a grilled cheese sandwich. Off the charts.

Oh, and the boyfriend! He’s recovering nicely while I look into other bloggable non-solid foods to make for him, thank you.

 

Fun Food Fact: Food for babies, geriatrics and root canal patients are interchangeable.

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Fresh Mint and Oreo Gelato

April 4, 2012 Leave a Comment

I’ve been looking for a mint ice cream recipe for a long time and I was really intrigued when I found this recipe that uses fresh mint instead of mint extract or creme de menthe neither of which I could ever seem to find. This was also around the time the Oreo cookie turned 100 years old. Ding ding ding! A spin on the classic pairing of mint and chocolate chip – mint and Oreo!

A few words on the difference between ice cream and gelato before we proceed. I read up on it a little bit and it seems like gelato is made with more milk (as opposed to cream) and egg yolks than ice cream. The former also has less air which makes for a richer and denser product. Given these criteria, I wondered if every batch of ice cream I churn out of my ice cream maker would be considered gelato but then the one I made with cornstarch instead of eggs to thicken came to mind. I therefore conclude that gelato is the honest and wholesome-goodness version of ice cream.

Let’s make some, shall we? To make fresh mint and Oreo gelato, you’ll need:

 

2 cups milk

3 egg yolks

1/2 cup sugar

vanilla extract to taste

1 bunch fresh mint

7 Oreo cookies

green food coloring

 

1. Separate the mint leaves from the stems. Wash them and blot with a paper towel to dry. Transfer mint into an airtight container (or medium bowl) and pour in the milk. Cover and let steep in the refrigerator for 24 hours.

2. Strain the milk. From this point onwards, I stopped following the procedure of the original recipe and reverted back to the way I know how to make custard. I followed it to the letter the first time and I ended up curdling my custard. Twenty-four hours of waiting for mint milk gone to waste, it was so tragic! It was absolutely my fault of course, I’m not used to having two things going at the same time. Anyway.

3. Transfer the milk into a medium pan on low heat. Add the sugar and stir until it dissolves.

4. Beat the egg yolks in a small bowl. Add some of the scalded mint milk into the bowl and whisk to temper the eggs. Add back into the pan. Add vanilla extract.

5. Keep stirring and cook until the mixture thickens enough to coat your spatula. When you run your finger down the spatula, the line should hold. Weee, custard!

6. Transfer the custard to a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. The plastic wrap will prevent a skin from forming on top as it cools. Chill in the refrigerator for about 3 hours up to overnight.

7. Once the custard is chilled, we can color! You can skip this step but I felt weird about mint ice cream, oh sorry, gelato that isn’t green. And I was excited to try my hand at coloring custard, really. I started with a drop and worked my way to the perfect green for me. I only needed about three.

8. Churn the custard in the ice cream maker. While it’s churning, break up the Oreos into pieces. Try not to eat too many.

9. When the gelato is churned to soft-serve consistency, drop in the Oreo pieces. Finish churning and transfer to an airtight container. Freeze the rest of the way in the freezer.

So pretty!

 Flavor-wise, it’s lacking in the mint department and oddly kinda tastes like the basil ice cream I made before. Or, since they both seem to share this particular flavor, maybe it is the taste of plant life. Bottom line is, it just doesn’t deliver the same punch of minty-ness as commercial mint ice cream. However, the faint mint flavor with the Oreos is nice and I find myself reaching for it. Did I mention gelato has less fat than ice cream? *evil grin*

 

Fun Food Fact: I’m not joking. Gelato really has less fat than ice cream.

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