Versatile pot pie.
It's a stew with a hat, a classic.
EQUIPMENT
Size 9 cast iron or other oven safe skillet of similar size; dutch oven also works
Knife
Rolling pin
Basting brush
Fork
INGREDIENTS
1 pie crust. Feel free to use a frozen pre-made crust but I’ve always found that an all-butter recipe is easy to throw together and not a big deal to make. Recipe below.
2 cups cubed cooked turkey, chicken breast, or mushrooms (See notes for more.)
2 carrots, diced
2 stalks celery, diced
1 medium onion, diced
1 medium potato cubed (optional)
1 cup frozen peas
2 cups turkey, chicken or vegetable broth
1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme
1 tablespoon parsley, more for garnish
2 teaspoons corn starch, mixed with 2 tablespoons water into slurry
3 tablespoons butter; 2 normal, 1 melted
½ cup milk if you want but I think that’s weird
Salt and pepper to taste
INSTRUCTIONS
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Roll out pie crust and trim to 1 inch larger than the circumference of your skillet or cut to equal size of the dutch oven. Cut two or three almond shaped holes radially 2 inches from the center, about one inch in length.
Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in your skillet or dutch oven over medium heat. Add onion, celery, carrot, potato if using and cook until onion is translucent. Salt and pepper to taste.
Add your meat or mushrooms and stir to incorporate thoroughly. Add broth until the vegetables are suspended in liquid, but not fully covered and allow to simmer for 10 minutes.
Add peas, herbs and more salt as needed and stir. If broth has cooked down substantially, add more.
Mix in cornstarch slurry and let bubble until the gravy thickens. This would be the time to add in the milk if you’re into that.
Remove skillet from heat and allow to cool for five minutes.
Place pie crust over the top of the skillet. Work quickly because it will start melting. Fold the edge under and press down over the lip of the skillet with a fork. If using a dutch oven just tuck it in around the edges.
Baste the top of the crust with melted butter.
Bake for 30 minutes or until the top of the pie is golden brown.
Let stand for 10 minutes before serving.
NOTES
This note is just for mushrooms. If you want to use mushrooms in this I suggest using 8 to 10 ounces of white or baby portabella mushrooms. Cut stems and caps into ½ inch pieces and put into a slightly oiled skillet heated over medium-high. Then don’t touch your mushrooms for like 8 minutes or even longer. Let the mushrooms release their liquid and then let the liquid evaporate so that the mushrooms can begin to brown. Then you can stir them and allow a little more browning to take place, about 3 minutes longer. Remove them from the skillet but don’t clean it out, just add the butter and stir it about to deglaze the pan and proceed with the recipe as directed.
Pot pie, meat pies in general, are probably one of the most intuitive foods that people have made since the birth of wheat-made dough. It’s incredibly obvious, a simple use of plain ingredients, and the pot pie specifically is a hallmark comfort food.
This is probably a personal thing I’ve noticed, but I feel like pot pie -- though incredibly easy and efficient -- has fallen out of style. It has an association with grandmother’s cooking, something midwestern or maybe just something easy and cheap from the frozen aisle.
Meat pies had their beginnings with the Greeks and Romans as an easy method for food preservation. Romans would heat and crack open pre-cooked pies and just eat the filling. Then, in the 16th century, the British revived the old Roman tradition of baking stew in dough and that’s basically all they ate for centuries. Increasingly ornate, with weirdly specific fillings.
The stargazy pie has whole sardines with their heads popping out of the crust. The “four and twenty blackbirds” nursery rhyme is actually illustrative of a bizarre practice of hiding live birds inside of a massive, ornate raised pie so that they would fly out when it was cut open.
In the 17th century, it became fashionable to adorn meat pies with the hollowed out bodies of swans or tail feathers of peacocks that were preserved and stabilized by wax or butters.
This shit is weird.
The Cornish pasty was a hand pie, just stew folded into dough and baked, and distributed as a portable snack for miners in Cornwall.
Wrapped in dough and baked, cooked meat is protected from yeasts and bacteria and is therefore kept from going rancid slightly longer than it might otherwise (for like two days, nothing extreme). Pie crust uses less flour than bread but still provides the energy and fullness of carbohydrates to the dish. Meat pies, simply, have always been a survival food. Maybe that’s why we don’t see much of them anymore.
The wisdom of a poster.
You don’t necessarily need to use all the vegetables listed, you can sub out the carrots with turnip or parsnip, for example. Leave out the celery if you want. There’s not a specific set of rules for the pot pie beyond mechanics: You build a thick stew and put a pie crust on it. Over the past year I’ve made mushroom and kale pot pies, personal pot pies in skillets and one with seitan. Go nuts.
BUTTER PIE CRUST
2 sticks very cold unsalted butter, cubed
2 ½ cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
¼ cup very cold water mixed with ¼ cup freezer vodka
In a large metal bowl, combine salt and flour. With your fingers or a fork, cut the butter into the flour until well integrated and crumbly, the occasional pea sized chunk of butter remaining is fine. Splash in ACV and then slowly drizzle in the cold water/vodka, a third at a time as you carefully fold it into the dough without overworking the flour or melting the butter. Watch and add liquid until it just comes together, then split the dough in two and form into 1 ½ inch disks. Wrap in plastic and chill in the fridge for at least two hours or until you need it. For a pot pie you only need one disk of dough. It’ll keep in the freezer for a week.