Once again, I am stunningly late with this blog post, but here it goes.
For last week’s assignment, we were to make savory pies. Now I absolutely love chicken pot pies, and I certainly considered making one, but I also wanted to really try something different than what I was used to. You know, take this class as a time to expand my palate as well as my cooking repertoire. So, the recipes that I found were for a pie called a Tourtiere du Shack and a Root Vegetable Tarte Tatin (recipes found at the links). Both looked incredible and exciting, so I decided to make both so that I didn’t have to choose between them.
The Tourtiere du Shack is a double crust pie that combines pulled pork and ground pork with mushrooms, onions, and garlic. The pulled pork is braised for a few hours until it can be easily pulled apart, while the ground pork is boiled in the juice from the pulled pork. For this pie, I decided to make an all butter pie crust that also made use of apple cider vinegar and an egg yolk. My overall impression of the pie was that it tasted good but seemed a little bland. If I was to make it again, I think that I would cook the ground pork separately before boiling it and include some more spices when cooking both types of pork.
The Root Vegetable Tarte Tatin is a single crust pie made up of sweet potatoes, potatoes, parsnips, and carrots. Before this, I had never had a parsnip, but I definitely enjoyed the flavor, which was reminiscent of that of a carrot. This pie was pretty simple to make. I just roasted the vegetables with olive oil, salt, and pepper and made a simple caramel of sugar, water, and white wine vinegar. The caramel went on the bottom of the pie pan along with thyme and rosemary, and the roasted vegetables went on top of them in a single layer. I ended up with a lot of extra roasted vegetables this week because I didn’t follow the recipe’s directions for their sizes very closely. This isn’t exactly a problem as the vegetables are delicious by themselves, but it’s something to be aware of. What I should have done next was to sprinkle the cheese over the top of the vegetables (I used queso fresco instead of goat cheese because I don’t really like goat cheese), but I forgot and just put the lard and butter pie crust on top instead. I fixed this shortly after I put it in the oven by lifting up the edges of the crust and stuffing some cheese around the edges of the pie, but it definitely would have been better had it been more evenly distributed. I really liked this pie and would definitely make it again without changing a thing (except for getting smaller vegetables).
Stay tuned for decorative pies coming soon this week!
