Portable meat pies

I look forward to Wednesdays. That’s when The New York Times publishes its food section. I eat my lunch (usually leftovers or, recently, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches) as I read about new restaurants and recipes. This past week’s had a piece about meat pies, with accompanying recipes, and I was excited.

I don’t remember when I developed my fondness for meat pies. I think it might have been when I was in London and had my first meat pasty at high tea. Since that revelatory taste of meat and pastry, I’ve been hooked. I am especially fond of the portable meat pies, little treats you can eat as you go without cumbersome knife or fork and, if you wanted, could slip into your pocket. And, if the idea of meat wrapped in dough and cooked to be handy wasn’t awesome enough, it comes in cultural variations—think of the empanada, samosa, calzone, and, the venerable, Hot Pocket.

Even though I’ve eaten plenty of meat pies, I’ve never made one and took the recipe from The Times as my starting point. I was so excited at the idea of making meat pies that I doubled the recipe. I don’t know what I was thinking when I thought it would be a good idea to make so many individual pies, but I did.

I started by making the dough and substituted whole wheat flour for some of the white, thinking that I’d make it a little healthier. My efforts were thwarted when it came to the butter. The recipe called for 14 tablespoons, so, doubled, that made 28 tablespoons. I didn’t think that I was possible; that’s a lot of butter. I double and triple checked the recipe and my math, but they were right. In addition to butter, the recipe also called for six tablespoons (or 12 doubled) of shortening. This was not going to be a skimpy, low-calorie pie. I combined the flour, fats, salt, and ice water to make the dough. Once those little rounds were ready and resting in the refrigerator, I started working on the filling.

I sautéed two onions and three cloves of garlic. To that, I added diced Granny Smith apples, a cinnamon stick (I couldn’t find my ground cinnamon), salt and pepper, and raisins that had been soaking in chicken broth (the recipe called for dried currants and white wine, but I didn’t have any of either). Once the liquid evaporated, I turned off the heat and let the mixture cool a bit. Then, I added the ground pork, chopped sage, and toasted pine nuts.

I rolled out my disks of dough into equal portions, using the shape of a bowl to ensure that I had perfect circles, filled the dough with the pork mixture, sealed it shut, and marked the edges with the tines of a fork. Then, my little pies went into the oven for 40 minutes.

When the timer buzzed, I retrieved my pies from the oven and cut into one to check to see that the pork was cook. It was, and I took a bite of the steaming pie (burning both my finger tips and tongue in the process). The meat pie turned out better than I hoped. The crust was incredibly flakey and really buttery (though I think it didn’t really need all 28 tablespoons of butter), and the filling was a nice touch of sweet and salty. I ate two pies, wrapped up the other six that were cooked (hoping that Eleanor and Colin may want a pie as a snack for tomorrow’s movie), and put the uncooked five in the freezer. I’ll be eating meat pies for a while.