Some cooler weather and a glut of David Blackmore's wagyu beef shin in our fridge has caused a dramatic increase in slow-cooked beef dishes at the Garden Club. With some excess mushrooms at hand, I thought it would be a good idea to cook up a beef and mushroom braise knowing that hubby would be eager to launch the first festival of the pie for 2008.
For this auspicious event we decided to be more diligent than usual and use differing pastries for the case and lid - short and puff respectively. And with that in mind, we then thought we'd go the (mostly) whole hog and get the pastry everyone's raving about...
Having done the legwork, I passed the reins over to hubby - a pie fiend of English origin and owner of a Sunbeam Pie Maker (an admission that has been met with incredulity by other bloggers domiciled in Australia and USA). As we don't even own a microwave, this may seem like a strange household appliance, but it was given to him (by me) on our first Christmas - I thought it would really tickle him, and seven and a half years on I think that's what keeps him with me!
After some lacklustre pies reviewed over at PiEcon, these pies packed with natural flavour were a refreshing change.
The pie maker has its limitations, the first being what it does with the pastry. Unlike an oven the pie maker has some level of contact with the surface of the pie, thus the lid does not develop the proper puffy flakiness it should. The case is less impeded, although blind baking in a pie shell would certainly give a better result. Hubby noted that the case "shrinks" as he fills it and I explain the blind baking principle (with the help of the back of the packet) to him.
The second frustration with the pie maker is the size of the mould - it's about 2/3 of the average pie. This makes it small for a chunky filling and as you can see, the moisture seems to be squeezed out of the fillings.
To address this, we chucked the mixture into the food processor, resulting in a filling with less texture, but a vastly more portable pie.