Pork Pie Heaven
This is the beautiful Pork Pie I made. It was very ruff around the edges but it tasted wonderful. I used a Lakeland Pork Pie tin to cook it, and a number of different recipes combined. The tin itself comes with a recipe inside, and I used this as a quality reference, as it was developed to fit the tin.
Using traditional hot-water pastry, bacon, cured pork and quails eggs to finish it off. Instead of using traditional supermarket bacon, I went to a very good local butcher and told him what I wanted to make, he was then able to recommend cuts and his own personally cured pork. I highly recommend you do the same if you want to create a traditional (pink inside) pork pie.
I made mine with a friend, hence the 'T' and 'P' to mark our own work - immature but fun.
Below is the uncooked pie. For a more detailed idea of method have a look at Pease Pudding.
- Preheat the oven 180ºC.
- Put all the meat in a food processor and blitz until more combined but not throughly chopped.
- Add finely chopped herbs and seasoning, and lightly blitz again.
- Boil eggs and allow to cool before peeling.
- Mix the pastry and after it has cooled a little (it must stay warm to be workable! This is very important!!!) and is more malleable and less floppy line the tin with 2/3 of it, reserving a 1/3 to make the lid.
- Fill the pastry lined tin with 1/4 of meat in the bottom.
- Add the eggs spaced equally across the bottom of the tin. Then stuff the remaining pork mix over and around the eggs so they are covered with a flat top of meat.
- Add the lid of pastry and pinch it shut against the tin lining pastry.
- Poke a hole in the lid to allow the stock to be poured in after cooking. Bake for 30-45mins.
- Allow to cool before mixing the stock and gelatine together and pouring it through the hole. Then refrigerate for at least an hour.
- Remove from tin, slice (hopefully to show the lovely egg inside) and enjoy!
