Cheese & Onion Pie

Cheese & Onion Pie

As well as my addiction to foodie mags I love me a good Saturday morning foodie show and start most weekends in the very fine company of James Martin and assorted chums.  Like Simon Hopkinson, for instance, who’s recipe this is (or strictly speaking his mum’s) and the sight of it being made was enough of a lure to buy the cookbook that went along with the show!  Somehow, I managed to sweet talk/con Hubby (*definitely con – Hubby) into making it this weekend (I think I called dibs on making the soup and left him with the pie…) and I have to say, it tasted just as good as I thought it would.

The slow cooking onions were soft and so sweet, which went perfectly with the sharp oozy cheese they were layered between, and the pastry literally crumble-melts in your mouth.  We ate it still warm with a big bowl of homemade soup, feeling particularly productive as a result, but I suspect it will taste even better still when Hubby has it at work tomorrow for lunch 🙂

Simon Hopkinson’s recipe uses Lancashire cheese only, but Hubby and I found it a little crumbly and quite salty so we swapped out half the amount required for a lovely Mull of Kintyre cheddar instead and it worked a charm, which is what we’ve listed in the ingredients bit.  If you’re a big fan of Lancs cheese though I’d go with Simon Hopkinson and just use 100% of that.

Cheese & Onion Pie
Sweet slow cooked onions go perfectly with sharp cheese in this Lancastrian pie.
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Cook Time
50 min
Cook Time
50 min
Ingredients
  1. Stuff you’ll need for the pastry…
  2. 60g butter
  3. 60g lard
  4. 200g self-raising flour
  5. pinch of salt
  6. 2-3 tbsp ice-cold water
  7. butter for greasing
  8. Stuff you’ll need for the filling…
  9. 25g butter
  10. 3 onions, thinly sliced
  11. 1 teacupful of water
  12. salt and plenty of freshly ground pepper (white is recommended over black)
  13. 125-150g Lancashire cheese, coarsely grated
  14. 125-150g Scottish cheddar cheese, coarsely grated
  15. a little milk to seal and glaze the pastry
Other stuff you’ll need…
  1. loose-bottomed tart tin (approx 20cm wide x 4cm deep)
Make the pastry first:
  1. Cut the butter and lard into small chunks and place in a large bowl with the flour and the salt. Gently rub the fat into the flour using your fingertips until it all looks and feels like very coarse breadcrumbs. If you’ve reached this point and it doesn’t look like breadcrumbs, but like dough, the best thing you can do is start again and make sure the fats are a room temp, as above, as you won’t be able to incorporate the water very well otherwise. That said, if you do have a breadcrumb-like texture, then mix in the water to bind the mixture together before kneading the dough until the water is well amalgamated. Don’t be afraid to go with the full 3 tablespoons if you think it needs it. Dust it with flour and pop it into a plastic bag, and place in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. You’ll want to take it out of the fridge 15 minutes before you’re ready to roll it, to give it time to come back up closer to room temperature.
  2. While your dough is chilling, put the oven on to 180C/350F/gas mark 4 and pop the baking sheet in to preheat as well – this will help cook the base of the pie more evenly.
Make the filling:
  1. Melt the butter in a large roomy pan before adding the onions. Turn the heat down low and allow the onions to gently wilt and stew for about 10 minutes, you don’t want them to colour. Once the 10 minutes is up season and add the water, then leave it to keep cooking still over that gentle heat with an occasional stir until almost all the liquid has cooked off. Tip the cooked onions onto a plate, spreading them out to help them cool, and set aside.
Make the pie:
  1. Lightly butter your tart tin, and set aside.
  2. Retrieve your pastry from the fridge and tear about 2/3rds of it off. Roll this out until it’s moderately thin, and then line the base and sides of the tin with it. Use a fork to gently prick the base of the pastry all over in a random and moderate spread, then cover the base with half the onions and then half the grated cheese, and then repeat with the remaining halves.
  3. Roll out the remaining 1/3rd of the pastry to a similar thickness (or thinness!) as before, making sure it’s wide enough to cover the tin, and then gently lay it on top of the filling. Brush the edges of the pastry where the edges of the pie case and lid meet with milk to seal the lid before pressing the edges together gently to seal. Trim off any excess overhang, and then brush the surface of the pie with milk.
  4. Before you pop it in the oven, use the point of a sharp knife to make 3 small incisions into the centre of the pie. Lightly drag the point of the knife across the surface of the pie, not enough to cut through it just enough to mark it, to creat a lattice pattern. Lastly gently press the tines of a fork around the edge of the crust to help seal the pie.
  5. Put the pie on your preheated baking sheet and bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 40-50 minutes, until the pie is golden and you can see a wee bubble of cheese and onion juices coming up through those holes you made in the middle.
  6. Once your pie is out of the oven, leave it for at least 20-30 minutes before trying to remove it from the tin. It also helps to run a butter knife gently all the way around the edge of the tin, and then place the pie on top of something like a can before slowly easing the side of the tin down and off.
  7. Cut into wedges, and enjoy while its still warm or at room temperature.
A few notes from Hubby
  1. Make sure that your fats, the lard and butter, are at room temperature before you start. This will ensure that they’re much easier to work through the flour without a lot of kneading involved. Over-mixing will toughen the dough and just result in problems later.
  2. On the onions; I, being a fussy sceptic who loves his seasonings, added two of my ‘secret ingredients’, in a few dashes of Maggi Liquid Seasoning and a spoonfull of Chicken Powder (think fluffed chicken stock cube), and the flavour most certainly did not suffer as a result. Also, the recipe says ‘teacupful of water’ – I took a normal tea/coffee mug and had it about half-full, and this worked a treat.
Adapted from Simon Hopkinson
Adapted from Simon Hopkinson
fifigoesnom https://www.fifigoesnom.com/
Blueberry Glazed Pork Pies

Blueberry Glazed Pork Pies

Wow! Christmas, pre during and post, was BUSY! Lots of time spent celebrating the holidays with family, and mostly by eating, marvellous 🙂 So rather than dwell on how quiet this blog has been let’s just move swiftly along and greet the New Year with a new recipe!  And what a fab new recipe it is too! I do like a cheeky pork pie, but Hubby isn’t a big fan of the jelly (understatement…), so when I saw this recipe in the Great British Food magazine I thought it might keep both of us happy.

I am happy to report that it most certainly did, and then some!  They may not be picture perfect (somewhere Paul Hollywood is twitching and he doesn’t know why!) and half of my bluberries may have popped, but I love the homemadeyness of them all being a little uneven, and they were hella good fun to make 🙂 And the joy of readymade pastry makes this recipe a total doddle and something you can rustle up in a little under half an hour.

Any worries I might have had that the blueberries would be a little tart were for naught as they sweetened up perfectly when combined with the redcurrant jelly and were a wonderful counterpoint to the savouriness of the sausagemeat. Next time I make these I’m going to experiment with the filling…  Our local butcher, Crombies, does an amazing pork and caramalised onion sasuage that I think would work an absolute treat!  And!  My sister in law gave me a bottle of her delicious homemade bramble vinegar which I’m going to sub in for the red wine vinegar as I think it’ll be amazing with the blueberries.

We ate half our batch for lunch, and popped the rest in the fridge to snack on. I suspect they won’t last the weekend…

Blueberry Glazed Pork Pies
Yields 12
Sweet blueberries compliment savoury sausagemeat, stuffed in lovely pastry pie cases.
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Prep Time
20 min
Cook Time
35 min
Total Time
55 min
Prep Time
20 min
Cook Time
35 min
Total Time
55 min
Stuff you’ll need…
  1. 65g dried sage and onion stuffing mix
  2. 500g readymade chilled shortcrust pastry
  3. flour for rolling or waxy baking parchment (really!)
  4. 3 spring onions, snipped into slices
  5. 400g good quality pork and herb sausages, poked out of their skins
  6. freshly ground black pepper
  7. 1 egg, beaten to glaze
  8. 175g blueberries
  9. 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
  10. 2 tbsp redcurrant jelly
  11. 1 tsp cornflour mixed with 1 tbsp water
  12. butter for greasing the muffin tin
Other stuff you’ll need…
  1. 11.5 cm biscuit cutter or small coffee cup saucer
  2. 12 section muffin tin
Stuff to do first…
  1. Put the oven on and preheat to 180C/350C/Gas Mark 4. Lightly butter the muffin tin, including the areas around each of the muffin cups. Wash the spring onions.
Bake!
  1. Start by making up the stuffing mix per your packet instructions – I used Paxo – and set to one side.
  2. Roll out your pastry, either on a floured surface or be sneaky like Hubby and snub flour completely by rolling your pastry out between two sheets of waxy baking parchment! Properly genius!! You’re aiming to get the pastry quite thin yet sturdy enough to hold the filling without breaking when they’re cooked and you’re gently wrestling them out of the muffin tin (can you tell I learnt this the hard way?!).
  3. Cut out 12 circles using the biscuit cutter/saucer, re-rolling the pastry until you have enough. Then gently press the pastry circles into the muffin tin (using the ball end of the rolling pin to lightly poke them in works a treat) so that the pastry stands a little above the top of the tin in a wavy edge. Set to one side.
  4. Snip the spring onions into your mixing bowl and then snap on the CSI vinyl gloves and get the sausages! Using scissors or a sharp knife, cut a slit up the length of the sausage skin and then poke all the sausagemeat out into the bowl with the spring onions. Give it a good few grinds of fresh black pepper (since the sausages were seasoned before they were cased you shouldn’t need to add any salt) and then get your hands in there and mix it all up. Tip the stuffing in and mix that all in too.
  5. Divide your sausagemeat mixture between each of the pastry cases, using the back of a spoon to even them out.
  6. Brush the top edges of the pastry cases with a little beaten egg, then pop into the oven and bake for 25-30 minutes, until that top edge of the pastry is golden and the filling is cooked through. Leave them to cool for 15 minutes, then carefully free them from the muffin tin (I found a butter knife really helpful) and place them on a cooling rack.
  7. While the pies are cooling down, put thevinegar and redcurrant jelly into a small saucepan. Stir on a medium heat for 2-3 minutes until the jelly has melted and then add the berries. Mix the cornflour and water to get a smooth paste and then stir into the berries and cook until the juices have thickened a little and the berries are starting to soften – don’t cook the berries for too long or they’ll pop. Leave to cool before spooning over the pies (if you’ve overdone the cornflour then spoon while its hot because once it cools it will be impossible to work with, again, as I found out the hard way!).
Notes
  1. The cornflour may take the sheen off the blueberry topping mix in which case brush a very VERY little bit of olive oil over the berries to give them a glaze. Scoff!
Adapted from Great British Food Magazine
Adapted from Great British Food Magazine
fifigoesnom https://www.fifigoesnom.com/