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You can perfect your pie with these pointers.
BY KRISTINA MERCEDES URQUHART
Successfully store, freeze and reheat your homemade pot pies.
BY KEVIN FOGLE
Pot pies and craft beers are a match made in heaven.
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COVER IMAGE BY
bonchan/ Shutterstock
Difficult to Define, Easy to Make
The humble pot pie comes filled with a fascinating history.
BY CHERYL MORRISON
Pot-pie toppings aren’t limited to pie crust. Shepherd’s pie comes covered with mashed potatoes.
when you hear the term “pot pie,” you might have a specific dish in mind. For me, it’s the Pennsylvania-Dutch style of chicken pot pie that I grew up eating — tender chunks of chicken, potatoes, carrots and onion plus thick, chewy egg noodles in a silken broth seasoned with nothing more than salt and pepper.
My family’s chicken pot pie is cooked in a pot, and it does involve dough (for the noodles), but it is actually a stew rather than a pie. Other types of pot pies are not cooked in pots; instead, they are baked in pie pans, Dutch ovens or casserole dishes. If your definition of “pot pie” includes Mexican empanadas, Cornish pasties and other regional foods wrapped in or covered with pastry, then pot pies also can be baked on cookie sheets.
Except for the Pennsylvania-Dutch version, pot pies have crusts that encase — or at least coverstewlike fillings. The fillings usually combine vegetables — often root vegetables, such as onions, potatoes and carrots—with meat or fish. Some omit the vegetables, though, and some use only meat.
Pot-pie crust is usually made with flour, but the cooking website Epicurious.com features a recipe for halibut pot pie with a covering of mashed potatoes. If that dish qualifies as a pot pie, so does shepherd’s pie, which generally has a mashed-potato crust.
Frequent Fillings
Meat can include poultry, beef, lamb, pork and fish. The meat might be cooked before it goes into the pie — or it might not.
Pot pies generally are simple, although few are as simple as a recipe in my 60-year-old copy of “The Joy of Cooking” (Scribner) for “Canned Stew Pot Pie.” It calls for dumping a 20-ounce can of “stew: beef, lamb, etc.” into an ovenproof pot; covering it with pie dough, biscuit dough or slices of bread buttered on both sides; and baking it at 400 degrees Fahrenheit until the covering appears light brown. (Mercifully, the authors —Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker — omitted this recipe from subsequent editions.)
A later edition of the same classic cookbook contains a chicken pot-pie recipe that starts with stewing a whole chicken and making 3 cups of gravy. The meat and gravy go into a baking dish. You then make a batter of flour, eggs, milk, salt, baking powder and butter; pour the batter over the meat and gravy; and bake it at 375 degrees F until light brown. The recipe notes that the crust will “soak up quite a bit” of the gravy. “Some cooks,” it says, “prefer a biscuit pie crust top that is cut to fit the casserole, baked separately and adjusted while hot over the cooked chicken.”
Root vegetables — including onions, potatoes and carrots — often play a starring role in vegetarian pot pies.
The term “pot pie” originated in England, where cooks baked meats in “coffins” that they formed by molding pastry to fit inside a pot or pie pan.