The Last Slice

Today for lunch I had the last slice of the pie that I made when my niece and her boyfriend came over for dinner on Saturday night.

Ever since my stay in Bath I’ve had a taste for pie and I’ve been working on my technique. On Saturday I did something which I would not recommend as a general practice: I tried something completely new. In this case it was hot water pastry. I made a beefsteak, mushroom, and pearl onion handraised pie with a hot water pastry crust, sort of a fusion of traditional English cooking with French cooking. I served the pie with mashed potatoes, a tomato-based sauce, and a green salad.

It turned out beautifully but I can now see quite clearly that hot water pastry is one of those things that incredibly easy to make but tricky to make well. It has just four ingredients: butter (150g), water (160ml), flour (375g), salt (2g). Melt the butter in boiling water. Combine the dry ingredients. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients. Mix until well-blended. It could hardly be easier.

However, American flour just isn’t the same as English or even Australian flour. My sense is that plain English flour is probably somewhere in between our all purpose flour and our pastry flour which means that a pie crust made with our all purpose flour won’t be quite as flaky as it should be. The hydration of the flour might be different, too. Their butter isn’t the same, either. I’ll keep experimenting.

2 comments… add one
  • sam Link

    You catch The Great British Bakeoff last Sunday on PBS? They all had to make hot water crust pies, three of them stacked. Most of the pies were meat, though some were fruit. Those meat pies were humongous.

  • I watched it while I was working in the UK. One of my inspirations.

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