Greeting Gastronauts, this is Keef Cooks, I'm Keef and today I'm going to show you how to make a northern style
pork pie [ MUSIC ] I say 'northern style' because I've done pork pies before and you might call them
Midland style or Melton Mowbray style and the northern style pork pies are
somewhat different. Here's an odd thing... I grew up in the north of England and
lived here till I was 18 and I never had a proper northern style pork pie - and by
proper I mean hot out of the oven with the jelly still liquid and it dribbles down
your chin and makes a right mess of your shirt - that's what a northern style pork pie is. And if you get a good one - and this will be a good one - it's fantastic, so let's do it! Now the first thing we need to do is make the pastry - traditionally pork pies are always made with hot water pastry which might sound complicated but it's
actually the easiest pastry in the world So, ingredients for the pastry, I've got 500
grams of plain white all-purpose flour 250 millilitres of hot water and 200 grams of lard cut into small pieces and I've also got a teaspoon of salt. So I'll just mix the salt with the flour and then we'll melt the lard into the water - just pop them both into a
pan and stick that on high heat till the lard has melted. Here it is - molten lard in
boiling water and we just stir that into the flour and salt mix - and be
careful 'cos it is hot and you could burn yourself! That's pretty much mixed together and we pop it out onto the worktop and knead it for a little bit just to get everything properly combined We're not kneading it like bread, you know this is just to get everything mixed in and nice and smooth. And now we wrap this in plastic film and stick it in the fridge to cool down to room temperature. If you're in a hurry, obviously stick in the freezer but be careful not to freeze it. And while that's cooling, we'll get on with making the pork pie filling. Ok, for the filling you
need pork and you need seasoning So I"ve got 750 grams of minced pork and I've got one and a half teaspoons of my seasoning mix and this is made from 1 part salt, 2 parts ground white pepper and one part thyme or you could use sage if you prefer. All we need to do is mix this evenly into that And this will be enough to make twelve pork pies. Now we need to split this into 12 equal blobs and you can do that by eye or you can use scales. Each blob is going to be about 50 or 60 grams. Once you've made them, stick them in the fridge until you're ready to use them 'cos, you know, food safety Now to assemble the pies you need a bit of equipment. You need some tins to make them in I'm using these - they are actually pudding tins for making steak and kidney puddings in You could also use something like this - these are muffin tins - but these are a bit bigger You need a cutter or a glass that's the same diameter as your tin - and that's for cutting out the lids You need a rolling pin, a knife, some flour to coat the worktop with ... and your pastry Just put a load of flour on the worktop - that's possibly too much and ...some pastry You can use shop-bought pastry if you like but it would have to be shortcrust - I've never seen hot water pastry sold ready-made And we'll just roll this to about 3 millimetres thick - that's just under a quarter of an inch And now we just need to cut out 12 discs for our lids And we need to make a good sized hole in each one, so I'm using the end of a funnel that's about the right size and this is to let the steam out when it's cooking and to allow you to pour the jelly in at the end Now you need to get your tins ready - I'm buttering the inside even though these are non-stick - the usual thing applies - non-stick never works One thing you absolutely don't want with
a pork pie is for it to stick and make a hole 'cos then you lose your jelly - so I use a belt and braces approach of non-stick ... butter ... and then quite a lot of flour on the outside of the pastry as well.And that usually works So now we need to roll out some pastry for the bases, or cases I'm just going to cut this into more or less squares and put them in the tins Now this is a little bit tricky because you don't want to get any creases or folds in the pastry and you also don't want to get any holes in it, so take your time and be gentle with it and basically we're just stretching it down to the bottom of the tin. That's done, I can feel that's touching the bottom Just turn it over and trim the excess but
leave a bit of a rim to fix the lid on to So we just take one of our blobs of filling, pop that in, and moisten the rim with cold water and pop a lid on Press it down all the way round so it seals, and then lift up the edge. And if you want to do some fancy crimping Now's the time, but I'm not gonna Here's a little tip, if you've got long fingernails and you're worried about puncturing the pastry, just take a little ball of pastry
and use that to press the pastry down into the tin. Magic, eh? So you might have noticed I've only got four of those bigger tins so I'm doing the rest of them in this muffin tin And they're not ... the indentations are not as deep so we've got a kind of dome effect on the top One thing you need to do if you are using a tin like this is make sure that there's no pastry sticking around the rim otherwise you'll have a hard time getting it out without breaking it And now we need to preheat the oven
to 180 degrees Celsius One last little job before we put them in the oven is to glaze the tops with beaten egg and also I like to sprinkle some thyme on there just for decoration Now we're going to cook these for about 50 minutes all together just to make sure the pork is properly cooked all the way
through and so what we do we put them in for 20 minutes and then we'll take them
out and try to remove them from the tins so that the sides and bottoms can get cooked properly too Ok, they've had 20 minutes in the oven and now we're gonna try to get it out of the tin. Oh! Easy peasy and pop that on a baking sheet Now they go back in for another 30 minutes and I might turn them round halfway through And while the pies are cooking, we need to make up the other essential component - the jelly So I've got 400 mil of hot water, boiling water in fact with one chicken stock cube dissolved in it and then I've got about 50 mils of hot water from the tap, not boiling - and I'm going to use half a sachet of gelatine, that's a 12 gram sachet, so six grams of powdered gelatine and we just sprinkle it into the water give it a good stir to dissolve it, and then add that to the hot stock and I'll put that on a low heat to simmer for a bit, just to get everything properly dissolved So that's it, that's our four beautiful pies. The other ones in the muffin tins aren't quite ready but these are looking a bit spectacular. Now they need to cool down for about 15 minutes and then I'll show you how we get the jelly in Now to put the jelly in, I've got the jellied stock in a tall narrow glass because I'm using a syringe and it means you can get more in. If you haven't got a syringe you can do it the traditional way which is to insert a funnel into the big hole in the top but this is
neater, easier, quicker And a little bit jelly leaking out on the top is perfectly fine. Some people claim not to like this jelly but ... they're mad! It's not a proper pork pie if it hasn't got jelly in it I'm going to leave those for about 10 minutes and then I'm going to eat one. YES! Tradition with this kind of pie is that when it's hot the jelly is still runny and dribbles all down your chin That's part of the experience -
obviously when they get colder the jelly sets and that's still wonderful I've had a bit already - it's fantastic and so all the jelly has run out so you won't have the pleasure of
seeing me with jelly on the chin I've had quite a few pork pies in the
last few weeks but - mmm hmm - that's the best one And that's that, hope you enjoyed it. Now
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