Brisket puff pastry pie.

[paulca]

I just put it on.  I have no idea how to cook a brisket, so I just made it up.  Slow pot roast.  Don't even need to bother with the oven.  An actual slow cooker would be nice, but my gas stove goes low enough.

1 (or 2) diced onion caramelised with basil, salt and pepper and a little veg oil.
Add the tied brisket to the pot.
When it starts trying to burn the onions, add water to glaze the pan.  (harvesting lots of lovely caramel onion).
After a while doing this add 1 beef stock cube to a cup of boiling water and add.
Top up with boiling water so the meat is just uncovered.
Add a packet of mixed frozen veg.  Stir.
Put the lid on, put the stove on a very very small heat and leave it for 2 hours.
Carefully turn the brisket, top up the water if necessary and return to a low heat covered for another 2 hours.

Eventually, lift the brisket out to rest.
Add a cup of marrow fat peas and boil off the excess of the pot remains.  This will become the gravy and main pie "padding".

Slice or pull the brisket into chunks, line the pie dish with them. 
Add gravy granules to the "pot remains" if needed to thicken.
Spread generously over the brisket.
Carefully lay re-rolled puff pastry over the pie dish.  Trim.

Throw into an oven pre-heated at 225C set immediately down to 200C for 25mins.  Rest for 5 minutes.  Serve.  You want to puff as much of the pastry as possible before it sags into the filling.... without burning the top layer.

Proper beef pie.  You can use pot-roast, silverside, top side, I even made it with diced rump steak.  The problem is always the same.  You never seem to have enough actual meet in the pie.  So this is why I moved to using briskets and joints instead of steak peices and making something similar to the crap you buy in the supermarket.

Cheap ... no.  A brisket here for a 12" pie is about 1kg and about £10.  So all in the pie is about £12.  (+gas).  It would make the main meal for 2 or 3 with nothing worth talking about remaining.

[themadhippy]

Brisket was my goto beef joint,used to be dirt cheap then it became trendy or sumthing  and the price shot up.My cooking method was  to wrap it in tinfoil with onion garlic and a few mushrooms,chuck in a low oven and forget about it for a  good  few hours

[coppercone2]

its easy with sous vide i don't recommend doing it any other way because its just really god damn inefficient compared to a insulated tub. Like holy hell its expensive to begin with and people heat it for like a day. Put liquid smoke in the vacuum bag if you want the flavor but IMO it is NOT required.

Brisket in a pie does sound good, if its sliced thin, as an alternative to ground meat products which make all meat pies, tacos, burritos..... kind of generic.

Searing it after this method of cooking might make it more interesting then just boiling, but I have a feeling europeans that see seared meat in a pie are like WTF


Other concerns:

-adding vegetables to cook for 2 hours seems like alot. I figure add them last 25 minutes to maintain some texture. This is a key to making good strognoffs and stuff IMO, to time all the additions so they cook for the minimum amount of time to maintain the nutrients and also flavor/texture of the food. For the traditional american things, you would add celary 5-15 minutes before finish. Potatoes maybe 1 hour. I guess for a pie it needs to be softer but it still seems excessive.

Onions I don't know.. maybe you want those dissolved.. but I think they will basically turn liquid after all this cooking time. But I have done the slow cooker meat on bed of onions for a long time and it usually works OK, it seems to be part of recipies to cook onions a long time (and garlic too). But carrots and potatoes and green veggies are typically added much later before finish.

[paulca]

its easy with sous vide i don't recommend doing it any other way because its just really god damn inefficient compared to a insulated tub. Like holy hell its expensive to begin with and people heat it for like a day. Put liquid smoke in the vacuum bag if you want the flavor but IMO it is NOT required.

Brisket in a pie does sound good, if its sliced thin, as an alternative to ground meat products which make all meat pies, tacos, burritos..... kind of generic.

Searing it after this method of cooking might make it more interesting then just boiling, but I have a feeling europeans that see seared meat in a pie are like WTF


Other concerns:

-adding vegetables to cook for 2 hours seems like alot. I figure add them last 25 minutes to maintain some texture. This is a key to making good strognoffs and stuff IMO, to time all the additions so they cook for the minimum amount of time to maintain the nutrients and also flavor/texture of the food. For the traditional american things, you would add celary 5-15 minutes before finish. Potatoes maybe 1 hour. I guess for a pie it needs to be softer but it still seems excessive.

Onions I don't know.. maybe you want those dissolved.. but I think they will basically turn liquid after all this cooking time. But I have done the slow cooker meat on bed of onions for a long time and it usually works OK, it seems to be part of recipies to cook onions a long time (and garlic too). But carrots and potatoes and green veggies are typically added much later before finish.

Been considering a sous vide machine.  They are also handy for mashing beer to keep a consistent temp.

For me "Steak/Beef pie" does not use ground beef.  We would call that a "mince beef pie" which is a valid pie type, but usually on the cheaper end.  Beef pie should have lavish chunks of beef, but the beef much be tender enough that it dissolves with very little effort chewing.

The onions and veg I use as "stock"  They add flavour to the water cooking the meet and the steam/vapours.  Everything that goes it at the start of the boil falls into the "stock" category.  A lot of people who do this use a gauze of cheese cloth to filter it out and separate the fat from the resultant "stock" which is then thickened with granules to make gravy.

I just decided to skip all that nonesense.  The reason is, those people then struggle as what to do to "thicken up" the pie filling.  Adding padding and fillers and thickeners.  Why bother when you have a pan full of vegetable remains, vegetable glyrine, vegetable oils, vegetable jelly.  There is nothing wrong with it.  It's just 100% unfiltered stock which when reduced has the perfect balance of thickness to runniness to be the pie filling.... or an over-serving as gravy++.

If I want there to be any vegetables in the pie at the end, they get added after the boil, during or after the reduction of the "veg slurry".

[paulca]

In the end, I did the last 1 hour in the oven at 180.  I wanted the top layer to "roast" and caramelise further.  It just looked a bit "pale" after boiling alone.

Caramelise/The other reaction I can never remember, it's not "Reynolds"... no.  Help?

[coppercone2]

i just wonder if anyone else will make this in the summer months. i feel like this thread might get popular around October

i don't want that oven turned on for any reason

[coppercone2]

well the key to making things sear is dry ness.


I am not sure how you can make your pie brown better. More then likely, you would need to use a reduced water content dough on top, and do tricks like egg and sugar to add color, butter too. maybe something like that dough they use for wontons

For meat, you need to wrap it in cloth after salting it to get all the moisture out of the surface. I leave it in the fridge for a few hours if I have the time before pan frying after sous vide, and I get that crust. I really started getting filet mignon correct if I sous vide it with only pepper, then drain it, pat it down, salt it, and leave it wrapped in tissue paper in the fridge for a few hours to wick out surface moisture.

I suspect for a pastry, it just needs a different dough formulation for top and bottom. It might be as simple as separating it out and adding less water and a bit more oil for the top