It took four hours of a Saturday afternoon to construct this gigantic pie.
The recipes available are all pretty similar, three different types of pork with herbs and spices surrounded by jelly and encased in a hot water pastry. This one based, again on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s, seems to be similar to most.
Ingredients
For the filling:
1kg pork shoulder
250g home made bacon
250g minced pork belly
12 finely sliced sage leaves
Several sprigs fresh thyme
salt to taste (my bacon was very salty)
2 teaspoons pepper smashed by the pestle in the mortar
teaspoon mace smashed as above.
Half teaspoon smoked paprika (no cayenne in the house)
A large fresh bay leaf
Jelly:
Ideally a stock made with pigs’ trotters. They were sold out the day I did this. I used a stock made with cheap ribs and improved the gelling with some two platinum leaves of gelatin that I had hanging around.
Hot water crust
100g dripping (couldn’t find Roy Hattersley)
100g butter
200ml water
550g plain flour
teaspoon or so of salt
2 beaten eggs
1 egg yolk to glaze after cooking
This epic in which I first made bacon and then piccalilli ends in beer, the only match to a decent Pork Pie. My preference would be a pint of Adnams. But a Mountain Goat Pale Ale from the bottle shop at the end of the street does the job.
First preheat the oven to 180C, which takes much longer than you realise to heat up properly – a couple o hours, actually.
For the hot water crust pastry, dump the dripping (or lard), butter and water in a bain marie and melt. Put the flour and salt in a mixing bowl and slosh the fatty mixture into it and mix. The end result should be have the softness of a proper natural bosom. Wrap in a towel, or cling film if you really must destroy the environment, and let stand in the fridge for one hour.
Next the meat, 250g of my homemade bacon is diced. A similar quantity of organic pork belly turns out to be a real pain in the arse to grind on my strictly amateur home machine. It blocks with the rind and I’d recommend have the butcher do this for you or use some fatty sausage meat instead.
1kg of pork shoulder is diced into 1cm cubed chunks – or smaller. As I mentioned while makin’ bacon, the meat combination should have a terrine-like texture rather than be one solid glump. So each meat is a different sized dice or minced.
Mix with the finely sliced sage, thyme (minus the twigs), mace, paprika (or cayenne) salt and pepper.
Now it’s time to roll our 2/3 of the delicate pastry fairly thick but not too thick – I went to about 50mm although HF-W recommends twice as thick which I think is a bit much. The important thing is to ensure that there are no imperfections as any gaps will later leak the molten jelly mix.
I carefully folded it into a tall 18cm high tin with a removable bottom. Equally a wider but shallower springform tin will do. I simply filled the raw pastry case to the top, dumped the meat in and stuck a bay leaf in the middle.
Roll the remaining pastry for the lid. Brush the lip of the base with egg yolk and pinch the base and lid together and pierce the a 1cm hole in the centre of the lid.
Cook at 180C for about half an hour and then 160C for another one and a quarter hours.
Remove the tin by sitting the base on a tall jar. Paint the lid and sides with more egg yolk and returned it to the oven until glazed.
When cool, inject the jelly through the gap in the lid. My syringe from the local needle exchange blocked and I wasn’t sure about borrowing the turkey baster from the girls next door. But a tiny funnel did the job. I left it overnight to cool while in parralell th epicalilli cured.
Is it perfect? With pickle and a beer it’s damn near it. But that depends on how spicy you like the filling, thick the pastry and where you stand on the question of jelly. For me I want a better ratio of pastry to the pork and jelly. Next time there will be more, smaller pies. And more beer.
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