eG Cook-Off 56: Savory-Filled Pastry

[Darienne]

Hi PanCan, lovely tutorial. In case I just missed it...what kind of oil are you using? Thanks.

[Panaderia Canadiense]

I probably forgot to say! I use Girasol (Sunflower) oil for all of my frying. It has a ridiculously high smokepoint, almost no flavour, and it's less expensive than other things I might want to fry in (like butter).

[David Ross]

Wow, thanks for adding to your Cook-Off. I've learned about a whole different type of dough and a new type of oil for frying Empanadas.

[LindaK]

Everything looks delicious.

PanCan, I don't know that I've ever seen plantain flour, I'll need to look for it. The dough looks tender and flaky, hard to believe there's no fat in it.

The crawfish pie is an inspiration and makes clear that savory pies don't have to be individual pies. Though I have not made one for a while, here's a pic of a slice of b'stilla, which comes from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table. A phyllo dough filled with a creamy, savory-spiced chicken. Very good:

Visiting friends over the weekend, I had the chance to browse several Brazilian cookbooks, which were full of recipes for doughs and fillings for empadinhas. All very new to me. I took notes and if i can read my scribble, I'll give some a try.

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Linda, there's no added fat, but plantains on their own have trace amounts as part of the fruit (0.37 g per 100g, according to the USDA). However, you're quite right about the texture - it's light and flaky and just generally wonderful.

The brand of plantain flour I used is, according to the pack, imported by a company in Brooklyn, so it should be somewhere in the US! Try the Latin American groceries, but it should also be in Caribbean and Asian stores. Pretty much everywhere that uses plantains also uses the flour.

[Kerry Beal]

Jamaican patties - used the Emeril recipe online - used annatto powder to colour the dough.

The oven we are using here is not convection and I occasionally forget that you can't put a 3/4 sheet pan in a regular sized oven without mucking up the air flow. Consequently - it's a good thing you can't see the bottoms of these!

Not quite what I'm after. I think I'll try next with a cream cheese dough to which I'll add some curry powder and turmeric or annatto. I think the filling needs to be finer texture too.

[Kerry Beal]

Version 2 of the jamaican patties. Realized the patties we buy don't usually contain ground meat - so started with some blade (chuck to those of you south of the border), sauteed some onion with hot pepper, ginger and garlic, browned the beef, added curry powder and cooked the whole thing sous vide for 14 hours at 80C. Shredded the beef, added some mashed potato, some tomato, some additional seasoning until it tasted more like what I was after. Wrapped in cream cheese pastry to which I added some annato and some curry powder.

Forgot to brush with egg.

[Darienne]

Version 2 of the jamaican patties. Realized the patties we buy don't usually contain ground meat - so started with some blade (chuck to those of you south of the border), sauteed some onion with hot pepper, ginger and garlic, browned the beef, added curry powder and cooked the whole thing sous vide for 14 hours at 80C. Shredded the beef, added some mashed potato, some tomato, some additional seasoning until it tasted more like what I was after. Wrapped in cream cheese pastry to which I added some annato and some curry powder.

Forgot to brush with egg.

They look incredible. These were baked, yes?

[Kerry Beal]

Version 2 of the jamaican patties. Realized the patties we buy don't usually contain ground meat - so started with some blade (chuck to those of you south of the border), sauteed some onion with hot pepper, ginger and garlic, browned the beef, added curry powder and cooked the whole thing sous vide for 14 hours at 80C. Shredded the beef, added some mashed potato, some tomato, some additional seasoning until it tasted more like what I was after. Wrapped in cream cheese pastry to which I added some annato and some curry powder.

Forgot to brush with egg.

They look incredible. These were baked, yes?

Yup - baked.

[Panaderia Canadiense]

I've just realized we're completely ignoring the steamed pastries. To wit, here are some Momos, the Tibetan-Nepalese take on savoury pastries. Mine are stuffed with a spicy cheese-mushroom-minced lamb combination. The wrapper is simple dough - flour and water with a pinch of salt, steamed until firm and then fried in a little oil until they crisp and brown a bit.

[ChrisTaylor]

Heh, this Cook-Off was surprisingly unpopular. Time to act the necromancer and dig it up, for I am making a savoury-filled ... well, it's not pastry. But it's close enough. A cousin. A riff on cottage pie: I wanted to make a full meal out of it, so I bulked up the veg factor somewhat.

Started off browning the beef mince and then set it aside. Softened some onion, carrot, celery and capsicum then added garlic and chilli. When they were soft I added a can of tomatoes. Cooked it for some time (it's mid-week--'some' is about as precise as I get, unless you count ounces of liquids combined with dashes of other liquids and stirred with a takeaway chopstick as being precise) then added some red wine. Let all of that sort itself out and come to a mutually beneficial agreement and then I returned the mince plus some porcini powder (some of the pie is going to someone who doesn't like the texture of mushrooms--but I want the flavour and the umami boost) and Worcestershire sauce and beef stock. This will simmer until the potatoes have boiled enough for mashing. The potatoes shall be mashed with much butter then spead atop the mince mixture. This will be baked and consumed.

[Darienne]

Thank you Chris Taylor for reviving this topic. Fun to go back and read it all. No idea why it didn't elicit more response.

Samosas. Love samosas. And found this recipe which called for using egg roll wrappers instead of making your own dough. Now, I know that this is nothing short of disgraceful...but I did it anyway. And they were very good.

I would also consider egg rolls and spring rolls in this category. Somewhere in one of the topics, someone (brilliant) suggested using cole slaw mix for the filling and simply adding whatever to this mix. Well, in the same run of cooking, in Moab to be sure, land of experimentation in cooking for me, I used said mix, although I hashed it up in the food processor. And they were delicious too.

We, friends and I, put on this Chinese feast every year when we are in Moab and boy! do folks like fresh egg rolls which you can't get in Moab! Cheap heroics on my part.

[janeer]

So the definition is incredibly broad--not just "encased" but also covered. Or based? Does quiche counte? Chicken pot pie? Would tamales (they are in a dough, after all) count?

Anyway, love anything in pastry but it is TOO HOT right now to cook things like this...at least here

[nibor]

Lately I have been looking at pasty recipes. Why? Because I suffer from nostalgia for northern Michigan. Pasty recipes always seem to come with a caveat about dryness. Does anyone know how to make this Cornish staple delightful?

[ChrisTaylor]

Fattier meat?

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Time to resurrect this thread again! I've got one that would make Julia Child either spin in her grave or give me a big hug.

I present: Chicken Cordon Bleu Empanadas. They're in Challah dough; in place of rolled breast they're made with minced chicken and tiny cubes of ham suspended in a mushroom cream sauce, and the cheese is a mixture of mozzarella and sharp white cheddar (as proper Swiss is hard to come by here).

They are delicious.

Edited April 29, 2013 by Panaderia Canadiense (log)

[David Ross]

Time to resurrect this thread again! I've got one that would make Julia Child either spin in her grave or give me a big hug.

I present: Chicken Cordon Bleu Empanadas. They're in Challah dough; in place of rolled breast they're made with minced chicken and tiny cubes of ham suspended in a mushroom cream sauce, and the cheese is a mixture of mozzarella and sharp white cheddar (as proper Swiss is hard to come by here).

They are delicious.

Thank you! Part of the wonder of these cook-offs is that they are timeless and we can regularly revisit each one for discussion and inspiration. Did you brush the dough with egg wash to get that shine?

[huiray]

I think one of the issues with the thread (having relatively few posts) is that the OP limited it to empanadas, samosas and UK pasties - even though it was subsequently acknowledged that any savory filling in a pastry counted, and some posters chimed in with other categories (e.g. calzones, momos, crawfish pie) Technically the term "savory pastry" covers an awful lot of ground. No Chinese or Japanese savory pastries have been mentioned, for that matter (other than the query about jaouzi), or other SE Asian or Indian ones (besides samosas) or other Asian (Persian, Turkish, etc etc) pastries? What about some dim-sum items? Would "Wu Tou Kok" qualify? What about "Dan Tat"? There are also savory versions of mooncakes nowadays, even though the veddy veddy traditional ones with the sweet lotus seed derived filling plus the salted duck egg yolks ought to qualify as sort-of-savory too. :-)

For that matter, chicken pot pies or steak-and-kidney pies and shepherd's pies (in the Western idiom) ought to qualify as well. :-D

Anyway, here's just *one* type of Chinese savory pastry some folks in the West might have had: "Char Siu So" (叉燒酥), which is just one version of a class called "So" or "Sou". As another example, there are any number of variations on something called a "Curry Puff", ubiquitous in SE Asia and derived from something similar in Southern India (and which are not quite samosas).

Edited April 30, 2013 by huiray (log)

[Mjx]

. . . . No Chinese or Japanese savory pastries have been mentioned, for that matter (other than the query about jaouzi), or other SE Asian or Indian ones (besides samosas) or other Asian (Persian, Turkish, etc etc) pastries? What about some dim-sum items? Would "Wu Tou Kok" qualify? What about "Dan Tat"? There are also savory versions of mooncakes nowadays, even though the veddy veddy traditional ones with the sweet lotus seed derived filling plus the salted duck egg yolks ought to qualify as sort-of-savory too. :-)

. . . .

Well, this is a cook-off, and no one made these items (yet), so there is no discussion of them; it isn't a matter of exclusion. As was mentioned upthread, anything savoury wrapped in some sort of dough qualifies, so what are you waiting for? Whip up a batch of any of these, and post your pictures

[huiray]

. . . . No Chinese or Japanese savory pastries have been mentioned, for that matter (other than the query about jaouzi), or other SE Asian or Indian ones (besides samosas) or other Asian (Persian, Turkish, etc etc) pastries? What about some dim-sum items? Would "Wu Tou Kok" qualify? What about "Dan Tat"? There are also savory versions of mooncakes nowadays, even though the veddy veddy traditional ones with the sweet lotus seed derived filling plus the salted duck egg yolks ought to qualify as sort-of-savory too. :-)

. . . .

Well, this is a cook-off, and no one made these items (yet), so there is no discussion of them; it isn't a matter of exclusion. As was mentioned upthread, anything savoury wrapped in some sort of dough qualifies, so what are you waiting for? Whip up a batch of any of these, and post your pictures

Glad to hear it.

Perhaps I'll give it a try myself - although I can't even remember the last time I used the oven for anything other than warming up or re-crisping some food (Yau char kwai, Chinese roast pork, etc). (Oh wait, I made roast lamb shoulder and roast duck some time ago)

My intention in my previous post was to raise the idea in folks' minds that those things I suggested ought to be fine for this thread and I gave some links to what some of those things look like. Although it is a cook-off thread I would hope it is not necessary to have personally made the featured food to even post in such threads. :-)

Edited April 30, 2013 by huiray (log)

[Mjx]

. . . . Although it is a cook-off thread I would hope it is not necessary to have personally made the featured food to even post in such threads. :-)

Of course it isn't necessary to get your hands dirty, but the point of the cook-off topics is to share personal experiences, that's what makes them different from other topics; we get to hear about an array of ideas, interpretations, and challenges from eGullet members in often widely-separated parts of the world, and with diverse backgrounds, who take on an ingredient, dish, or class of dishes. Information is great, but applying that is even better (and makes for great pictures!).

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Time to resurrect this thread again! I've got one that would make Julia Child either spin in her grave or give me a big hug.

I present: Chicken Cordon Bleu Empanadas. They're in Challah dough; in place of rolled breast they're made with minced chicken and tiny cubes of ham suspended in a mushroom cream sauce, and the cheese is a mixture of mozzarella and sharp white cheddar (as proper Swiss is hard to come by here).

They are delicious.

Thank you! Part of the wonder of these cook-offs is that they are timeless and we can regularly revisit each one for discussion and inspiration. Did you brush the dough with egg wash to get that shine?

Yup, that's egg yolks cut with just a bit of water. The dough itself is slightly shiny on its own, though.

[Keith_W]

I didn't realize there was a savoury pastry cook-off! Anyway, I made these some time last year so I suppose I may as well post them now.

Malaysian curry puffs. The filling is chopped chicken, potato, peas, carrots, onions, curry leaves, dried chilli, and Malaysian meat curry powder.

How to fold and pleat a curry puff.

Curry puff production line

Fry the puffs until they are golden ...

... then enjoy!

[David Ross]

I have one of those little plastic pastry molds. Works quite well for all types of savory and sweet filled pastries.

[Darienne]

What do you call that little pastry gizmo. I would LOVE one. Thanks.

Found them. Here's a metal one. Maybe it wouldn't break...the plastic ones seem to. http://www.amazon.com/Kuchenprofi-Ravioli-Pierogi-Dumpling-Maker/dp/B0009Q2L5M/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1367455011&sr=8-11&keywords=pastry+maker

Edited May 2, 2013 by Darienne (log)