Last week, I decided to go where no cookbook I own goes, really: I was going to make a lamb meat pie of the sort that you might get in a UK gastropub. (That is, a good one, rather than one of the dodgy mass-produced ones you can get in a bad supermarket.) There’s a recipe in Keith Floyd’s book but it wasn’t particularly helpful. So I decided to go my own way entirely: no cheating by looking up recipes of any kind.
Courtesy of Philly Foodworks recent addition of lamb, I ordered some things that I thought might help me to stumble my way towards something interesting. Namely, they were selling a big ball of lamb fat that I thought could serve both in making a standard hot-water pastry of the kind that you might normally make with lard or suet and as the fat for cooking down a fine mince of leeks, mushrooms and lamb loin and then adding flour to make a kind of roux. And they were selling lamb bones, which I thought I’d roast and use to make a stock to finish the roux, and voila! the pie filling. I also ordered lamb kidneys to go in it only I found out on arrival that it was kidney singular, and one lone little kidney seemed almost beside the point.
I weighed whether to make it as a single pie or as a large kind of muffin, and went with the muffin.
Did it work? Well, yes and no. First off, of course, there’s the insanity of making a dish in late August that screams “Hi, make this in December or January”. But ok, when I get an idea like this in my head, it won’t go away unless I do it. Second, I think maybe I underseasoned the filling—it was a little bland and a little too mushroomy. Also, the lamb loin was not really what I’d hoped, as I thought they were going to be lamb tenderloins (as per their picture where you order them) and instead they were on the bone and pretty hard to butcher off. I probably should have used chunks of shoulder meat or maybe some braised shank.
Third, I’d sort of forgotten that lamb fat has a bit of a textural issue, or maybe a mouthfeel issue. There may be a reason that lard is favored by bakers who are willing to use an animal fat (and who have no problem eating pig)—it’s texturally clean and the taste is savory without being overwhelming. If you eat meat and like lamb, think about the times you’ve had lamb where there’s a bit of the fat in or around the meat—the little strips of fat that run down a lamb chop or the pan fat that you might have from a shoulder or leg roast. It’s got a savory, rich flavor that goes with the meat, but it also forms a kind of coating on the roof of your mouth and tongue almost right away. There’s something about how it interacts with water and temperature that’s really striking that I think made it a bit less optimal for use in the pastry and in the roux.
So not perfect, but not bad. I also made a simple chicken cordon bleu only without bleu cheese or a heavy cream sauce this last week—just some thin iberico ham and gruyere inside. I think that cooking combination leaves me feeling like I want to get back to eating like it’s still summer in this coming week—though I did also serve a thin-sliced tomato salad with garden pesto on it alongside the chicken.
Both dishes were excellent. I liked the choice of cheese for the chicken (bleu cheese can be a bit overwhelming); and the crust on the pie was great -- it held its form and was crisp and tasty.