homemade chicken pie

Partially cook vegetables, prepare a sauce, make a pie shell with a top. Bake.

Precook your favorite vegetables to at least 50% doneness along with a single cubed chicken breast. Obviously, one chicken breast will produce more filling than one single-serving pie shell can hold, so either make a larger pie, or multiple pies, or use a smaller portion of chicken, like a thigh, or retain the surplus chicken filling for something else like biscuits or toast. Naturally, your choice of meat and vegetables will differ from mine.

Filling

* one large chicken breast cut into small cubes

* one whole medium-size onion, diced to bits

* one carrot, quartered along its length, cut into bits

* two smallish celery stalks, sliced along their lengths and cut into bits

* half a regular size Russet potato peeled and cut into small cubes. 

* a handful of green beans cut into small segments

* one large garlic clove, grated

* one ginger finger the same size as the garlic clove, scraped and grated

* one small broccoli floret carefully broken into the tiniest possible florets (raw)

* one handful frozen peas (added still frozen)

The broccoli and peas are raw because in the frozen commercial version I had the broccoli was mush. This corrects that.

Make a chicken-flavored béchamel sauce. This will be the gravy. There should be quite a lot of gravy in order to moisten the pie crusts, top and bottom. I noticed with the frozen version there is scant meat and vegetable filling and an abundance of thick gravy. I like that. But ours will have more meat and vegetable filling than the frozen versions. Our aim will be to make sure it is not too dry, so more gravy than you might imagine but not so much as commercial versions. The mixture will be spooned into the pie crust cold so you can determine at that point the ratio of solid to liquid filling you think will suit you.

Sauce

* 2 tablespoons butter

* 2 tablespoons flour

* 1/4 cup Marsala wine

* 1 cup chicken broth

* 1 cup milk

* salt/pepper

* sage

The sauce can be made simultaneously with precooking the vegetables in the same pot all at once if you wish. If you deem your sauce too thin, then you can thicken it with your favorite cheese, preferably off the heat then to avoid separation.

Make a nice cold pie crust. Cold flour, cold butter, cold lard, cold Crisco™ solid vegetable fat, each fat type imparts unique attributes, cold salt, cold sugar, cold pepper, cold water, cold bowl, cold mixing knife, cold fingertips, cold rolling pin, cold rolling cloth, cold work surface. I should probably mention in case you haven't picked up, the key here is to have everything kept cold as reasonable without being actually frozen.

Crust

* 1 + 1/2 cup flour

* 3 tablespoons butter

* 1 tablespoon lard

* 1 teaspoon Crisco

* 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

* 1 teaspoon sugar

* 1/16 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

* 1/4 cup water, drizzled possibly even less, possibly more depending on location and on the day.

This is a purposeful excess of crust  because nothing is worse than coming up short and the excess can be sweetened further and turned into delicious dunking cookies or biscuits.

Flour into a bowl along with salt, for flour is blah without salt, sugar because crust is nice when slightly sweetened, pepper, just to be different and to establish our savory cred. Some people like a touch of vinegar in their crusts. 

Then three tablespoons of diced cold butter, a tablespoonful of lard which is softer than butter, and a teaspoon of Crisco which is softer than lard, or any other similar combination thereof that suits you, dumped into the whisked dry ingredients and rapidly smashed and rubbed with cold fingertips until all the fat is flattened and mixed thoroughly throughout the flour. This should take only a minute. Adjust as necessary with additional fat or additional flour, all the powder should be enfattenated <-- made up word, all the flattened fat particles should be coated with flour. Chill again because by now the whole mess has warmed slightly and the fat verges on liquifying. 

Drizzle in cold water, ice water if you will, while stirring vigorously with a dinner knife until combined.  Keep testing for cohesion. Aim for as little water as necessary to pull the dough together and still be rollable. Chill again. The aim is to keep the fat within the dough in a solid state. If it melts, everybody DIES! 

Roll out in a cold solid state. Fill a cold pie pan while maintaining a cold solid state without stretching the dough or else it will shrink when baked. When formed and trimmed in the pie pan then return to the refrigerator to chill again.

This pie recycles the bake pan that came with the Marie Callender's frozen chicken pie, here. It is a pan designed for microwave use but works as well in a regular oven. 

Chill again.

Cold filling. 

Moisten the edges and apply the top however suits you, roll the top onto the rolling pin, or just flip it on. The water will glue the top to the bottom. Trim the top and empress a design, here with the tines of a dinner fork. 

Vent with a few holes or a slit. This will prevent steam underneath from lifting up the crust while still pliable from the filling and setting the top baked with an air pocket beneath it then shaped like an airplane hangar. Although the kids get a kick out of it, they can drive their little Hot Wheels™ in and out of it. 

Chill again. 

You see, there is a lot of back and forth in and out of the refrigerator between each step. I cannot overemphasize this whole keep-everything-chilled aspect of the process because the flakiness of your crust depends on it. Each flattened fat particle coated with flour, if kept cold throughout to the bitter end, bakes to a separate flake, piles of overlapping flakes comprising the crust. Sure, you can take shortcuts and your crust will still be fine, like processing the whole thing to cold oily dust in seconds, but why would you want to? 

Preheat oven to 425℉/220℃ while the whole pie is chilling. The edges of pie crusts tend to burn in a hot oven so protect the edges with strips of tinfoil. Be clever about connecting a couple of strips and gently shaping around the whole rim without destroying whatever design you've impressed in the tender raw dough edging. 

 Insert the cold pie into the hot oven and SHOCK IT TO DEATH!  Bake for 50 minutes to 1 hour or until it is golden brown. 

What did bakers do about pie crusts before the arrival of the miracle of refrigeration? I do not know. They probably had terrible pie crusts, I imagine. Everything was put in pies back then, even twenty-four blackbirds, if an early sixpence song is to be believed. Pie crusts were called coffins back then, and they were gross as they sound, made with ordinary oil and intended to be discarded. It was a storage thing. My own mum made terrible pie crust with regular liquid oil, as did dear ol' Dad, they both had no idea what they were doing, and how I did suffer so for their not knowing. But that's all over now. A girlfriend showed me the light, and I can stop thinking about those bad old days of cardboard crusts. Stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about it. Stop ...

Conclusion: nom nom nom nyom nom, what? nom nyom nyom nom, burp. No, srsly, my pie is better than the frozen versions. My crust is tastier, my filling is fuller and more varied. Their sauce is creamer than mine, I'll admit, but come'on, I'm just a regular bloke over here, and they're scientists! They have more experience at this sort of thing and a whole bunch of chemicals at their disposal, which I wouldn't use anyway. Gimme time and my sauce will be super duper creamy too.