Chicken Pot Pie

I really had a taste for chicken pot pie this afternoon, and had enough of the stuff at home to make it from scratch and improvise on the rest, so I thought, why not? I normally wouldn't attempt to make pastry dough on a work night, but sometimes it just feels good to stand in the kitchen for a long time with your iPod on, after sitting in front of a computer all day. (Nevermind the fact that I race back to the computer to talk about it.)

Making a pie crust is easy in concept, but hard to execute. You're working with very limited ingredients (flour, water, salt and shortening - maybe sometimes butter or sugar, depending on what you're doing), but those few ingredients are very demanding. Everything has to be very cold or it's not going to work. This is maybe the third or fourth time I've made pie dough, and it seems to get easier every time, although I would not call it easy. Fussy is more the word. This was the first time I actually used a pastry blender. It worked well. The first time I tried making dough, I believe I just used a spoon and/or my hands. Big mistake. The heat of your hands melts the shortening, which makes your crust tough (still delicious, but unappealingly tough).

The second time I made pie dough, I used my food processor. Everybody recommends this, but it's for the birds. I had even placed the blade in the freezer to keep it cold and not melt the shortening, but it was just a waste of time. The dough really didn't hold together well. Mind you, it still made a pie. It was just a pain to roll out, it cracked a lot, and again, it was tough. (But again: it still tasted good.)

This time I got out that pastry blender, a strange, primative tool with several blades to cut through the shortening without having to touch it. It's not electric, even though it sounds like it should be. I threw it in the freezer to cool it, roughly measured out 2/3 cup of non-hydrogenated vegetable shortening, threw that in the freezer. I store my flour in the freezer, so that was already cold. 2 cups of flour. I got a glass of ice water. For the pie crust, not me. A coke and some chips for myself, because I knew it would be a while before dinner.


Put the two cups of flour in a bowl with one tsp of salt. Put the chilled shortening in it, and cut it with the pastry blender until the lumps of shortening are pea-sized. Then add 6 tablespoons of the icewater and mix with a spoon -- preferably a chilled spoon. Add 2 more tablespoons of ice water if necessary, but know that it should look a little dry. It'll still be falling apart at this point. Don't touch it. Plop it onto a sheet of plastic wrap and wrap it in a ball, touching it as little as possible. Throw the ball in the fridge and let it rest for thirty minutes. Something magical happens while it's in there, but it's not telling what. Maybe the gluten develops.


At this point, you probably have flour all over the place, so that 30 minute resting phase is a nice chance to clean up.

I started making the filling - and I must confess, I didn't totally follow the rules of this blog, because I used powder gravy to thicken the vegetables and chicken. The horror!  The preservatives! Honestly, in a perfect world, I would have loved to use gravy made from scratch in this, but c'mon. It's a Tuesday evening after work.

So anyway, I cut up and sauteed some carrots, onions, celery, one potato and one already cooked chicken breast. I added a few healthy shakes of sage and thyme. Some white pepper, and accidentally too much salt, so I balanced it with a pinch of sugar. Then I added some water and that gravy powder (the one you gave me, mom), tasted it, and it tasted like too much pepper and too much salt, so I added a splash of milk for good measure. It still seemed too salty, so I watered it down a little and then used a slotted spoon to put the filling in the crust.

But wait: by this time, the 30 minutes were up, and I had rolled out the bottom crust in between everything I just mentioned. The best way to do this is between two sheets of wax paper. I have no idea how anyone does it any other way. I've heard fancy rumors about gracefully collecting your sheet of dough onto your rolling pin, and gently rolling it off into your pan. Those are lies. Lies designed to make you feel bad about yourself. So I use the wax paper, and it's fine. Once you get it to the size you need, you can peel off one of the sheets, flip the whole thing over onto your pan, put it down, and then peel the second sheet off. Perfect. And you hardly have to touch it.


But again, I am getting ahead of myself. Once you get that ball out of the fridge, cut it in half and put the other half back into the fridge, wrapped up. Try to touch it as little as possible. These little details seem silly, but seriously, this is a fussy project.

The dough was much easier to work with this time and didn't even crack.

Once you get the first crust in, I would make sure the filling is ready, then don't put the filling in until you've rolled out the top piece. You can whip up an egg white and brush it over the top of the bottom crust -- this allegedly keeps it crispy. I only did that once and the dough was tough tough and maybe too crunchy. I didn't do that this time.


You can also brush some butter or egg white on the top, after you've got the filling in and have put the top layer on. That helps it brown better in the oven. I forgot to do that this time, and it did take a long time to brown. Don't forget to cut some slits for the steam to get out, and you can pinch the corners with a fork or your fingers.

I put it in at 350 for 45 minutes, and then cranked it up to 450 for another 10-15 minutes to brown it. Right now it's still cooling. Tom is finishing up some yard work. It's going to be a late dinner.