Pieday the 13th

Happy Pieday!

Let me explain. Several weeks ago my flatmate and I made an excellent pie. Chicken and mushroom I believe. This led onto an idea that we should continue to make pies each Friday. Hence Friday became Pieday. The natural evolution of this was clearly to theme said pies to different countries. So far we have done England (beef and ale), Itally (meatball), Spain (chicken and chorizo) and Greece (mousakka). I may describe these in more detail later, however the subject of this post is our most recent effort.

From the orient I give you;

Hoisin duck pie!

Now it is no joke that this has been our greatest pie to date. I won't go into the recipe in detail as I am rubbish at such things but here are a few pointers should you wish to give this a go. The cheapest duck we could find was duck crown. We took the meat off the bone and then cut it into strips. These were fried in soy sauce until crispy on the outside. The rest of the filling consisted of strips of pepper, spring onion and onion with mushrooms, water chestnuts and bamboo shoots. This was all fried up and, once the duck was done, the hoisin sauce was added. This was a normal hoisin sauce as you would use in a stir-fry for example. The filling was then added into the pie (remember to butter the pie dish before adding pastry) and the pie baked for around half an hour. In the meantime, the requisite mash was prepared. In order to match the theme, the mash had spring onions added. Finally the whole dish was garnished with cucumber. Et voila!

Fantastic!

Join me again next Pieday when we will continue our asian adventure with a trip to India.

If you are curious to learn more about pie in general I suggest you watch this series of educational documentaries.

Triangulon