Almost Aussie Pie

I managed to make good headway last week on the information system proposal and bid.  I wasn't able finish it, but I have enough data to wrap it up, hopefully this week.  For that reason, future post may be sporadic rather than daily, at least for the nonce.  Thanks for bearing with me.

Okay, then.  I've titled this post Almost Aussie Pie because, while the result tasted good, it really wasn't Aussie Pie.  Actually, it tasted more like pie-shaped Cornish Pasties, but that's a recipe for another time.  Anyhow, here's the recipe I used.

Almost Aussie Pie

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2 lb eye-of-round (beef) roast.
1 large Spanish or yellow onion, rough chopped (1/2-inch dice).
1 carrot, sliced crosswise into 1/2-inch-thick pieces.
1 celery stalk, sliced crosswise into 1/2-inch-thick pieces.
2 packages store-bought 9-inch pie crusts (enough for 2 pies with top and bottom crusts).
2 heaping T all-purpose flour.
3 bay leaves.
1/4 t whole mustard seeds.
6 C tap-water.
Seasoned Salt.
Black pepper.
Onion powder.
Garlic powder.
Vegetable oil.
Cooking spray (aerosol vegetable oil).

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Coat all surfaces of the roast liberally with the seasoned salt, black pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder.

Pour enough vegetable oil into a heavy skillet.  Over HIGH heat, sear all surfaces of the coated roast.

Place the roast in a pressure cooker.  Add the water, carrots, celery,1/4 of the chopped onions, bay leaves, and mustard seeds.  Cook (according to the
instructions for your pressure cooker) for 1 hour.  When you're done, remove the roast from the pressure cooker (keep the cooking liquid and vegetables - you'll use them to make gravy) and let cool.  Shred the roast, then chop the shreds into 1/4- to 1/2-inch pieces.

Note: If you don't own a pressure cooker, you can get the same results using a Dutch oven and more time.  Just follow the directions for pressure cooking, but put the ingredients in a Dutch oven.  Then braise in your oven at 350 degrees for 3-4 hours, or until the roast is tender enough to shred.

While the roast is cooking, place the remaining chopped onions in the skillet you used to sear the roast, and sweat them over LOW heat until they're translucent.  Remove onions from skillet and reserve.  When the onions have cooled sufficiently to be handled comfortably, mix them, using your hands, with the shredded and chopped meat.

Reduce the cooking liquid, by boiling, to a generous 2 cups in volume (here's where I screwed up, incidentally - I blended before I had reduced the liquid, which action resulted in the Kitchen Katastrophe I described in detail earlier).

Remove the bay leaves and discard.  Allow reduced liquid to cool, then pour the reduced cooking liquid, along with the vegetables and mustard seeds, into a blender and blend until the vegetable are pureed.

Into the same pan you used to sear the roast and sweat the onions, pour 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil.  Mix the flour thoroughly in the oil to form a paste, and cook gently, over LOW heat, stirring constantly with a wire whisk, until the oil-flour mixture turns the color of peanut butter.  Remove pan from heat and let cool. (Congratulations! you've just made a roux, considered by many to be a bane of home cooks.)

Into the cooled roux, pour the cooled reduced liquid/pureed vegetable mixture.  Place over LOW heat, and whisk, constantly but gently, in order to incorporate the roux and cooking liquid.  Be patient, because this may take awhile.

As the mixture cooks, your constant whisking breaks up any lumps of roux that may have formed.  Also, the mixture begins to thicken.  When the mixture is thick enough to just coat the back of a spoon, your gravy's ready to make Almost Aussie Pie.  Don't be concerned that your gravy is too thin.  It will continue to thicken in the course of baking, the next step.

Spray cooking oil into two 9-inch (preferably non-stick) pie tins.  Following package instructions, place a sheet of crust dough in the bottom of each tin.  Using a fork, make holes in the dough to prevent steam pockets from forming between crust and tin while baking.

Place half of the meat/onion mixture in each tin and arrange evenly.

You should have at least two cups of warm gravy.  If not, add warm water until you have 2 cups, and mix thoroughly (you have enough roux to thicken two cups of gravy).  Pour half of the gravy (1 cup plus) evenly over the filling of each pie.

Following package instructions, apply a top crust to each pie.  Be sure to crimp the top and bottom crust together to prevent leakage.  Also, be sure to cut vent holes in the top crust to prevent steam pockets from forming as the filling cooks.  If you don't vent the top crust, your pie can explode in the oven (actually, it'll only look like it exploded, if you're lucky; in any case, it will not be pretty).

Brush (or spray) top crusts with vegetable oil (or you may also use dollops of butter or margerine).

Place pie tins on cookie sheet (to catch any pie filing that oozes out during baking) and bake as directed by the instructions printed on the pie-crust package.  Alternatively, or if the package your pie crust came in doesn't have printed baking instructions, you can bake at 350 to 375 degrees for about an hour, or until the top crust is golden brown.  In either case, you may want to cover the crust over the seam between the top and bottom crusts with aluminum foil to prevent this area of crust from scorching (don't cover the entire top).  You should remove the foil when you think the pies have 20 to 30 minutes of baking time left.

As with most pies, it's not a good idea to slice or serve these pies immediately after removal from the oven.  Don't let them cool to room temperature, but do let them cool some before slicing and serving.

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Well, there you have it, for what it's worth.  A visually attractive and tasty pie, but genuine Aussie Pie it ain't.  In a future post, I'll give you a recipe for the real McCoy.

Happy cooking!

The Aussie Pie Saga

Right off the bat, let me tell you that making Aussie Pie - making it the way I made it, at least - is not for the faint of heart.  The result was very good in the eating, but getting there was something else again.  Though I tried to make it easy for myself by using store-bought pie crusts, and by making two 9-inch pies and not the traditional smaller individual serving-size pies, there's only one phrase to describe my experience:  it was just nuts.  When the preparation was all over and done with, I had to enlist the aid of my wife to get the pies out of the oven.  I barely had enough energy left to eat.

The entire affair was a comedy of errors, and it was that way mostly on account of my decision to use a pressure-cooker.

Firstly, most Aussie Pie recipes that I've seen on-line specify coarse-ground beef.  Well, I didn't have any coarse-ground beef on hand, so I used a 2 1/2-pound eye-of-round roast.  Moreover, instead of cutting the roast into small cubes, browning the cubes, and then braising, as the few on-line recipes instruct, I thoroughly browned the intact roast, and then tossed it into my pressure-cooker.  The net result of this was that I had to cut the meat into cubes after it came out of the pressure-cooker.  This would have been a straightforward task and easily accomplished but for one thing.

It's like this.  Pressure-cookers cook quickly because the water that cooks the food - being prevented by the internal pressure, which builds up in the contraption when it's sealed and put on the fire, from turning into steam and boiling off - has a temperature much greater than 212 degrees, the sea-level boiling point of water.  The temperature's more like 250 to 275 degrees, and that's pretty darned hot.  This means that it takes longer for the food to cool to handling temperature, and when you add to that the cool-down time it takes for the cooker to cool down enough so you're not in danger of scalding yourself when you open it in order to get the food out, you're talking about a significant chunk of time.  When you add it all up, I think I'd have been better off time-wise to have cut that roast into cubes first, and then to have proceeded according the sensible instructions I listed earlier.

Secondly, all credible (i.e., submitted by Australian or New Zealander cooks) on-line Aussie Pie recipes specify Vegemite, which is a vegetable buillon in powder form, or some other form of concentrated vegetable flavoring.  Now, being in general a from-scratch cook, I don't keep vegetable buillon.  Thus in need of a substitute, I decided on mirepoix vegetables (carrots, celerey, and onion), which I cut roughly and placed in the pressure-cooker water.  The recipe I adapted (as well as all other Aussie Pie recipes I've come across) calls for gravy, and my intention was to make a gravy that incorporated the mirepoix vegetables.  My intent was to pour the cooking liquid, vegetables and all, into my trusty blender and make short work of pureeing the vegetables.  I do this routinely when I want to make a smooth gravy from vegetable-seasoned braising liquid, but this time it resulted in a minor 'kitchen katastrophe.'  It could easily have resulted in me being scalded, too.

Anyone who's used a blender knows better than to overfill it.  I know better, too.  My excuse for doing so is that I was momentarily impaired by an exhaustion-induced attack of the stupids.  And I wasn't only stupid, I was impatient, too - what with all the time I'd already spent - and I didn't let my cooking liquid cool sufficiently.  Talk about a recipe for disaster.

Bottom line, after reducing my vegetable-laden cooking liquid to one-half its original volume, I almost immediately poured too much of the still-too-hot liquid into my blender.  Then I turned the thing on, and all Hell broke loose.

Realizing from the start that I had overfilled the blender, my enfeebled mind decided that I'd be able to compensate by pushing down on the lid more forcefully than usual.  Well, as you've probably guessed, that did not one whit of good.  Not to say that my hand was forced up; it wasn't.  It's being there, in fact, probably prevented a worse disaster.

The lid stayed in the same place, right where it should have been, on top of the blender vessel, but it surely did not stay the same shape.  The force imparted to the liquid by the blender's impeller blades literally warped the pliable plastic lid, almost turning it inside out, and scalding-hot liquid flew all over the kitchen.  The floor, the counters, nearby appliances - everything within a radius of ten feet, including the upper torso of yours truly - was covered in gravy-makings.

I uttered appropriate blasphemies, of course.  Then I sighed, uttered some more, and set about giving clean-up the proverbial lick and promise while uttering still more.  The clean-up (at least) was necessary because the kitchen floor had been rendered too slippery for safe walking, and my labors were not yet complete.  At this point, I was ready to cry 'uncle'.  The truth be known, if I hadn't promised my wife Aussie Pie for dinner, I'd have said to Hell with it all, and we'd have had fast food for the evening meal.

Anyway the blender incident turned out to be the last mishap of my Aussie Pie misadventure, and I'm glad it was, because I don't think I could have handled another misfortune.  I managed to do a pretty good job with the store-bought pie crusts; I even remembered to take a fork to the bottom crusts to allow steam to escape during baking.  I put the Aussie Pies in the oven, and poured my self a glass of Pinot Noir.  And by godfrey, I thought I deserved it.

That's my post for today because I have to go and finish cleaning my kitchen.  If I'm lucky, that task will only take all afternoon.  Tomorrow, I'll publish the recipe I used, and the details of how I prepared my version of Aussie Pie (or, rather, the details of how I should have prepared it and will prepare it, if I decide to prepare it ever again).

Happy cooking!

Aussie Pie

Years ago, during my software engineering 'apprenticeship', as it were, in California's Silicon Valley, I was introduced to Aussie Pie.  Aussie Pie is a savory meat (beef, usually), onion, and gravy filling stuffed into a pie crust.  The typical Aussie pie is small enough to be picked up in one hand and eaten without ceremony or fanfare.  In Australia, they're sold as fast food and eaten like we eat hamburgers here in the U.S.

My acquaintance with Aussie Pie dates back to the late 1980s.  Being an inveterate foodie - always have been, always will be - I knew what Aussie Pie was, and based on the ingredients, I knew that I'd probably like it.  Therefore, when I read that an Australian firm was introducing Aussie Pie on a test-marketing basis on the West Coast, my interest was piqued.  When Aussie Pie finally arrived on the scene, I was not disappointed.  I was a bit surprised, however, because the advanced publicity had not proclaimed "coming to a 'ptomaine trunk' near you!"

That's right.  The first Aussie Pie I ever ate I purchased from a cold-serve vending machine.  I had to 'nuke' it to warm it up, but the flavor, texture, and mouth-feel were to die for.  In short, it was the complete package, and I've been a fan ever since.

Now you may ask - and with good reason - just what in the world does the abovegoing 'war story' have to do with Southern home cooking?  Well, the answer is absolutely nothing.  But I've been thinking and remembering about Aussie Pie now for the last couple of days, and I'm thinking I'll take a crack at making Aussie Pie myself.  I'll let you know how it turns out, and over the course of the next few days, I'll describe my labors (and recipe) in detail, which will lead (hopefully - keep your fingers crossed!) to my ultimate triumph.

Happy cooking!