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When I watched The Great British Bake Off this week, I did actually consider doing the technical challenge. Then it got to the weekend, I still hadn’t gotten around to baking, and I have felt exhausted. So I went with a good old pasty instead. I wasn’t organised at all so it all started going wrong straight away. First of all, I decided to attempt my own puff pastry, for the first time! Bad idea. I think it was the mixing that went wrong; I tried rolling it out – no, didn’t work. I couldn’t rescue it either so it went in the bin. Back to the drawing board and good old shortcrust pastry it was. Then I didn’t make enough. Then I wasn’t happy with the filling, as I discovered I only had mince. The only thing I am happy with is the outside look. I’ve half debated not even posting this week’s challenge, but then thought what the heck! (Hopefully only two people will read this then you can’t all see how bad it went – though I know I’m too critical of myself!). Anyway, here goes…
Ingredients – makes 6 pasties
Pastry
- 600 g plain flour
- 330 g butter
- pinch of salt
- 6-9 tbsp water
- 500 g pork mince (or you can use a cut of pork if you’re more organised than me)
- 1 large cooking apple
- 2 tsp lemon juice
- 1 medium red onion
- 8 leaves of sage, finely chopped
- 1 egg, beaten
- In a large bowl (or food processor [on the pulse setting] if you want to cheat like me), mix together your flour and butter until they resemble fine breadcrumbs, then add the salt.
- Slowly add the water to bind together into a ball.
- Wrap the ball of pastry in cling film and refrigerate for around 30 minutes.
- Whilst the pastry is in the fridge, prepare your filling. Without using oil, cook the pork over a medium heat until it is just cooked (this is to get rid of the excess fat). Set aside to cool.
- Peel & core the apple and chop into small pieces. Mix in the lemon juice (to stop the apple going brown).
- Peel & chop the onion into small pieces and mix in with the apple.
- Add the pork to the apple & onion and then mix in the sage.
- Preheat the oven to gas 6/400F/200C.
- Remove the pastry from the fridge and roll out to around 1/2 cm thick. Using a side plate, cut out 6 rounds with a sharp knife.
- Split the meat mixture between the pastry rounds, placing it into the middle of each.
- Brush a little of the beaten egg around the inside of the pastry on the edge, I did this on the bottom half.
- Carefully lift the top edge and bring it over the filling, and line it up with the bottom edge, pressing down with your fingers to crimp & seal.
- Brush more egg over the outside of the pastry, this will give it a lovely golden colour.
- Place a sheet of baking paper onto a baking tray and place 2 or 3 pasties on the tray (so you will have to do it in 2 or 3 lots unless you have more than one baking tray).
- Cook for 30 minutes until the pastry is crisp & golden, then leave to cool a little.
- Enjoy!
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well young lady (lol!) these pasties look amazing – the pastry is all golden and crisp looking with lovely layers, and i think your filling sounds great and using minced pork is great because lesss chewy! So there! you shoul not out your efforts down!
thank you for linking up x x
I tried them today, they turned out great and my guests were impressed (specially because I made a dough from the scratch, having a 15month old in the house:)))) will make it again. Thanks :))) I added an extra apple too :))