Much like I did for the Tour de France winner, I set out to make a dish in honor of the Giro champion, Tao Geoghegan Hart. While the TDF champion’s dish was tricky in its own right, as there was not much source material to work with, I encountered a problem for this dish as well. Tao grew up in Hackney, East London, however he claims Scottish citizenship through his father’s lineage. I decided to tackle this dual-citizenry issue by making an East London specialty: Pie and Mash since he spent most of his years in London. However, in honor of his Scotsman qualities, I used one of my favorite, and very delicious, brews in the preparation of the meat filling, an Innis & Gunn Scotch Ale which is aged in bourbon barrels...how can I do wrong?
Well, I found a way, but it wasn’t due to my meat filling (which was excellent, btw). It was the crust and gravy recipes I used from BBC Food. You figure you can trust a recipe from a large entity like the BBC, but apparently not. The top pastry was great, the bottom suet pie crust was a comedy of errors. It called for suet that you cut into the dough before adding any liquid. My grocer was out of suet, but since that kidney fat is super rich, I figure I’d just swap in the same amount of rich and delicious duck fat. So, that part is my fault. The flavor was great, but the texture was completely different (the suet would be cut in just like cold butter and have the mealy appearance after a work-in) mine came out super saturated and I had to keep adding flour...A LOT of flour. It just wasn’t right and never fully rolled out properly, nor cooked through. But that was due to using a water-bath: something completely unnecessary for a pie crust that is quickly baked.
Then the gravy, or “parsley liquor” as they call it in jolly ol’ England, recipe called for way too much corn starch. The gravy, or “parsley pudding” as I called it, seized up and was a gelatinous glob within a minute of cooling. So, this recipe is currently under development and will be updated when finalized. Again, the filling and top pastry were great, so this should be a quick and easy fix and I could probably just issue a revised recipe from experience, but I want to make sure what happened to me, using the BBC Food recipe to my detriment, won’t happen to you. Whenever I publish a recipe, I want you to know it is fool-proof and will be as delicious as the food photograph appears.
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Copyright 2020, Brendan McCann, All Rights Reserved.
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