Steak & Kidney

After a successful apple pie last weekend, it was time to step up to savoury pie.
A bit of a look around suggested a short crust pastry, which for added taste I decided to go 50/50 lard & margarine, which made rubbing a bit 
harder.

but the breadcrumb stage happened along in good time. I was always told before making pastry to put a glass of water in the fridge so that when  it came to mixing in you had ice water to hand. The result is a nice ball of pastry ready to be cling filmed & chilled.

Whilst thats happening we can ready the filling. I do like lambs kidney & have a very good butcher, so a good 500g of stewing steak & 250g of lambs kidney were to hand.

Melt butter in a frying pan & season (salt,pepper,garden herb) and then sweat down some onion. Then toss in the steak & seal it off, whilst the heat is still high (& the steak not quite sealed) add some bourbon & flame off.

Once the flames have died down, add a generous measure  of red wine or red vermouth (I prefer the latter, the herbal flavour goes towards a very rich gravy) turn down & allow to simmer.

Time to make the bottom of the pie, which ought to be baked blind, since I'm lacking on the baking bean front I had to improvise with lentils, it didn't look quite right coming out of the oven.

Next time I'll double check the time & temperature
a little more throughly. As if there isn't enough to be going on with, its the ideal time to core,dice and flour the kidneys, I'd some mixed mushrooms left over so they went in too.

This was a Gordon Ramsey tip of adding the kidneys to your beef stew bit right near the end of cooking, so they go into the pie very rare and cook in the pie, that way the kidney stays tender. Into the pie they go

then its time to put on the lid, as always there are pastry scraps over, you can use these to decorate the lid (remember there need to be steam holes), a quick milk wash and its oven time.

Cooking, about 20 minutes in a pre-heated oven at gas mark 6, time to have a quick glass of red wine.

Lets hope its not a premature celebration, maybe it'd be better to do the washing up ? Anyway pass 20 minutes doing what ever you want to do, then Check on the pie.

The gravy worked out well being thick enough to coat the meat & not soak through  the pie. There could have done with being a bit more gravy but thats a minor niggle in what ended up being quite a tasty pie.