‘Ello, you lot, this is Keef Cooks, I'm Keef, and today I'm going to do an old English classic.
I'm going to make a venison pastie. Ooh yeah.
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First of all, quick shoutout to William Doherty, who made a magnificent donation via PayPal.
And I really do appreciate it, so thank you. Anybody else feels like doing that? Just go ahead.
So venison pastie was mentioned by William Shakespeare in his old plays,
and also by Sam Pepys, who was a total foodie, by all accounts,
and was very partial to a venison pastie. So what on Earth inspired this? Well,
I'll tell you, this book, which I got for Christmas, has an entire chapter,
well, two or three pages about venison pasties. This is about the history of food and
class in Britain. So, as you know, we are a terribly class ridden and messed up society.
[ LAFFS ]
But if you were fortunate enough to have a bit of land, you might have some deer on it,
and then you could have venison pasties. Peasants couldn't have them unless
it fell off the back of a poacher. So, yeah, total class divide. But
then they got usurped by the Cornish pasty, of which we shall not speak.
All right, maybe a little bit. I'm not a massive fan of Cornish pasties,
and things like pies and pasties I like to have gravy or sauce inside, not just clumps of
dry steamed meat and vegetables. That really doesn't do it for me.
So I'm going to cook my venison in a lovely red wine sauce as well. It'll be fab.
Anyway, I'm going on a bit. If you like this video, give it a like, share, subscribe,
ring the Bell, ring a ding ding, etc. And, let's get on with it...
Venison Pastie. Ooh aarrr. First job is make the pastry. I'm going to use hot
water pastry because that's strong, robust pastry. I'm going to make four. So what you need is
350 grams of plain, all-purpose, flour, 175 grams of lard cut into small bits,
150 mls of water and a teaspoon of salt. So we need to heat the lard and the water
until the lard melts and they combine. We don't particularly want it to boil.
So pop it on the stove...
[ IGNITER CLICKIN ]
and then stir the salt into the flour.
When the fat is melted, we pour half the mixture in with the flour
and then stir in the remainder. And I do it in two stages because it's easier.
That's pretty much all mixed together. So just finish it off with your hands because there
are some bits that the spatula cannot reach. And then we'll wrap that in plastic film and
just let it cool on the side. It doesn't need to be chilled and it doesn't actually need to be hot.
People think because it's called hot water pastry - and you will find lots
and lots of recipes that tell you this. You've got to use it, they tell you,
while it's hot. I've never found that to be necessary. It works very well when it's cool,
and it's a lot easier to do.
So, for the pastie filling, I've got 250 grams of venison. That's deer meat, basically, in case you don't know,
200 grams of bacon lardons with
some fat on, because that is very lean. It's noted for it, but I think a bit of
fat is tasty. And then we’ve got an onion, a carrot, and a parsnip.
I’ve also got some herby things. I've got about a dozen juniper berries, two bay leaves,
half a teaspoon of dried sage, half a teaspoon of dried thyme, and a glass of full bodied red wine.
This is Chianti from sunny Italy. It's lovely. And about a cup of stock. This is my homemade chicken
stock. If I had any beef stock, I would use that, but it doesn't actually make that much difference.
So we'll also maybe need some flour for thickening and some salt and pepper for extra seasoning.
I'm going to cook the meaty base separate from, well, from these.
Those will go into the pasties raw, and they'll cook in the 40 or 50 minutes that they'll get.
There's a bit of kind of silver skin on this side. So I'm going to try and...
And now we need to cut the venison into small bits, really quite small,
because it's going to go in a pastie. We don't want big lumps of meat bulging out the sides.
So we're kind of looking at a centimetre, about half an inch dice.
Now I'm going to brown the venison off before I put it in the pressure cooker.
So I want some flour...
and some salt, and some pepper.
Mix those together and toss the meat in. Get it coated all over.
I know this isn't what you would normally do with a pastie. Where
the meat would go in like that - not cooked, not precooked.
But I want a nice sauce, and I want to control it. So I'm doing this.
So you want a frying pan or a cast iron pot or something. Pop your bacon in,
turn the heat on, and on gentle, low. Just let the fat from the lardons melt...
Well, that didn't work so well with the cheap and nasty water injected lardons that I got.
So I'm just getting rid of the watery liquid that came out. And I'll add some actual lard
and then add the flour coated meat. Make sure you shake off any excess [flour].
Otherwise it makes a mess of burnt flour. And that's not really nice.
OK, so I'm going to deal with this onion... Want to peel...
and slicy dicy.
[ BLAM ]
[ SIZZLIN ]
Thought I better open the wine because I need a glass of it for the deglazing the pan. And it's... Oh no,
it's got a cork. It used to be all wine...good wine bottles had a cork in them, and anything with a screw-top
was really frowned upon. But now it's reversed. The norm is for wine bottles to have screw-tops,
which makes life a lot easier. But anyway, it gives us a chance to get out the fancy silver corkscrew
that somebody gave us. [ POP! ]
Smells like wine. So I'm scooping out the brown
meat and the bacon, and I’ll put the chopped onions and let those cook for about five
minutes until they're soft, and we get those out. And then we pour in a glass of wine to deglaze
the pan and transfer the whole lot into the pressure cooker or whatever you're cooking it in.
And then you've got two or three different options of how to finish cooking it. You could
continue in this cast iron pot with a lid on it for maybe 3 hours till the meat is really tender.
Or you could use a crockpot / slow cooker where it would probably need six to 8 hours or overnight.
But the quickest way is a pressure cooker where I reckon it will take 20 minutes.
Top it up with the stock, add the herbs,
maybe add a bit more water. This looks like it would probably boil dry.
And then put the lid on, bring it up to pressure, give it 20 minutes, and then we'll have a look.
[ MANIC BACKGROUND MUSIC ]
Ok. There's the parsnip and the carrots diced. I'm going to just sploosh them with some olive,
olive juice? Lemon juice to stop them going brown. I’m also going to season them...
with the pepperer and the salterer. Now the pressure cooker has had its
time. I'm waiting...well, I will actually depressurize it and then see what we've got.
So there's the cooked meat. I've just had a taste, it's delicious. And the
venison is just - if there was a bone, it would be falling off it. But it is runny.
I need to reduce that liquid, thicken it, whatever. So let's have a go at that. And we'll
just boil it away till a lot of the liquid is gone and then maybe sift in some flour to thicken it.
There it is reduced quite a lot. I'm going to transfer that into a chilled
steel bowl to cool down some more. While that was going on, I picked out the
juniper berries and the bay leaves because nobody wants to eat those.
All right. Now I'm going to roll out the pastry for the pasties.
That is 610 grams. So I need to divide that in 4 - 150 and a bit.
OK, flour on the worktop...
Now, normally if I'm making pasties, I would do a circle, so we get like a D shape,
but I'm going to do mine as a triangle. So to do that, I need to start off with a square.
There we go. I thought it would be bigger. Sprinkle some carrot and parsnip in one half.
And we need to leave a good couple of centimetres, about an inch margin along the edge.
And then spoon the meaty gravy saucy thing on top and moisten the edge with water
and fold it over.
Okay, let's try and crimp this.
I really should go to crimping college because some people can do beautiful stuff and I can't.
Okay, that's my two pasties. And I need to glaze them. So I've got one egg and a splash of milk.
Just paint the top, side and edges.
[ COCK-A-DOODLE-DO ]
Cockadoodle-do, indeed. It is the next day. So I baked the first two pasties yesterday and I made
a big deal about not puncturing the top so that the steam wouldn't escape from inside the pasty.
That turned out to be a bit of a load of tosh because steam can be quite high pressure stuff
and it did actually burst both pasties open quite badly.
So yeah, I'm going to put holes in the top now to let the steam out. Glaze them…
Right, that goes in the oven for 45 minutes and I'll turn it around halfway through.
[OVEN ROAR ]
Time's up let's get them out… [ OVEN ROAR ]
Oh, yeah, they were pretty neat. So I want to get these
onto a cooling rack and let them cool down. They’re quite warm.
“And now, it's taste test time with Mrs. Keef Cooks!”
[ CHEERIN ]
"Hello babe, you all right?" "Hello darling."
"Hello!" "She poorly."
[ LAFFS ] "I'm gonna live." "Yeah, good, okay."
"This is mine."
"I'm not surprised because he made some of these yesterday..." "They know."
"I mean, yeah, structurally a disaster but so good. What's the sweet thing in it?"
"Mmm, it's parsnips and carrots."
[ MUMBLE MUMBLE MUMBLE ]
"And it really is sweet." "It is, but it's like it's a pop of sweetness when you get a..."
"piece of the vegetable and then you've got the richness of the meat and the sauce and everything."
"Yeah, I like it even better now It stays in one piece while I'm eating it."
"Oh, so do I. When I was a kiddiewinkle you could not get venison Well, we could not get venison..."
"but it's actually ...not exactly common, but it pops up in Morrison's sometimes have it, Waitrose, "
"Sainsburies, AldI and I got this from LIDL, would you believe. So yeah, apart from regular"
"butchers who do game." "I like when we do a taste test during my tea break."
"Ooh that's a point. Kettle's just boiled, I need to..." "All right, we're going."
"Love you and leave you..." "Thanks for watching and...see you next time."
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