Portable Shepard's Pie: Pot Pie Cupcakes - how to pt. 2

So last time, we talked about how to make fillings. This time, we will be focusing on how to make the cups and fill and bake.

So first, if you don't have time to let some beer, flatten some in a stand mixer with the whisk on low. Preheat the oven to 350'f. Beating the bubbles out is what will be necessary. Once the beer is good and flat, you can use any beer dough recipe, I went with my fall-back of 4 1/2 cups flour, 1 tbsp baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 12 oz flat beer. Sift together the dry, mix them while gradually pouring in the beer. Don't over-knead, but mix until it gets nice and balled up.

Once the dough is done, each batch can make about three 12" shells. So if you're looking for a super easy ber dough recipe, that's it.

You'll start the same as if you were making a pizza. Cut the dough ball into 1/3s to make it easier to portion. Lightly flour a working surface. Gently roll out the dough a bit, toss for a minute in the air by hand, and roll it out some more. You will want it to be pretty thin. 

Cut into rectangules, at about 4x2". In a extra-jumbo muffin pan, wrap the strip around the outside. Once you get your pan(s) all loaded with potential shells, pop them in the oven. This is a multi-stage process.

It takes about 15 minutes to parbake the shells. However, you will need to punch them down about 5-8 minutes in. The shells will start to rise in the muffin pan, and will shoke out the middle area. With a large plastic serving spoon, press it back around the edges.

Bear in mind, this is baking dough, and depending on how you wrapped it around the edge, it may have seams. You can make them worse when pressing it back, and you can also make it better. Smooshing against the edges, directly back will be safest. pushing back against the wrap will smoosh the dough into the seam and possibly seal it. 

Once the shells are done baking (they will be soft and browned) pull them out of the pans to cool.

If you want to fix some seams, you can brush with coconut milk and bake again free-standing on a cookie sheet. There's probably a better way. Either way, they will fill nicely as long as there aren't gaping seams an your filling isn't too runny.

Now I'm not going to give away someone else's recipe, but I topped with one tablespoon of the corn bread biscuit batter form the Vegan Pie in the Sky Lemon-y Blueberry Cobbler batter. You can find a corn bread biscuit recipe other than that one, or use it.

So add 3-4 ounces of your filling, (add the smoked seitan on top for the Seitanic ones,) top with the corn bread biscuit batter, and bake until the biscuit is done. It's going to work, trust me. It is great.

Check out the gallery for the rest of the pictures.

Eek

It's been a minute since I posted, but I will be posting a bunch of pics from recipe testing, the second half of Portable Shephard's Pie: Pot Pie Cup Cakes. 

Reverend Al Sharpton is calling for a National Moment of Prayer on Behalf of Whitney Houston. I don't have even a hint of sarcasm or irony in bringing this up. When I was a kid, I tried out for "The King and I" at the Playhouse singing "The Greatest Love of All." I did terribly, no call-backs, but I really liked her when I was eleven.

Portable Shepard's Pie: Pot Pie Cupcakes - how to pt. 1

For the first Dreamsfood bounty I subimtted a recipe for Pot Pie Cupcakes. They are intended to pull together the goodness of a pot pie in a portable cupcake/muffin format.

Here's the gist; make shells | make soup | fill shells with soup | top with corn bread biscuit batter | bake | top with hollandaise sauce

Of course, being the Alpha Dreamsfood project, this is Columbus centered and vegan. The hope is to spread the message and open it up to more locations and flavors. Anyway, I'm hoping you are here for the recipe, because that's what I've got -

To begin with we will address the soups.  The first one, "Soothing Savory", had apple-smoked sweet potatoes, peas and charred corn. The second one, "Sassy Savory", had some apple-smoked seitan, leaks, butter beans, and smoked turnips. 

For the Soothing Savory, you first need to roast the potatoes (I recommend doing so at the same time as the turnips). Once you roast them and get them hot and sweaty, throw them on the grill for about two hours with some apple wood smoke and indirect heat (you will want to smoke at the same time you do the seitan). As the smoking is winding down, saute an onion, then add some garlic and build up a good soupy base. In a cast iron skillet, powder the bottom with paprika and ancho powder (and cayenne if you want some more heat) and dry toast the spices on medium then edge it toward high. Once the skillet is hot and the spices are done, drain a can of corn (actually use fresh if you can, but it's January in Ohio so...) and add it to the skillet and char the skins. Add along with a can of peas to the base of the soup. Add the sweet potatoes and *boom* you're basically done. From here on out you will be acting like a custodian more than anything. Spice it how you like it, I did my general tex-mex thing. The vegetables are the focus here, and not some spice blend so just keep in mind accenting.

Note: Using fresh corn would have been ideal, same for the peas. You can decide to drop some corn starch slurry into the mix if you'd like a thicker soup for your pies. Smoked salt, however, is one stand-out seasoning that I would say you should invest in for this and the next soup.

Sassy Savory is a smidge more intensive. For the seitan I made basically the same seitan as I had with the Seitanic Panic in the Oven Shepard's Pie. I used the same basic recipe from before, and a similar stock for simmering the seitan and for the rub. Smoking the seitan was nice and easy and done at the same time as the sweet potatoes and the turnips. So basically once you drop the seitan in the stock to simmer, cut up your sweet potatoes and turnips and put them in the oven at 350'F.

Once the seitan and turnips (which upon roasting will still have their bite, though a bit mellowed; upon smoking will mellow out entirely but still have a great punch of flavor) are done smoking it's time to build the soup. The soup starts the same as pretty much any other one I do, but in this case after you finish off the onion and garlic sauteeing, you can stock the stock with the simmering stock you used for the seitan (upcycle that salty water). Mire-poix is utterly your friend on this one, so grab some carrot and celery (and hell, add it to the other soup if you want). Originally I was going to use butter beans only but some black beans made their way in there as well. Add the sweet potatoes and corn starch slurry (if appropriate). Spice and season as you like. Reserve the smoked seitan for making the cupcakes, or just add toward the end of stweing.

Note: When/If to add the smoked seitan is an interesting problem. If you've ever baked seitan before adding it to a saucy stweing dish, you will know the effect you get. The surface becomes nice and resilient and the texture more durable. It is less likely to soak up massive amounts of liquid, and consequently flavor. I chose to preserve the acute smokiness by topping with seitan before serving (and I like the presentation aspect better); you could diffuse it (a) if you prefer, or (b) if you can't stand sharp smoked food, or (c) if you over-smoke those bad boys.

Next time, how to make the shells and build these bad boys...

pron of food - pot pie cupcakes

New Gallery up from my recent entry for Dreamsfood's first bounty, vegan comfort food. It is an attempt at creating a pot pie using a cupcake format. The first one, "Soothing Savory", had apple-smoked sweet potatoes, peas and charred corn. The second one, "Sassy Savory", had some apple-smoked seitan, leaks, butter beans, and smoked turnips. Both were served in pizza dough shells with corn bread biscuits and a nice dose of vegan hollandaise.

So the Bounty of comfort food also included Shepardess Pie and four varieties of Spanikopita (one of which Portia had spontaneously created with some leftover mix and some leftover smoked seitan). It was a big success in terms of people loving the food prepared as well as the turn-out and feedback provided by our Dreamsfood Alpha group members.

Very excited for the second bounty, which was announced this week. It's focusing on Latin Foods and we're hoping for some foods inspired by our Western hemisphere neighbors. So far we have an enchilada entry and a flan (vegan flan? for science!) and I'm hoping for a ton of additional recipes.

I will get the post up soon detailing the how of making these exciting monsters! And YES, smoking seitan is utterly worth every ounce of the effort.

Thanksgiving Pie in the Sky Odds and Ends

So I made a pumpkin pie (the Vegan Pie in the Sky adaptation of the Myra Kornfeld pie) with a single crust and a bunch of cookies. Had some leftover dough and made a pyrex-potpie of thanksgiving leftovers (stuffing+green-bean-casserole+gravy+tomato-paste=FTW).

This four-day holiday weekend was the bestest good times. Also, I'm hard at work pulling together an entry or three for the VegNews Holiday Cooking contest (mfg needs a KitchenAid!).

Okay, so actually, I'm hard at work at going to work. I might make some more refinements to the recipe I tried over the weekend; these include subbing one ingredient (fresh for canned), swapping one ingredient for another (root the squash), and doing both with some earthbalance alchemy. I also need to do a write-up on the other recipes from the vegan x-butter cookie-thon. Recipes to follow.

Update on 7:59AM by mfg

Here is the sequence of posts from Vegan Pie in the Sky by Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terri Hope Romero:

• National Pie Day, and the next; Tongue Tied Triple Berry Pie
• Upside Down Banana Toffee Pudding (Banoffee) Pie
• Thanksgiving Pie in the Sky Odds and Ends
• Blueberry Lemon Corn Biscuit Cobbler

My Original Review: Vegan Pie in the Sky: We are Gods