Nose To Tail At Home

This is a most rich and steadying pie.

Have you ever made a dish that was so amazing, so wonderful, that you end up associating it mentally with what you made it in?  Right now, my largest cast iron skillet will forever be linked to this recipe, which is–for the time being–my absolute favorite from “The Cookbook”.

Two weeks ago I had a small get-together with a few of the local food bloggers.  There is a very productive fig tree in my backyard, and I had been feeling terrible watching perfectly good figs being sniped left and right by the whole Texas population of birds, so I invited the following folks over to get their fill of figs:

Rachel and Logan from Boots in the Oven

April and Sean from The Hungry Engineer

Jennie from Miso Hungry Now

Addie, Ian and Julian from Relish Austin

The same day I was interviewed by Chef Evan Kleiman for her radio show Good Food.  The interview hasn’t aired yet, but I’ll be posting a link once it hits the web.  I found out the day before the interview that Mrs. Kleiman has been working on a very impressive project: Every summer day, she’s made a pie of some sort.  She’s made various fruit pies, shepherd’s pies, ice cream pies, cream pies, fried pies and everything in-between.  It inspired me to make a pie of my own, the Pheasant and Pig’s Trotter Pie with a suet crust from “The Cookbook”.

The Boots Crew had offered to show up a little early to lend a hand with the preparation, which I eagerly accepted.  Logan has formal culinary training from his time in Italy, so I was excited to have him wielding a knife in my kitchen.

But before people started showed up I needed to get some of the long prep work completed.  The recipe starts off with the pig trotters, which needed to be braised for three hours.  I split four trotters in half, added them to one of my larger pots…

…along with the needed vegetables, herbs and spices…

…and added chicken stock and red wine to everything.  The pot was brought up to a boil, then dropped down to a simmer.

Right after walking in the door, Logan jumped immediately into action.  When I showed him the recipe for the pie crust, he suggested that we render the suet into lard.  Now that I’ve seen the process I know that it’s not terribly complicated, but it was totally new to me at the time.  I stood back and let the Maestro work his magic, watching and making mental notes.

Logan started off chopping the suet into smaller pieces that we could send through the grinder attachment of my Kitchenaid mixer.

Once the suet was ground down, it was placed in one of our cast iron skillets over medium heat with a little water.  It quickly melted, and we strained it into another bowl…

… that was submerged in water and ice.  The liquid rapidly cooled, and before I knew it we had lots of lard for making a crust.  Thanks for the lesson Logan!

We moved on to the next step, cutting some of my homemade bacon into lardons and tying the rind into a baton.  This particular bit of bacon rind still had nipples on it, so we all tittered like school girls as we rolled and tied.

Using the same cast iron pan we had used for the lard making, the bacon chunks and rind were fried with some butter until they had properly browned.  Around this time more of the guests started to show up.  Being the conscientious host that I am, I ended up leaving the cooking in the very capable hands of Logan.  I still darted in every so often to try and help here and there, but the success of this dish truthfully lies at his feet.

As the bacon cooked, Logan started working on the crust.  I didn’t get to witness the whole process, but he used my food processor to combine the flour, lard and ice water to make a very fine dough.

April, The Hungry Engineer, showed up with two huge branches of bay leaves (THANK YOU!) and a freshly baked loaf of walnut bread.  I think the gracious generosity of food bloggers really shines here in Texas, if I do say so myself.

Once the dough was completed, Logan started halving the pheasants.  I managed to find these glorious birds at my local supermarket, much to the shock of everyone.  I’m still not sure how or why they were available, but no more have turned up since these two showed up.  Maybe it was fate?

After moving the browned bacon and the rind into an over proof pan, Logan seasoned the pheasant halves with salt and pepper, then browned them in the rendered bacon fat.

When each pheasant half had finished cooking, they too were moved to the oven proof pan with the bacon.  Three sliced onions took their place to sweat in the last bits of bacon fat.

These are the braised trotters, rescued from the bottom of the stock pot.

The flesh and minuscule amounts of meat were removed from the bone and added to the pheasant and bacon along with the onions, and the liquor the trotters cooked in.  The pan was then covered with aluminum foil and placed into a very hot oven for about fifteen minutes. The heat was then lowered in anticipation of another 30 minutes of cooking.

A short time later the pheasant had cooked completely through.  The meat needed to be removed from the bone for the pie, so the pile of game bird you see above quickly turned into this with the help of my industrious guests:

The meat chunks were kept as large as possible so as to add structural integrity to the finished pie.

It might have been Monday night, but we had enough fun to make it seem like it was Friday.

Finally, it was time to construct the pie!  Logan retrieved the dough and began flattening it out with a makeshift rolling pin.

Since I am without a proper pie pan,  Mr. Boots suggested that we use the same cast iron pan we had been using all night.  It made perfect sense to me, so we started filling it with the pheasant, trotters, bacon lardons, onions and the stock the trotters had cooked in.  Logan laid the pie dough over the pan, and cut a few holes for venting.  A quick egg yolk wash and the pan was ready to go into the oven for forty minutes.

As the smell of fantastically rich pork began filling the kitchen, the timer went off: the pie was finished.  We had a bit of trouble finally digging out a slice, as it looked almost too good to touch.  The modesty was short lived however because the aroma was too intoxicating to resist.

And here we have a generous portion of pie with a few expertly prepared Brussels sprouts in the background.  This pie was almost regal  in its nature.  The crispy, dense crust had a very slight piggy flavor to it from the lard, which played perfectly with the rest of its porcine kin.  The pheasant ended up tasting pretty much like chicken to me, so perhaps this dish was born out of a hunters need to use some of his recent spoils.  I plan on making this again with simple chicken and I expect the results to be almost identical.

Dog ear this page if you’ve got the cookbook and make this as soon as you possibly can.

Again, thanks to April, Sean, Jennie, Addie, Ian and Julian for showing up, taking some figs home and making that day extra special.

Logan and Rachel, you guys are just awesome, and I attribute the fantastic outcome of this dish to Logan’s supreme skill.  It was a real honor watching him work.

One down, seventy one to go.