If pâté en croute doesn’t trip off your tongue, try the good, old, plodding English “meat pie.” I’ve always thought of pâté, sealed in a pastry crust, as one of the most elegant presentations for charcuterie – and one of the most intimidating! But, hell, making pie is supposed easy as, well, pie, so I plunged in and made a couple pâtés for Tuesday’s party as well as this pheasant pie, which my family gobbled up beforehand.

The pheasant was a big hit Tuesday night, so here’s the recipe. The preparation is a little involved, with diced pheasant meat and mushrooms laid in a turkey forcemeat (think turkey bologna), but you can easily double or triple the recipe for the forcemeat and make several at the same time. My Killer Cutting Robot handled a triple recipe with ease.

I started with recipes in Fritz Sonnenschmidt’s Charcuterie book, but his versions came out too bland for my taste, so I’ve jazzed them up:

Turkey Bologna or forcemeat

turkey thighs 6.5 oz (19%)
turkey breast 9.5 oz (29%)
pork fatback or jowls, without skin 11oz (34%)
crushed, frozen chicken or turkey stock 6 oz. (18%)
salt 13 g
white pepper 2.2 g
mace 0.75 g
powdered ginger 0.75 g
cardamom 0.4 g
onion powder 7 g
non-fat milk powder 6 g

Cube the meat and fat, toss with the salt and seasonings, and keep just below freezing while grinding through a 3/8-inch plate. Place in a food processor with the crushed, frozen stock and process on high until the temperature gets above freezing (approximately 5 minutes). Add the milk powder and continue processing until the temperature reaches 55º F. (This kind of emulsion will break, ruining the sausage, if the temperature gets above 60º F, so don’t push it too far.)

For the inlay, you cut all the meat off one pheasant and cut it into medium-sized cubes. Sear all the bones and skin, and put them in a pot with some Trotter Gear to simmer. Deglaze the pan with Madeira and pour off into a bowl. Add some more oil, dust the pheasant cubes with salt and pepper and then sear them. (Don’t crowd your pan and keep the heat as high as possible in order to avoid merely poaching the pheasant in the water it will give off. Like the crust on a steak, you want the rich flavors that come from searing the outside over high heat to a rich, crusty brown.) Stir the pheasant into the bowl with the Madeira, put diced mushrooms in the pan (I used small portobellos), add salt, and cover. (The salt will help to extract water from the mushrooms, which will deglaze the pan again.) When the mushrooms have given off their water and you’ve scraped the bottom of the pan clean again, remove the lid, and sauté the mushrooms on high until deeply colored. Deglaze the pan again with a splash of Madeira and combine the mushrooms with the pheasant.

Roll out pâté dough or a good lard crust and line a pie plate or terrine. (No, I’m not giving you a recipe – sheesh, do I need to come bake it for you, too?) Sprinkle the bottom of the crust with some powdered porcini mushrooms (locally, it’s available at World Harvest), then fill the pie or terrine a third of the way with the turkey forcemeat. Top with the pheasant and mushrooms, pressing them down into the forcemeat. Cover with the rest of the forcemeat, and then sprinkle with more porcini powder, like fairy dust. Seal with a top crust, but make a small hole in the center and dig down, exposing the meat and mushrooms. Brush the top with beaten egg white. Set onto a baking stone in an oven preheated to 500º F , turn the temperature down to 350º-400º F, and bake for about an hour, until gloriously golden brown. When the pie comes out and has cooled, pour the rich reduced trotter gear in through the hole in the top. When chilled, this will set up as a lovely aspic. (Don’t think you can skip the aspic! This rich, reduced, gelatinous stock transforms the pie, from really good to lip-smackingly delicious.)

Tuesday night, any number of people asked if this was available through the club. It will be, as soon as I get ahold of more pheasant!

• There’s no point beating a dead horse, but it’s probably worth noting that more I delve in Sonnenschmidt’s Charcuterie book, the more slipshod I find the production to be. Both recipes I made, for chicken liver pâté and the pheasant pie, call for gelbwurst, but don’t give you a page number for that recipe. When you look it up in the index, the page number there is wrong. Similarly, they also don’t tell you where to find the recipe for the pâté dough or how thick to roll it out. The recipe for pâté dough doesn’t tell you either or bother to specify that it’s a double recipe, enough for two patés. Small details, but the kind of details a “professional” book should get right. I’m grateful to have recipes like the one for the Gelbwurst or white bologna, but you should consider them a starting point. Typically, I increase the spices he calls for by about 30-50% and do whatever else I can to boost the flavor.

Tags: aspic, en croute, pâté, poultry

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 6:28 am and is filed under Club Offerings, Feature, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.