A Prairies attempt at cuisine Québécoise in three parts… Part I: Tourtière

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Tourtière

A meat pie recipe originating from the Canadian province Québec. Original recipe for the filling is courtesy of Recettes du Québec (link in text below), with modifications to suit the needs of this recipe
Print Recipe
Prep Time 15 minutes
Cook Time 2 hours
Resting Time (for dough) 12 hours
Course Main Course
Servings 1 pie

Ingredients
  

Tourtière Crust

  • 2 cups flour
  • 1.5 cups butter cold
  • 1.5 Tbsp kosher salt (cut to 1 Tbsp if using salted butter)
  • 4 Tbsps cold water (extra if needed)

Tourtière Filling

  • 2 lbs ground pork
  • 4 cloves garlic minced
  • 2 shallots medium sized, diced small
  • 1 cup boiling water
  • 2 small potatoes peeled and grated
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp ground cloves
  • 1/4 tsp ground ginger
  • 1/4 tsp ground coriander
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp fresh ground pepper

Instructions
 

Crust

  • Mix together flour and salt. Cut the butter into the flour until the butter is about pea-sized. Add the water and mix, adding additional water as required until the dough starts to form up. Press the dough together into a ball and let sit in a fridge for a minimum of 2 hours, up to overnight.

Filling

  • Brown the meat with the garlic and shallots. Once all the meat is cooked through, add the potatoes, water and spices. Cover and simmer for approximately 1 hour. Remove from heat and move on to assembly.

Assembly

  • When ready to use, take the dough out of the fridge and divide into two halves. Form each half into disks, and then roll them out to desired thickness. Fold each dough into quarters, score one of the halves to prepare for top section. Place bottom section in pie pan, poke with fork, fill with filling, then place top section. Pinch around edges, then trim off the excess sections. Bake at 375ºF for 45-60 minutes, until golden brown and bubbling.
Keyword Baking, Meat Pie, Pie, Pork, Savoury Pie

And now for the details…

While I was home over the holidays (yes, it took me until now to post… *le sigh*), I got the opportunity to cook with one of my really good friends, Krystal. Both of us live in different cities, and we rarely get to see each other, but have been able to visit the last few times we both have come home for Christmas.

When we get together to cook, we have a habit of turning it into our very own faux cooking show, full of cheesy smiles, exaggerated cheery banter, and any food facts we may have about what we are cooking. “Emily, why don’t you tell me more about shallots.” “Well Krystal, shallots are a type of onion, but are milder in flavour and sometimes carry the flavour of garlic…” *overly melodramatic fake laughter*

Every time we do this, we choose a theme for the meal and take great joy in trying to figure out what the theme will be. We ended up zoning in on French Canadian fare as the theme for this cooking adventure, and lucky for us, since Krystal had started dating a gent from Québec, we were regaled with all kinds of ideas for the menu. The suggestions included a whole lotta meat and carbs which we narrowed down to tourtière, ragoût de boulettes, and mashed potatoes. The only suggestions for veggies were pickles and a shredded carrot salad. So we went online to find out more about French Canadian food to see what we could find for vegetables. Fun fact that we discovered: French Canadian food was heavily influenced by French and Irish food. Another fun fact: there are not a lot of vegetable options when you do a Google search for Irish cuisine. So we decided to go French-ish and added haricot verts to the menu. Krystal remembered having a dish of beans with caramelized walnuts and onions at a restaurant in Québec, and so: enter haricot verts with caramelized walnuts and crispy shallots.

The results of our efforts!

For this post, we are going to make tourtière. I started the night before to give the dough enough time to rest in the fridge. The crust we are making is a butter crust, which means there is no lard. It would be great for vegetarians if it wasn’t for… well… the meat filling 😉

I would suggest cutting the butter into the flour while it is still cold. Then the butter breaks apart instead of smooshing (yes, smooshing), which I find lends to me overworking the flour to cut the butter down to size. I am suggesting Kosher salt here, but any salt will do. I am just a bit of a saltaholic and I like that “bite” of salt you get when it doesn’t break down completely in the dough. If you are sodium adverse, cut the sodium down in any and all of my recipes 😛

The original recipe I was following for the dough had a terrible ratio of flour to butter to water. After I had cut the butter into the flour and salt, I added the suggested amount of water and you can see the liquid mess I ended up with in the following photo. I ended up cutting way more butter into way more flour, and mixing it into the liquid mess to try and get something that would work. This meant I was working the flour way more than I was hoping to, and I feel as though my crust was “tougher” than I would have liked.

I made significant changes to the recipe that will hopefully help you improve your experience! Start with the first small amount of water, and lightly mix everything together. I am suggesting to start with this, and only add more water as needed, by the tablespoon. There will be a few extra dry bits, but as long as the dough is mostly forming up, try and pull those dry bits in and let the dough rest together instead of adding way more liquid and ending up with too much. I made round two tourtière with the new recipe, and as you can see it turned out much better!!

After you pull the dough all together, wrap it in parchment or waxed paper and let it rest in the fridge in an air proof container. Either a ziplock bag or a Tupperware container would work great for this. By resting, it will allow the moisture to hit up those dry bits, as well as lets the gluten relax. Maybe even play it a little Frankie Goes to Hollywood if you think it will help 😉

The next bit is to get your filling ready. The original recipe we used to help us through the filling was courtesy of the site Recettes du Québec, and I have made some modifications to meet the tastes I was trying to get to. Start by dicing your garlic and shallots. Add them to a dry pot on medium-high heat until they have just begun to brown.

Next, add the pork and sauté the meat with the shallots and garlic until the meat has browned, breaking up the meat if it forms into larger chunks. While the meat is cooking, peel your potatoes and shred them using a grater.

Add the potatoes, spices and boiling water to the pot, cover, and lower the heat WAY down to a simmer. Allow this to simmer for approximately an hour.

About 15 minutes prior to the filling being ready, preheat the oven to 350ºF. Take your dough out of the fridge and separate into two halves, rolling each half into a ball. On a clean, floured surface, flatten one of the halves and roll out until desired thickness. To help transfer to you pie pan, fold the dough into quarters, transfer, then unfold in the pan. Perforate the bottom crust with a fork to avoid bubbling of the crust during cooking.

When rolling out the top half, add your choice design into the pastry before topping off your pie. The pattern allows steam to release during cooking, and makes sure you don’t end up with a blow out of your dough!

Once you have topped off your pie, pinch the edges to seal them up, then trim the ends to get a nice clean pie. Now it’s off to the oven for your tourtière to bake! I put my pie on a baking sheet to catch any unwanted messes in case there was overflow.

Bake for 45-60 minutes, or until the pastry is golden brown. Let it chill at room temperature for about 15 minutes before digging in. Then, slice that sucker up and enjoy!!

Coming up next time… Ragoût de boullettes!

First post… Whew. Perisky, here we come.

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Sauerkraut Perisky

A recipe from my Ukrainian grandma: little buns that can be stuffed with sauerkraut, meat or stewed fruits.
Print Recipe
Prep Time 4 hours
Cook Time 20 minutes
Proofing Time 2 hours
Course Side Dish
Servings 5 dozen buns

Ingredients
  

Perisky Dough

  • 1 cup warm water
  • 4 tsp sugar
  • 3 Tbsp fast rising yeast
  • 1 cup butter Split into 1/2 cup + 1/2 cup
  • 1/2 cup lard
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • 5 cups milk whole
  • 1 egg
  • 12-14 cups flour

Sauerkraut Stuffing

  • 1 onion medium, sliced
  • 2 Tbsps butter
  • 1 800mL jar sauerkraut drained
  • fresh ground pepper to taste

Instructions
 

Perisky Dough and Assembly (Stuffing Instructions to Follow)

  • Mix together the water, sugar and yeast, and let sit.
  • Warm 1/2 cup of the butter, the lard and milk together in a saucepan just until the butter and lard have melted, do not overheat.
  • Combine the milk mixture and the yeast mixture in a very large bowl. Then mix in 8 cups of the flour. Cover and allow to rise in a relatively warm location for approximately 2 hours.
  • After the dough has risen, mix in the salt and egg.
  • Heavily flour your clean counter surface with remaining flour. Starting kneading the flour into the dough, adding more flour to the mixture as needed, until the dough no longer sticks to the counter surface. Transfer the dough back to a bowl, cover, and let rest for a minimum of 15 minutes.
  • Preheat oven to 400ºF and get the filling ready (recipe below) while waiting for the dough.
  • Punch down the dough. Pinch off a small piece of dough. Roll into a ball, then flatten into a disk. Fill with 1-2 tsp. of your filling, then gather and pinch your dough together to close. Lay the perisky sealed-side-down on a baking sheet. Bake for 15-20 or until golden brown. Melt 1/2 cup of butter, and brush buns with butter as soon as they come out of the oven.

Perisky Sauerkraut Stuffing

  • In a large sturdy pan, sauté the onion in the butter until caramelized. Add the sauerkraut, and cook until fully heated. Add fresh coarsely ground pepper to taste.
Keyword Baking, Buns, Perisky, Sauerkraut, Ukrainian Food

And now for the details…

I recently lost my grandma and have become extremely nostalgic for the things that remind me of her. A significant amount of my memories with my grandma take place either in her kitchen or her garden. This recipe touches on both, since, although I am suggesting using bought sauerkraut, Grandma would make the sauerkraut with cabbage from her garden. She would shred the veggie, salt it heavily to get the water to release, then put it in the basement to ferment. My grandma was the OG of the reuse movement: a large, diligently cleaned KFC bucket was the vessel of choice for this undertaking. Once emptied, the bucket was cleaned back up, and put into storage for the next time. You may note that the only two ingredients Grandma used were cabbage and salt. It is the reason I’ve suggested avoiding wine sauerkraut. It has a different flavour than a sauerkraut that only contains cabbage and salt, and wouldn’t taste nearly the same as Grandma’s 🙂

Perisky were often made for special occasions. I remember having them frequently at the big baby or wedding showers that would be held for extended family or friends of the family in local community halls across southern Manitoba. Finger sandwiches, pickles, veggies and dainties (***see note on dainties) were already on the table, but the headliner was when baskets of hot perisky were brought out out from the kitchen to signal the start of the meal.

***Dainty: noun plural dainties; Manitobism; any cookie, square, cake or other form of sweet deliciousness, placed on plates as a random assortment for sweet tooth consumption. Often placed in muffin cups prior to plating, to make them prettier (which I like to call “daintifying”). A great visual example can be found here, courtesy of Goodies Bake Shop.

A quick note on pronunciation. Despite the spelling, we never pronounced it “per-riss-kee”. The “r” is a hard roll of the tongue, almost coming out as a “d”, and the “y” at the end is more of a shortened “eh” sounds, kinda like you would use for “meh.” Also, the “s” is a “sh”, so in all you get something that sounds like “ped-ish-keh”. Isn’t learning fun?

Okay, enough background information, let’s get to the cooking.

We are going to start by mixing the yeast with sugar and water to feed our little yeasties so they will give us delicious bread. While waiting for the yeasties to eat their breakfast, we heat our milk, lard and butter. Keep the temp low-to-mid, so we allow the fats to melt more slowly, without scorching the milk. The fats in this dough recipe will hinder the gluten from getting too long, resulting in a fairly crumby (not crummy!) bread, almost pastry-like.

Melting our fats in milk

After we have fully melted the fats in the milk, mix it together with the yeast solution and dry ingredients (minus some of the flour). The result should be an incredibly soft, almost liquid, dough that we let sit in the bowl in a warm place for 2 hours to do its first rise. If you are going to cover the dough (which is a good idea to keep it from forming a dry crust on top), make sure there is PLENTY of room in the bowl for the dough to rise, otherwise you’ll end up with a sticky mess adhered to whatever you’ve used to cover it with (learned from experience? …maybe…)

First rise

After the yeasties have finished their lunch and the dough has risen, we will use some of the leftover flour to thoroughly cover the countertop and then turn the dough out onto the flour.

Soft gooey dough ready for kneading

We mix the flour into the dough through kneading, adding more flour as we go, until the dough no longer sticks to the counter. The dough will be extremely soft and sticky to start, but as we knead in more flour, the dough will form up.

Dough ready for one last rest before forming our perisky

Let the dough rest, covered, one more time. While we wait, we’ll make the filling. If you are fast with your filling, make sure you let the dough rest for at least 15 minutes before you start assembly.

In a pan, melt the butter, then add the sliced onions, and cook slow over medium heat to caramelize to a nice golden brown.

Not a lot smells better than onions getting toasty brown in butter…

When the onions are ready, we add the sauerkraut. If you’ve chosen to use a wine or vinegar sauerkraut, you will likely need to drain the kraut first, but I find most of the salt-based krauts have very little liquid in the jar and can be added directly to the pan. We sauté the kraut and onions until any liquid that did exist has evaporated, then add some nice coarse black pepper to taste preference. Now is a good time to preheat the oven (400ºF).

Tasting just a little bit will be necessary to ensure quality, right?

Now we are ready to assemble! Punch down the dough, and then pinch off a small portion for your first bun. The amount you pinch off should about 50% to 75% of the size you want your buns to be. You might need to flour your fingers a little bit to make the dough easy to work with. With a light touch, roll the dough into a ball, then flatten into a pancake.

Add 1-2 tsp of your filling to the centre of the dough, and pinch the outsides together to form the bun. I’ve found it easiest to use a fork for sauerkraut, and twirl the fork in the sauerkraut like you would with spaghetti to get a nice dense little filling piece to pinch around.

Once we’ve pinched the dough into a little bun, we place the bun sealed-side down on a cookie sheet. We will continue stuffing until we’ve filled the sheet, and then place in the oven. My original recipe said 12-15 minutes, but I’ve found it typically takes 15-20 minutes for the perisky to reach the right amount of golden. Why the extra cooking time? Am I making the perisky too big? I might be. My grandma had opinions on the sizes… I think it had to do with the care and time involved, but my grandma usually made her perisky, perogies and holupchi quite small, and anything that was too big was considered poorer quality… eek.

Once golden, pull the perisky out of the oven and brush some melted butter (salt it, if it is unsalted butter) and let cool. You’re ready to eat! Careful! The insides will be steaming hot!

As an end note, you can fill the perisky with all kinds of different fillings. I had more dough than sauerkraut filling (I only made a single recipe of the sauerkraut filling), so also I made a thick applesauce with crabapples, butter, sugar and cinnamon and filled the rest of the dough with that. My dad also has memories of one of his aunt filling them with stewed dates, and a friend of mine had a family member who would fill them with a bacon and ham filling, which I feel I will need to try and recreate at some point because that sounds amazing. The possibilities are endless!

I’m excited to start this cooking adventure with you all, stay tuned for more posts!