If anyone has been up to copper country in the upper peninsula of Michigan, you have undoubtedly encountered pasties. These are meat and potato pies that originated in England. During the early 20th century the Keewenau Peninsula was the world's richest source of copper and immigrants from Finland and England mined the ore. The pasty became a staple food for the miners. My grandfather was a copper miner and my grandmother Lila would make these wonderful treats for him to eat at work. The miners loved them because they could hold them in their hands to eat. This is as close to my grandmother's recipe as I can get, although I suspect she used shortening or lard in the crust instead of butter. I prefer them slathered with ketchup.
Ingredients
Serves 8
The Crust
3.5 cups flour
1.5 cups cold butter
1 tsp salt
~0.5 cups ice water
The Filling
2 lb ground chuck or other ground beef
4-5 medium potatoes
4-5 large carrots
1 medium rutabaga
1 large onion
salt and pepper to taste
Method
preheat ove to 375°F
The Crust
Mix the flour and salt. Cut in the butter (I use a food processor pulsing for about 10 seconds) to make a mixture the consistency of lumpy gravel. Add water by the teaspoon and toss just until the dough can be formed into a ball. Wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 3o minutes. I like to divide the dough into four balls and slightly flatten them when I refrigerate. This dough should make 8 good sized pasties.
The Pasties
Dice or shred all the vegetables and mix with the meat. Season to taste. Divide the dough into eight and roll them out one at a time into a round oblong shape. Place a mound of the filling on half of the dough and fold over, sealing the edges with a little bit of water and pinche them together. I like to twist and fold the edges up to make the edge a bit more decorative. Place on an ungreased baking sheet and bake for 50-60 minutes, until the crust is nicely browned. Serve with ketchup or butter.
8 comments:
Hi Greg, thanks for sharing. Just a question, the closest I can get for rutabaga is jicama. Any suggestion for the replacement? Kinda hard to find the turnip in local wet market. Hmmm... unless I try Cold Storage.Do let me know. Wanna try making pasty. Cheers!
A fellow Yooper chemist. There can't be more than 10 of us in the entire US.
Next we'll have to swap recipes for homemade juustoa.
:D
taitauwai, some people use parsnips instead of rutabaga. Extra potato works too, but then final product is a little bland.
Thanks... now I wanna try "juustoa". I love cheese... :>
Are pasties anything like pierogies?
It sounds like this would pair up nicely with a fine lager or a pale ale.
mevans: Pasties really don't resemble pierogies at all. In my limited experience with pierogies, they are about the size of a curry puff, a wheat shell over homogeneous potato filling. Pasties are about one meal each, two servings for most children. They about half fill a standard dinner plate, and the contents are only about one quarter starch, the bulk being rutabaga and carrot and meat, and quite heterogeneous.
My first experience with a pierogie was shock and horror due to my having been raised on pasties. I still won't eat them unless someone's mother crafted them with love ;)
chemgeek: You are correct, though i think pale ales have too much personality to balance the pasty. I am a big hefe fan, so that would be my first choice, but PU or Stella or any of the medium lagers would work. Bass, for example, i think would be too much.
This is all my opinion of course. Where i grew up Schlitz and Blatz still rule ;)
The best pasties are half meat, and half jam/custard. You get your meal and dessert in one pastry. Beautiful!
Twyi,
You're talking about cornish pasties. Designed for tin miners. The pasties are made from short crust pastry with an internal divider. There is savory at one end and a sweet at the other. The pasty is sealed with a large welt that can be held by the fingers and discarded after eating. Quite important when you're mining tin ore with no access to clean water to wash your hands.
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