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Sunday, December 19, 2010

Christmas tourtierre, day two

The first half of our dough making is now done.  I figured I'd post a couple of shots before we start our assembly line.

2010 Christmas Tourtierre

We make our tourtierre with a hot water dough (another Mdm Benoit recipe) rather than the flakier cold water dough I usually use.  Here's the basic recipe our version is a variation of.

Mdm Benoit Hot Water Pie Crust
(enough for 1 double crusted pie)

1/4 cup water
1/2 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups pastry flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder.

Bring water to a boil.  Add shortening.  Remove from heat and stir until smooth.

Sift, measure and re-sift flour with salt and baking powder.  Combine mixtures.  Stir until smooth.

Set in covered container and chill for 2-3 hours.

We do ours in triple batches.  Usually I just use all purpose flour, but this year I tried pastry flour for about half the batches.  Usually we use Crisco shortening, but since they went transfat free, the resulting dough has a very different texture, so I'm trying a new brand.  As you can see by the photo, we also add egg and some herbs to the mix.  With so many batches to make, there's no way we'd do it all by hand!  I get one of my daughters to measure and sift the batches of dry ingredients while I use a kettle to boil the water and a food processor to whip up the liquid ingredients.  Then I transfer it to my KitchenAide mixer (best kitchen appliance I never paid for! *L*) with a beater attachment.  After beating in several cups of flour, I transfer to a dough hook and finish it off.  Then the dough it divided into three balls and set aside for chilling while the next triple batch is made.

2010 Christmas Tourtierre

Once all the batches were done, they joined the meat on the balcony to chill.  The bright orange dough is a new experiment this year; instead of herbs, the last two triple batches have paprika in them.  Should be interesting!

While the dough chilled, we headed out to do our annual Christmas family photo.  The meat is now inside to get closer to room temperature.  It won't take long, as it didn't freeze overnight; not even at the edges.  I'll have photos of the assembly later on.  Whether or not I get them up by tonight is a different thing. ;-)

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