Traditional pork pie

Background

There are a few things I miss about the UK. One of them is getting hold of a decent pork pie. Having said that, in the 15 years I have lived in Australia it is getting better. In fact, there has been a steady decline in the flavour of pork pies, even in the UK.

It is Christmas time, and that’s the time of year people enjoy pork pies. Pigs are typically slaughtered at the end of autumn. That’s when they are at their fattest. If they are allowed to live into winter, two things happen. Firstly, they lose weight because there is less food for them to eat in winter, and secondly, what food there is will need to go to the livestock you must keep until the following year for breeding. So, it makes far more sense to slaughter them while they are still fat. 

This is the problem. Summer brings an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables, so we can feast on this during summer, but how did we survive through the winter? That’s when we kill the land animals. They are going to go thin otherwise, as will we.

Pigs are large animals, giving a glut of pork when slaughtered. That presents a potential problem. How do you keep the meat through the winter months without refrigeration? Well, there are various solutions, most of which involve some sort of curing (salting). Think sausages, bacon, ham, scratchings, and pork pies. That’s why all these things are part of the Christmas feast! They are all in abundance at Christmas time. 

I have had great success and terrible failures at making them myself, but that was before I started blogging and before I trained as a chef and a baker. So, now that I have both certificates under my belt, I thought I’d blog my experiences making it again. 

Microbiology

There are three main microbial barriers in a traditional pork pie:

1. Impenetrable pastry (hot lard ‘lining’ pastry)
2. Immobilised water (jelly)
3. Cured pork (salted)

This is no ordinary pie. It is built to last months before fridges were invented, throughout the whole winter months, in fact, until fresh produce was once again available. 

Unfortunately, pork pies have fell foul of recent trends in cooking, and no longer convey nearly the same amount of microbiological protection to the food inside as they once did. Levels of salt have been reduced, the type of pastry has been changed, and the layer of jelly has all but disappeared completely.

This blog is for those who remember the traditional pork pie in all it’s former glory, aren’t burdened by the mistaken belief that our food needs less salt, sugar, and saturated fat for us to be healthy, and who wish to recreate this dish how it was meant to be. 

Recipe

I’m splitting this up into three main parts and will be doing a ‘deep dive’ into each component:

• Pork
• Seasoning
• Hot lard ‘lining’ pastry
• Jelly

Pork

You can use either pork belly (50% fat) or pork shoulder (30% fat). Bear in mind that shoulder is half the price and half the fat of belly, but belly is better tasting and has a nicer texture. You decide what you want more of, but if you are unsure, use a mixture of both.

I have based this recipe on half belly and half shoulder. The actual amounts I used are listed here, after the skin was removed and turned into pork scratchings, of course:

• 570g pork belly (weight with skin removed)
• 490g pork shoulder (weight with skin removed)

Roughly chop the meat into 1 cm cubes.

Seasoning

The seasoning makes or breaks a pork pie. Pork pie is charcuterie. It is meant to be eaten between fridge and room temperature, and it lasts for months at this temperature before being cut open. Pork pies were the main way pork was preserved in Britain, whereas the French made terrines, the Spanish made chorizo, and the Italians made salami. 

One of the ways all these products have a long shelf life, and the one that is common to them all, is salt. There needs to be an appropriate amount of salt to retard microbial growth. 2% salt is what we normally like in food, 2.5% is what we use for short term preservation (e.g. butchers sausages), and 3% for charcuterie. 

Also, we need to bear in mind the colder eating temperature of charcuterie. These products are eaten cold, so your taste buds will register less taste across the board. 

The other thing to bear in mind is that meat is normally roasted, grilled, or fried. That means the Maillard reaction creates umami chemicals which convey a ‘savoury’ taste. That doesn’t occur in boiling or steaming, and pork pie meat is steamed from raw inside a protective pastry case.

Low salt and low umami, along with no pepper, spices or herbs will give you a completely tasteless pork pie. I accidentally made one of these two years ago and it tasted like a lard pie. I had to throw it away. This is an expensive pie to make, in terms of time as well as financially.

So, seasoning is incredibly important in a pork pie, more so than any other pie. As a rough guide you need to use between 2-3% the weight of the meat (including attached fat) in salt, and about the same in other flavourings combined. Typical examples would be ground white pepper, ground mace, ground nutmeg, ground allspice, and/or chopped sage (fresh or dried). 

I decided on the following: 

• 2.5% salt
• 1% white pepper
• 0.5% ground mace

I chopped all the fatty meat into roughly 1cm x 1cm cubes. I added the seasoning mix and massaged it in with a gloved hand. 

Hot lard ‘lining’ pastry

I’ve only made a hot lard pastry twice before, and no one has taught me how to do it. Both times it worked fine from a recipe I sourced online. I would have been more confident with a written source. The internet has a way of adopting the extreme bias of the day while passing it off as authentic. It’s a lot more difficult to do that with printed sources of information.

Nevertheless, it tasted authentic. Unfortunately I didn’t record it, so I had to source this recipe from the internet again. I can’t say I’ve tried it though, because I? can’t remember how close it was to the two I’ve made before.

Anyway, this is pastry recipe I eventually decided upon:

Ingredients:

• 575 g plain flour
• 200 g lard
• 220 ml water
• 2 tsp salt

Method: 

1. Add lard to mixing bowl on scales
2. Pour over boiling water on scales
3. Add salt on scales
4. When the lard has melted, add the pre-measured flour all at once
5. Using the dough hook attachment, mix the dough on lowest speed for 1 – 2 mins until the flour is fully incorporated, then scrape down with a bowl scraper
6.  a dough (use some sort of spatula until the dough is cool enough to touch), then knead while still very hot to the touch until smooth
7. Grease a spring-form pie tin with lard
8. Roll 2/3rds of the pastry to 5mm thickness and line the tin with pastry, making sure there is enough of an overhang over the sides to attach the lid
9. Place meat into the pastry lined pie tin and press firmly to eliminate any gaps. You want to make sure there are no gaps between the pieces of meat, as well as no gaps between the meat and the pastry. These will cause big problems later if present, so compact that meat in
10. Roll the remaining 1/3rd pastry into a 5mm lid, at least as wide as the diameter of the 
11. Cut an X in the centre of the lid, turn out the 4 ears, and trim them off with scissors to leave a hole about 1 cm diameter
12. Brush the top with egg wash (half egg, half milk)
13. Cook at 180℃. until pastry is medium-dark brown and the centre is above 65℃. (about 90 mins)

I picked up my ‘Retail Baking’ certificate from TAFE last week. Reading this recipe was interesting. It is the first time I recognised it as a ‘lining pastry’. That makes so much sense! So, what do I mean by a ‘lining pastry’?

Bread and pastry are similar. Both have 3 parts dry ingredients to 2 parts wet ingredients, where all fat is considered ‘wet’. In the case of pastry, almost all the ‘wet’ is fat. In the case of bread almost all the ‘wet’ is water. 

Lining pastry is a halfway-house. The ‘wet’ is half fat and half water. ‘Lining pastry’ is what is used for a pie where the filling is liquid. In practice this usually means a liquid custard that will set in the oven. To help the liquid custard to set, a ‘lining pastry’ is typically blind baked, and has no lid. We are talking quiche here, people, but you could also apply it to sweet custards as well as savoury ones! 

Bread is stretchy, with a hard armour called a crust. Pastry is crumbly, and liquid can leak through the tiny cracks that make it crumbly. So, we need a pastry case that has some of the properties of bread to hold in all the liquid that comes out of the meat.

Now, some might say that all savoury pastry should be made with only lard, and all sweet pastry should be made with only butter. Others like to use half butter and half lard in all their pastry so they can have a single recipe for everything. 

When the filling is pork though, it’s a no-brainer that you want the pastry to be as complementary to the subtle flavour of the filling as possible, and that means using all lard. I say you want a complementary rather than a contrasting flavour here because of the subtlety of the pork flavour. It is too fragile alone. Yes, pork pie is matched brilliantly with a powerful sauce, like HP Sauce, or English Mustard, but any boost in porkiness helps the overall picture. 

I actually made my pork scratchings on the day I bought and prepared the meat, so I got around 75 mls of lard as a by-product of that. It smells really strongly of pork, much more so than my block of lard from the supermarket, so I will be using that as part of my lard. 

I did some research regarding this pastry for this blog. Compared to an all-butter pastry, all-lard pastry gives an outer flakiness, resembling laminated pastry without the lamination. As ChatGPT puts it: “Unlike butter or shortening, lard has a unique crystalline structure that creates distinct layers in the pastry, leading to that desirable flakiness”. 

Lard is also a better moisture barrier than butter, probably because butter is 20-30% water anyway. This is particularly important when you want a strong microbiological barrier as you do in a pork pie! 

This is also important in a quiche. You know, I think I’m going to switch to using only lard in my savoury quiches from now on. A savoury flavour and better moisture barrier are both characteristics you want in any savoury quiche. 

In fact, you don’t just want a tough microbiological barrier for a pork pie. You really do need a moisture barrier in a pork pie too. In a quiche, at least the filling sets after 30 – 45 minutes. Hopefully the liquid won’t have dissolved your pastry by then. With a pork pie, the meat is continually emitting liquid as it cooks. And then it has to potentially keep it in there for months at room temperature. 

This dish really is a feat of structural and biochemical engineering!

Ok, but why hot lard. Why not cold lard and cold water, as with your basic ‘savoury shortcrust’?  

Well, we make pastry with solid fat, namely butter or lard, and go out of our way to ensure it stays solid while it is mixed into the flour. There is a reason for this. We want the fat to coat the outside of all the flour particles, not get soaked into them. This ensures the fat is where we want it, forming a barrier to water between two particles of flour. If there is ever water between two flour particles, the soluble protein molecules will come out of the flour particle into the water. This is called ‘gluten development’. This is what we want in bread making, but what we want to avoid in pastry making. Preventing that gluten development is what makes the pastry fall apart (crumble) when we bite into it. Bread, on the other hand, is chewy, not crumbly. What we want in shortcrust pastry is for all the fat to melt during cooking, get absorbed by the flour then, leaving gaps around every flour particle. That gives it a really crumbly texture.

So, we chill a pastry we want to be crumbly, and we heat one we want to prevent it from being crumbly. We don’t want the fat on the outside of the flour particles preventing gluten development, we want it soaked into the flour particles now, so we can add water for the gluten to move into, tying the flour particles together as a tough scaffolding. 

This makes ‘hot lard’ pastry more of an enriched, dense, unleavened bread. Having said that, most enriched breads are 10% fat. This is three times that. This is a super-fatty unleavened bread armour. On the outside it has that typical pastry-like appearance, but on the inside it should be white, smooth, stretchy, and be stodgy and dense. 

Also, this pastry is kneaded. You don’t knead pastry, you knead bread. In fact, the heat makes the gluten develop even quicker. I made this in my mixer. For pastry you would always use the paddle attachment. For bread you use the dough hook. You can use the paddle if you have a high hydration dough but your mixer would need to be pretty powerful to cope. This is a standard hydration dough so I used the dough hook. That gets the bread kneaded for you as well as mixed. 

I weighed the lard into the mixing bowl, then the water from a kettle that had just boiled, then added the salt. I stirred it around until all the lard had melted, then added the pre-weighed flour all at once. I attached the dough hook and mixed on the lowest speed for 2 minutes. There was a little mixture at the top of the bowl that wasn’t being incorporated so I stopped the machine and did a quick bowl scrape. I continued the machine, turning up the speed a little to the next setting. 

I then took the hook attachment off, and covered the top of the bowl to let the dough rest in the bowl for 10 minutes. This is because we have just pulled on lots of protein molecules and they have made the dough 

Fat-enriched breads brown more on the outside than their lower-fat counterparts. So, this beast will brown quicker. That’s fine, because the meat inside is steamed, so where is the umami going to come from? Well, a well caramelised crust will do nicely, thank you! . A heavily fat-laden unleavened bread crust, cooked for long enough to remove every water molecule from its outer layers, would be the ultimate microbiological barrier. What water dependent micro-organism could possibly grow through a crack that was so heavily ladened with fat, completely penetrating through to the core of every single flour particle, preventing it from being accessible as food? 

So, I cooked it for an hour, then checked on it. The pastry was still a bit blond. It was cooked where I crimped it, but too pale elsewhere. The temperature probe read 65℃, meaning the meat is fully cooked. The ventilation hole was full of water. Luckily, none had escaped and poured over the top of the pastry, but there might not be much space for me to add gelatine if I take it out now. So, I left it for another 20 mins. 

I checked again, and decided to leave it for another 10 minutes, so it actually got the whole 90 mins in the end. However, there was spillage on the lid from liquid emanating from the central ventilation hole. That’s not the end of the world, it’s only cosmetic. What was a problem was the fact it was also emanating from the edge where the lid was supposed to be sealed against the side at one point. Damn! That’s going to cause a problem as we shall see later. 

Jelly

You may not be aware, but a piece of meat typically loses 20% of its raw weight when cooked. We are cooking 1kg of meat, so that equates to 200 ml of liquid that the meat is going to extrude as it cooks. We are steaming this meat in a pastry case that has been designed to be impervious to liquids. 

This meat steams, it is not baked. It steams in its own juices. That gives it a very peculiar flavour, characteristic of pork pie. Lots of aroma is lost when you cook pork normally. Steaming food in its own juices retains that aroma. Pork pie smells very porky. 

Having said that, you do need to put a ventilation hole in the pastry lid, otherwise the pie will explode, but the point is the hole should be large enough to prevent explosions, yet small enough to preserve as much of the cooking liquid and pork aroma that exudes from the pork as it cooks. So, I accept there will be some evaporative losses here, but we will be replacing those losses with water, so we need to allow for 200 mls of liquid.

We are basically trying to set this liquid. This is the juices of the meat, which have been squeezed out of what is now a contracted, solid lump of meat that is now sat in the middle of a larger pastry case. There is now a big gap between the cooked pork and the pastry that wasn’t there when we put the meat in. 

I let the pie cool to around 40C so it could be handled easily and the pastry was more resilient. It was still in its pie tin. I turned it upside down over a bowl to collect the juices. This should have been an easy task as there should have only been one place the liquid could come out from, but because of the leak at the side of the lid I mentioned earlier, it came out of two, and I made a bit of a mess, losing some in the process. 

The gelatine layer works as an extra barrier to spoilage, working in the same way that setting a jam prevents spoilage. You convert free water into water that is trapped in a network. In the case of a jam that network is a carbohydrate called pectin, and in this case that network is a protein called gelatine, but the principle is the same. No free water, no microbial growth. 

The instructions on my powdered gelatin said 2 tsp sets 500 ml. I caught around 150 ml, and so I added 50 ml of water which I knew I would need to fill the space. So, for my 200 ml I should need around 1 tsp. I wanted a set that was slightly firmer than a wobbly fruit flavoured  jelly we all know from childhood. Medieval jellies were typically much firmer than that. 

So I added 1.5 tsp of gelatine powder to the meat juices. My gelatine wouldn’t dissolve properly so I heated it in the microwave to bring the temperature up a bit and gave it a stir. Gelatine melts above 25℃. I had to push it up to around 60℃.

Now you need a funnel. Place the point of the funnel into the ventilation hole, then slowly pour your juices back into the pie. When you think you can’t get any more in, leave it for half an hour, give it a little shake, and see if you can get any more in. 

Gelatine sets around 15℃, so, to ensure this would set in Sydney, Australia in summer I will need to put this bad boy into the fridge. By this time, the pie was around 35℃. I knew it would take another 24 hours to get to 26℃, which was the ambient temperature of the kitchen, so I just put it in the fridge then and there. After 2 days, the centre read 5℃. So it was fine to cut into. 

Tasting notes

So, what I have written above was the plan. But how did this pie actually taste?

I want to comment on a few specific things in detail, as follows:

• Meat texture
• Pastry thickness
• Pastry fat content
• Pastry seal (crimping)
• Accompaniments
• The perfect accompaniment to beer
• Seasoning
• Jelly

Meat texture

This pie needs texture in my opinion. Don’t use minced pork. Buy whatever piece of pork you want to use and chop it  a little chunky. The ideal sized pieces are around 1 cm cubed. Having said that, this applies to the lean meat. If you do that to the fat pieces, people will be picking  them out. Chop the fat smaller so they are too small to pick out.

This also gives you full control on how much fat to add because as you try to cut through the meat, the layers of meat and fat tend to separate for the pork shoulder in particular. I actually bought twice the amount of pork shoulder I knew I would need and cured the other half of it, and put all the fat from it into this pie. I won’t do that again. One third fat is enough, and pork belly has 50% fat. There should be enough fat in the belly part when you use half belly and half shoulder to leave all the shoulder fat out.

Pastry thickness

I had plenty of pastry left over, so was tempted to see what effect making the pastry base a little thicker than was needed. You can see from the pictures that the base is a little too thick and stodgy looking. It should look like that, just a little thinner. It cooks for ages and the base is always sat in a puddle of water, don’t forget. The lid doesn’t have that problem to deal with. You can see the differences in the picture. 

Nevertheless, after cutting out only a little bit of the stodgy middle of the base when eating this pie, the proportions of meat-to-jelly-to-pastry were spot on. I just should have made sure the pastry was 5 mm in thickness. 

Pastry fat content

While I might cut back on the fat in the filling, I wonder whether substituting some of the water for more lard might give this pie a darker and flakier outer crust. It is good how it is, and again it is very authentic, so I don’t want to mess too much, but I just think maybe having 200 ml of water and 220 ml of lard might be better than the 200 ml of lard and 220 ml of water in this recipe. I will try this next time and update you with the results. 

Pastry seal (crimping)

My pastry leaked. That’s a big problem for something that is supposed to be an impenetrable barrier for microbes. 

I used a decorative crimp I use for apple pies. It’s easy, but perhaps not the right one for this. What I needed was a fold-over crimp, the one you see used for Cornish pasties, or samosas. This is harder to learn, but would have been essential in the days when this pie needed to last for months before it was going to be eaten. 

Accompaniments

Wow! As you can see from the pictures, I had this with the simplest of salads, i.e. just salad ingredients on a plate, not combined, and not dressed in any way. All it was missing was a pickled onion, only because I didn’t have any in. Some bread and butter, and a beer. 

You know, while we trash salads like these in Britain, there is nothing like a grazing salad like this, where you just pick up an ingredient and take a bite out of it as you want it. Very rustic. Britain isn’t known for its salads, because we don’t have the weather for them, but it did make me think that my favourite salad probably is a Ploughman’s lunch, where the salad is exactly the same each time, and the only thing that changes is weather you have it with a piece of cheese, ham, a slice of pork pie, or a slice of pate. Even a British chicken salad is exactly the same as this, and served with salad cream. These are great dishes for summer and I rarely have them any more. 

In regard to condiments, I tried this pie with HP sauce and Branston pickle as a taste comparison. Both are very traditional, of course. I much preferred it with the HP sauce. Having said that, it was my version of Branston pickle, not the commercial one so that might suit it better. 

The one condiment I forgot about was Coleman’s English mustard. That is excellent with pork pie. I can’t think of a dish Coleman’s English mustard goes better with, in fact. 

The perfect accompaniment to beer

What was really evident here was how well this pie suits beer. It really was an essential part of the flavour of this meal. I would usually have it with a lighter beer, but all I had on tap at home was this one, a White Rabbit clone I will be posting on soon. 

It was great. The whole combination of a summer’s day, a cold beer, a traditional British salad, pork pie, and some bread and butter. I was in heaven!

I can see why Ploughman’s lunches are such a hit in Britain. When done well, and that usually means very uncomplicated, they are a great way to show off the elegant simplicity of British beer, cheeses and charcuterie. All in our national pubs, with friends, on the best days of the year. 

Jelly

Look at my jelly layer in the photographs. Can you see it doesn’t come up over the top of the pie? That’s because of the leak I had where the lid meets the sides. As I put more gelatine juices in they just leaked out of the seal. 

The set on the jelly was more than it needed to be. I could have got away with 1 tsp of gelatine, but what was more disappointing for me was that it was a little cloudy. I presume this is because it contained fat which had emulsified to some extent with the water from the meat juices. I don’t know how to resolve this, or even if it can or should be resolved. 

Seasoning

Here goes. Pork pie is charcuterie. It should be cured, and that means it should have a salt content above normal levels of seasoning (which is 1 – 2%). For curing we are looking at levels of 2.5 – 3%. 

I used 2.5% salt for this. I thought it tasted a little too salty. That surprised me because I love my salt. The jelly was the same. It was from the same meat, so that’s expected. I am confident I added the amount of salt I thought I was adding.

So, I can’t go below 2%, and I want less than 2.5 for my ext attempt, so I would suggest 2.25% as a better amount. 

There was a nice, subtle warmth from this. That’s what there should be. A barely detectable jet reassuringly there spiciness to it. Often that comes from just finely ground white pepper. However, I wanted to give mace a try this time. 

I liked the mace flavour, and it belongs in this pie. It really suited it, and the pie tasted traditional. However, I think I would prefer to dial down the mace a little, to 0.3%, and dial up the white pepper to 1.5%. I couldn’t really detect the white pepper, and feel there is scope to increase this a little. 

Conclusion

Before this attempt I had to either guess my seasoning or rely on an online recipe, and online recipes are steering us towards a world I’m not prepared to accept anymore. So, both results are now unacceptable for me.

This was a good result. It has elements I prefer to the best shop-bought versions currently available, but it also has elements I don’t like as much.

For the moment, I plan to make this pie once a year, sometime between the end of autumn and Christmas, fine-tuning this recipe as I go. I will keep you updated!