Cooking With Nik & Little Bear, Ep 3: Chicken & Leek Pie
Channel: Cooking With Nik & Little Bear
Date: 2017-03-27

Nik will teach you how to cook the delicious, nourishing, cheap and easy way, ably assisted by his unfortunate & ridiculous dog, Little Bear.

EPISODE 03: Chicken & Leek Pie
15 mins, 25 sec / Shot: 22 March 2017 / Uploaded: 27 March 2017

~ HOW TO MAKE CHICKEN & LEEK PIE ~

Pies are awesome and I probably eat them too often – easy, hearty, delicious and, in many cases, a sensational medium for tomato sauce, but no sauce required with this one!  Chicken and leeks are meant to go together, and here they get a level up by being wrapped in pastry.  The flavour of this beast is killer.

YOU WILL NEED:
– Puff Pastry, three sheets – shop-bought is fine (make your own if you’re really keen but seriously, shop bought pastry is fine)
– 500g chicken (four thigh fillets should do it… a bit less meat is fine too, my pie was super-meaty)
– 2 leeks
– An onion
– 2 cloves garlic (minced with a good pinch of salt)
– A good handfull of button mushrooms
– ~2 tsp of dried thyme
– ~1½ tsp dried sage
– One big bay leaf (or two little ones)
– Cracked black pepper
– Roughly 100g butter
– About a cup of milk
– 1-2 tablespoons of white flour  
– 150g tasty cheese, grated

METHOD:

1) Butter a pie dish or any large oven-proof pot and arrange the pastry in it… any way you like – get creative (the pastry only needs a minute or two to defrost).  Cover the pastry with a big sheet of baking paper (or alfoil if you have strong stuff) and fill the pie cavity with rice or barely or any dry legume you have enough of.  Bake for 15 mins at about 180-200°C.  Meanwile…

2) Dice up your chicken and fry it off in a large hot pan with a little olive oil.  Once it’s all mostly white, turn down the heat and remove the meat from the pan, keeping the juices.  Chop the onion finely and cook gently in the chicken juice.  Start preparing the leeks.

3) Leeks are a bit annoying but worth it.  Slice them thinly into rings and chuck them in a colander for washing.  Just use the white and pale green bits, discarding the greener bits as you work your way up the leek.  Once they’re all in the colander, blast them with cold water, breaking them apart and swishing them around vigorously so they get a really good clean – dirt is great, but not in your pie.

4) Mince the garlic with some salt and throw it in with the onions (which should have been sweating down for 5-10 mins by now).  Add the leek and mix it all through – a splash of water will help it all cook evenly without bits getting crispy on the bottom and sides.  Stir often.  Add the herbs and black pepper; chop the mushrooms and add them too.  Let it all sweat down as you do the next step, stirring occasionally, and add the chicken bits back in with the veg about halfway through the next step.

5) Make a white sauce:  Melt a chunk of butter – 50 to 100g depending on how much you like saturated fat.  Dump in a heaped tablespoon of flour (like really heaped) and cook it on a low heat, stirring almost constantly.  After about 5 mins, add a bit of milk and keep stirring.  The mixture will go all lumpy and gross-looking.  Keep stirring through the milk, a splash at a time, until the sauce gets nice and silky – it will probably take about a cup of milk, maybe a bit more depending on how much flour you used.  [You should probably get that chicken back in the pan with the leeks etc at this point.]  Dump the cheese into the white sauce and stir through (a teaspoon of Dijon mustard wouldn’t go astray either).  Once the slurry gets nice and homogenous again you’re good to go – it should be thickish, not too runny but not like paste either.

6) Pour the cheese sauce mixture into the pot with the chicken and leek and now let’s have a look at your blind-baked pastry case.

7) *Carefully* extract the baking paper package full of rice (or whatever) and pour the grains off into a clean bowl.  Once they cool, you can (try to) put them back wherever they came from (have fun with that – an A4 sheet of paper with a fold down the middle can help to funnel them in).  Check that you haven’t got any escapees stuck to your pastry – one or two errant grains of rice can ruin your dinner and hurt your teeth!  And the pastry shouldn’t be totally cooked, just part-way will do.  Fill the pie with your chicken-leek-cheesy-white-sauce filling and whack a bit of pastry on top, trimming so it fits nicely (if you can be bothered).  Whisk an egg in a small bowl and dribble in some milk (maybe 2-3 tbsp), and paint this glaze over the top of your pie with a brush (or your fingers if you don’t have a brush).  A few slits in the top to let out the steam, and your pie is ready for the oven.
 
8) Bake at about 180°C for 15 mins or so – until the top looks delicious.

NB: This needs no sauce, sides, garnish, or any other junk – just slop it on a plate and devour.