Cornish pasties

Cornish pasties are very easy to make - much easier than you probably realise. If you can knock up a shortcrust pastry you’re half way there, end even if you can’t, you can always buy that part (although it would rub against the self-sufficiency ethos).

Once you have your pastry made, it’s up to you what you put inside. A traditional pasty would include beef and vegetables, but you can easily make vegetarian variations, one of which we’ll include here. As much as possible, you should use home-grown vegetables; onions, turnips and carrots work particularly well.

The following quantities will give you around 10 decent-sized pasties, any one of which would be enough for a lunch box or a lighter evening meal.

Ingredients

Equipment needed
Knives and peelers
Chopping board
Baking tray
Small plate
Rolling pin
Pastry brush
Cooling racks

Method
Wash and peel your vegetables and then slice then into very small pieces. Don’t shred or blend them but aim, if possible, for pieces around 5mm cubed. Mix these together and, if making meat pasties, roughly chop in the minced or ground beef.

Combine your ingredients in a large bowl and bind together with the gravy or white sauce. The gravy can be made using graules. For the white sauce, melt 25g of butter in a heavy-bottomed pan, mix in 25g of cornflour to make a smooth white paste, and then pour in three quarters of a pint of milk. Bring this to the boil, stirring all the time, until it forms a smooth white sauce. This will happen quite suddenly after several minutes’ stirring during which it will have seemed that nothing was happening. Don’t be tempted to stop stirring at any time, though, and don’t let the butter and flour burn on the bottom of the pan.

Roll out your pastry on a floured surface until it is around 5mm thick, and then cut out circles using a small tea plate. Lay a stripe of your filling across each one from edge to edge, passing through the middle.

Now use your pastry brush to lightly brush water around the edge of each circle, and gather it up into the familiar pasty shape, folding it in half along the line of the filling. Pinch the edges together and then lay them out on a greased baking tray. Cut a could of slits in the top of each one to allow it to vent in the oven, and then brush with the beaten egg. Not too much - that single egg should be enough for all 10 pasties.

Put them into a pre-heated oven at 230 degrees Celsius (450 degrees Fahrenheit) for 10 minutes, and then turn down to 190 degrees Celsius (375 degrees Fahrenheit) for a further 40 minutes. Once cooked, they can be eaten hot, or turned out onto wire racks to cool, then eaten cold.

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