Chicken Pot Pie

My wife is a little crazy and I love her for it. This week when I had poached a chicken, she nonchalantly and quite apropos of nothing (that I could ascertain; who knows what was buzzing around in her infinitely circular brain?) asked me to make a chicken pot pie, saying that she would really like that a lot. Why not? Anything for her.

So I poach all the vegetables, make the gravy, make the crust, bake the pies, and get them to the table. Just before we dig in, she says, "I've never had pot pie before." All the while, I assume that she has asked me to make her a pot pie because she had eaten one and found it delicious enough to want again.

Don't you think that she would have said to me, "I've never had a pot pie before and really want to try one! Would you make me a chicken pot pie?" Nut!

Chicken Pot Pie

Pie Vegetables

You can use any vegetables that you want for your pies. I had planned to use celery, leeks, carrots, and green beans. When I got home from the store, I found that someone (not naming names) had roasted all the green beans that I was going to use in the pies. So I substituted some broccoli florets.

I brought some salted water to a boil and gave each of the vegetables a quick parboil. I cooked each vegetable in sequence until it was crisp-soft and put it in ice water to stop the cooking. Meanwhile, I picked a bit of chicken off a carcass that I had poached the day before.

Pies Ready for Topping

I brought the chicken stock that I had made the day before to a roiling boil and thickened it with a corn starch slurry. I poured the thick gravy over the vegetables and chicken, then seasoned with salt, plenty of black pepper, and a mound of freshly chopped parsley.

In retrospect, I should have used a beurre manié (flour and butter mix) to thicken the gravy. I was trying to back off the calories by using corn starch, but the gravy broke down in the oven later, something that flour will not do. Even an old chef learns the hard way (to be fair to myself, in my restaurant career, I did not get any experience in low-fat, low-calorie cooking!).

Pies Ready for Oven

We don't have any special dishes for pot pie and I thought that it would be nice to make individual ones, so I repurposed a couple of cereal bowls. I topped each with pie crust (recipe below), trimmed the crust, crimped it into the rim of the bowls with the tines of a fork, slit the crusts for steam vents, and brushed the tops with egg wash. 

The pies want to be in a hot oven (425F) until the top crusts brown nicely. I want to say that these took 35-40 minutes, but I wasn't watching the clock like a hawk.

Pie Crust Recipe

This is my tried and true all-butter super flaky pie crust. I would love to say that I learned it from my mother or her mother, inveterate pie bakers both, but that wouldn't be the truth. They were diehard Southerners and it was Crisco for their pie crust or nothing. I gave up on trans fats and hydrogenated shortening a very, very long time ago in favor of butter or (rarely) lard.

The following recipe will make a generous single pie crust (with generally enough left over to make a lattice top), depending on what size pie plate you are making. I measure my baking ingredients by weight in grams. If you do not have a scale, get one. It will be the single best thing you can do to improve your baking.

150 grams all purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

140 grams cold butter, in small cubes

ice water as needed

Spin the flour and salt in the food processor for a second to mix it. Add the cold butter cubes and pulse. Pulse until the butter resembles really small peas in size. Add a couple tablespoons of water and pulse. Add water in dribbles and pulse in between. When the dough just starts to come together, bring it out onto a floured counter and shape it into a flat disc. Wrap it in film and refrigerate for an hour to cool it off. After this rest, it will be ready to use.