That's a-Mornay

I've cooked up two batches of pot pies so far, both using a fairly standard pork stew filling. But there's more to the world of pot pies than just pork, and there was one variety in particular that I wanted to try my hand at reproducing: cheesy chicken bacon.

To make a cheesy chicken bacon filling, one must first start with cheese. But simply adding cheddar cheese to the pot pie would result in a greasy, curdled mess since the milk fat would melt and separate from the cheese solids. We must do science.

To keep the components emulsified, and to lend a velvety texture, we actually start by making a béchamel sauce. This is where you prepare a roux of butter and flour, and then whisk in whole milk or cream (I decided to go with whole milk since this was already going in very rich directions). This turns the béchamel into a mornay.

The recipe I used called for 1/4lb of butter, 1/2c flour, 3c whole milk, and a half pound of sharp cheddar. It also requested the addition of mustard powder, nutmeg, white pepper and salt. I skipped the nutmeg because I didn't feel like buying some. I might try it in the next batch, who knows.

So that's the cheese part figured out, next up is the chicken.

I'd been a bit disappointed in the flavour I was able to get out of the pork I'd used in the previous pot pie batches, so for the chicken thighs I decided to brine it overnight in 2c water with 2tbsp salt, and then roast it in the oven until it got some color on it. This turned out really quite well, and I expect I'll be brining my meats from now on.

The bacon part is pretty self-explanatory, but what's left out of the description is the vegetables. This would be a pretty overwhelmingly rich pot pie if there wasn't a bit of greenery mixed in, so I opted to go down the obvious route of using broccoli; about a pound of it before I trimmed it down into its canonical tiny tree form and tossed the stems. Yes, I know the stems are edible and taste just fine, but they're also not expensive or rare so I can choose to only eat the trees instead.

So, into the pot goes the cooked chicken, crisped bacon, and raw miniature forest (the broccoli will cook when the pot pies bake).

Now this is starting to look really good, but it's far from being a pot pie. For that, we need pots, and we need to form pies.

Initially I had used store-bought puff pastry. This worked well, but availability had been a bit spotty, so on the second batch I used store-bought pie crust. It also worked ok, but wasn't really as good. Caught between these two unappealing alternatives, I decided to take matters into my own hands, and make the puff pastry myself.

For some silly reason, I decided to go with the cheater puff pastry, where you basically shred the butter into the flour and then do the roll-and-fold deal. I don't know why I did this, because to be honest it actually ended up being more troublesome and annoying than just doing it the regular way. I think in future I'll just do the traditional butter-slab method.

But, that said, it worked out well and my pies were successfully encrusted.

How do they taste? Well, that's a mystery for me to investigate next Tuesday. Until then they'll be sitting in the freezer patiently waiting for their turn to be cooked.