Ok, gather around boys and girls because today we're making tourtiere. What is tourtiere you ask? Well, the wikipedia answer is here, but it is basically a savoury meat pie. Traditionally you throw whatever meat you had in there but I chose to go with veal, pork and beef. Yes, I love veal, please don't send hate mail as I cannot resist its tastiness. Anyways, back to the pie. As you can see above the crust is butter, flour, salt and cheese. Seriously, how can anything that starts with these ingredients not be good?
Behold the filling. The meat is browned with an onion, some garlic, salt and pepper, parsley and allspice. Broth is then added along with some breadcrumbs so the mixture gets thick and binds together. Like all traditional Quebecois recipes it is very light on the spices, not many of those available back in the day I suppose.
Check out my pie crust with all of the bits of cheese. I let the dough chill for half an hour in the freezer and then rolled it out. After letting the filling cool for a bit I filled the pie.
Isn't my pie pretty? Yes, I am rather fond of this recipe, as I think you can tell.
Alas, the kitchen deities do not like culinary hubris. As you can see below the baked pie looks a wee bit different from the unbaked pie. You see, I had to perform emergency surgery on my pie, as bizarre as that sounds. The filling is supposed to have yet more cheese added in it and I had forgotten to do so. So with much cursing in French and English I attempted to remove the top lid of the pie without disfiguring it too much. Alas, this was not possible after the pie had been crimped and brushed with milk so I had to rip the top lid off, mix in the cheese with the filling and then re-roll the top lid out again. Unfortunately my pie was no longer as pretty as in the first shot and I remembered why I needed to re-read recipes when cooking. If you're wondering this comes from Ricardo. I've linked the recipe, in case you don't read French you could run it through babelfish.
Et Voila, the finished product. I could seriously sit down and eat half the pie in one go because it is just that good. Cheddar cheese was made to go in pie crust. Everytime I make this recipe my only regret is that I didn't make a second one.
