Welsh Pasties and Aloo Partha

This week for HBinFive we are making 100% Whole Wheat Bread with Olive Oil which makes a good flatbread. I had some trouble with this recipe in the beginning and I don’t know why. Maybe it just wasn’t my week for making bread, but then I settled down and got to work!

For some reason I’ve been thinking so much about Michigan lately and many of my memories involve food. When I lived in Flint, right across the street was a tiny restaurant, King Arthur Pasties, pronounced PASS-tee. King Arthur’s had a very limited menu with Welsh Pasties, some people call them Cornish Pasties, being the main item and they were excellent. The unique flavor in the Pasties is Rutabaga, a large, clunky looking root vegetable with a flavor similar to a peppery potato and when cooked it turns a beautiful deep yellow.

Instead of adding Olive Oil to the HB5 Whole Wheat Dough I decided to use butter and make a flaky pastry dough or detrempe and whip up some Pasties. Detrempe is easy to make, just mix up the dough and chill. Then roll out the dough about 1/4″ thick, spread a thin layer of soft butter, fold up the dough letter style and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. Then again roll out the dough, spread with soft butter, fold and refrigerate. This makes the dough nice and flaky similar to puff pastry.

The Welsh Pasties were outstanding..totally delicious..definitely a keeper recipe!

Welsh Pasties
Recipe adapted from Milwaukee Journal March 28, 1943

Dough:
3 c. flour
1 1/2 sticks butter (cold and cut into bits)
1 1/2 tsp. salt
6 tbsp. water

Filling:
1 lb. round steak, coarsely ground
1 lb. boneless pork loin, coarsely ground
5 carrots, chopped
2 lg. onions, chopped
2 potatoes, peeled and chopped
1/2 c. rutabaga, chopped (can substitute turnip)
2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper

Dough:
In a large bowl, combine flour, butter and salt. Blend ingredients until well combined and add water, one tablespoon at a time to form a dough. Toss mixture until it forms a ball. Kneed dough lightly against a smooth surface with heel of the hand to distribute fat evenly. Form into a ball, dust with flour, wrap in wax paper and chill for 30 minutes.

Filling:
Combine all ingredients in large bowl. I browned the meat and added the vegetables and sauteed for a few minutes.

Making the Pasties:
Divide the dough into 6 pieces, and roll one of the pieces into a 10-inch round on a lightly floured surface. Put 1 1/2 cups of filling on half of the round. Moisten the edges and fold the unfilled half over the filling to enclose it. Pinch the edges together to seal them and crimp them decoratively with a fork. Transfer pasty to lightly buttered baking sheet and cut several slits in the top. Roll out and fill the remaining dough in the same manner. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. Put 1 tsp. butter through a slit in each pasty and continue baking for 30 minutes more. Remove from oven, cover with a damp tea towel, cool for 15 minutes.

For our second recipe we made Aloo Partha. For the filling I used white potato, sweet potato, peas, garlic and salt/pepper. I have to admit this was not one of our favorite breads but in all fairness, if I had rolled the dough thinner I think the loaf would have been better. But you can see in the below photo that the “crust” is far to thick. In the dog world we call this a handler error meaning the dog was not at fault but rather the handler had made the mistake but in this case it was the cook!

Whole Wheat is a strong flavor and if I was making this bread again, instead of making one large loaf, I would roll the dough thinner, less then 1/8″ thick, into individual loaves and add a bit more garlic and maybe some bacon bits to the filling.

If you’d like to see Tradtional Aloo Partha, Aparna, a member of HBinFive, has a wonderful post on her site My Diverse Kitchen. And please take a minute to watch the video embedded in her post, definitely worth your time.

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Tagged as: Beef, Pasties, Pork, Potato, Rutabaga