Name: Pork Pie (Hand-Raised Hot-Water-Crust Pie)
Prep time: 1 h 15 min
Cook time: 1 h 30 min
Total time: 2 h 45 min
Yield: 8 servings
Cuisine: British
Ingredients: 450 g plain flour; 1 tsp salt; 150 g lard; 180 ml water; 1 egg; 700 g pork shoulder; 250 g pork belly; 2 tsp salt; 1 tsp white pepper; 0.25 tsp ground mace or nutmeg; 0.5 tsp dried sage; 300 ml stock made by simmering a pig trotter; salt

Ingredients

8servings

Hot water crust
plain flour450 g
salt1 tsp
lard150 g
water180 ml
egg · beaten, to glaze1
Filling
pork shoulder · cut into 5mm pieces700 g
pork belly · finely chopped250 g
salt2 tsp
white pepper1 tsp
ground mace or nutmeg0.25 tsp
dried sage · optional0.5 tsp
Jelly
stock made by simmering a pig trotter · or 300ml chicken stock with 8g leaf gelatine300 ml
salt · a little

Steps

Filling: mix the shoulder and chopped belly with the salt, pepper, mace and sage. Cover and refrigerate.
⏲ 10 min
Jelly: with a trotter, simmer it gently in 1L water for 3 hours, reduce to 300ml and strain. With gelatine, soak it in cold water. Either way, heat it just before pouring.
Crust: put the water and lard in a pan and heat until the lard has melted and the mixture comes to the boil.
⏲ 5 min
Pour the boiling water and lard into the middle of the salted flour in one go and stir with a spoon. When you can handle it, knead for a minute or two until smooth. Set a quarter aside, covered, for the lid, and move on before it cools.
⏲ 2 min
Raising: flour the base and sides of a jar or tin about 12cm across and stand it upside down. Drape the warm dough over it and push it up with your palms into a wall 1cm thick and 8cm high. Chill 20 minutes to firm, then twist the jar out.
⏲ 20 min
Wrap a band of baking paper round the outside of the wall and tie it with string. Pack in the filling firmly, mounded slightly in the middle.
⏲ 5 min
Roll out the remaining dough for the lid, wet the rim, lay it on and crimp it to the wall. Cut a 1cm hole in the middle and brush with egg.
⏲ 5 min
Bake at 200°C for 30 minutes.
⏲ 30 min
Lower to 160°C and bake 60 minutes more. For the last 20, remove the paper and egg the sides so they colour. It is done when a thermometer through the hole reads 71°C or more in the middle of the filling.
⏲ 60 min
Out of the oven, wait 10 minutes, then pour the hot jelly stock in through the hole with a funnel, a little at a time. Let it sink and pour again until it will take no more.
⏲ 10 min
Refrigerate as soon as it has cooled and leave it overnight. Once the jelly has set, take it out 30 minutes before serving and cut thick slices. It keeps 4 days in the fridge.

Variations

Pink pies. Pork cured with salt and saltpetre stays pink after cooking. Most factory pies, pressed in moulds, are this kind.
Gala pie. Filling with some chicken in it, baked in a long loaf tin with a line of boiled eggs down the middle, so every slice has egg in it.
Hot, as in Yorkshire. Warmed and served with gravy, or with mushy peas and mint sauce. The jelly turns back into broth.

More detail and the reasons why (1)

Melton Mowbray. Only pies made around Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire may use the name, and the conditions are a hand-raised crust and uncured pork. This recipe follows that version.

Tips

Grey is right. Pork seasoned with salt and pepper and no saltpetre turns grey when cooked. If you want pink, you need cured meat.
A hand-raised wall sags a little. A slight bulge in the sides is taken as the mark of a hand-made pie. The paper band is what keeps the sag from becoming a collapse.
71°C in the middle. The filling is chopped pork, so check the centre temperature (cooking meat). The hole in the lid is where the thermometer goes.

More detail and the reasons why (5)

The pastry starts in boiling water. Most pie pastry rubs cold fat into flour. Here the lard is melted into the water and poured on at the boil. Congyoubing says what that does: "The hot water gelatinises some of the starch, which is what makes the sheet stretch instead of tearing." The result is a warm, sticky paste that can be shaped by hand and keeps that shape as it cools, which is what lets the wall stand up without a tin. So work it before it cools.
A crust that takes a wet filling. Hot water crust holds even very wet fillings. In the dry-oven part of wrapping and sealing the long-baked crusts answer with the flour: strong flour and lard for a pasty, rye for kalakukko. Kalakukko leaves the fat out as well, because "A short crust is a disaster here." A pork pie keeps plenty of lard and answers with the water's temperature rather than the flour.
The filling goes in raw. Meat pie and beef wellington cook their fillings and cool them, because "no oven dries a base from below". A pork pie's filling is raw meat that cooks for an hour and a half inside the crust, and holding that liquid is the base's job.
The meat makes the gap. As it cooks, the meat shrinks and leaves space under the lid and against the wall. The hot stock poured in after baking is there to fill it. It sets as it cools, joining meat to crust, and it once also kept air off the filling. Commercial makers pour a gelatine solution at 80-90°C straight after baking.
Gelatine used the other way from pyeonyuk. There, "it is the setting of that gelatine on cooling that bonds them", the fibres. Here it bonds the meat to the crust. Warmed, the jelly melts again, so serve it cold or at room temperature (serving temperature).

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