Gluten Free Savory Chicken Hand Pies

I'm never sure what counts as "my recipe" - I rarely do anything as the recipe is written, but I don't really think taking the cake recipe as written and putting it in a cupcake tin instead really count as "my recipe" - but today's recipe is a combination of four different recipes so I feel pretty confident posting it as my own invention. And the results are spectacular.

Restaurants are doing savory pies.  Pints and Pies is four blocks from my house. There's a food cart that does fried hand pies in Portland.  It made me jealous.  I wanted some so very bad.  I just loved the idea of really good handheld savory pie and I felt left out.  But if I've learned anything about gluten free baking it's that when something needs to be rolled out, someone else needs to have figured out the recipe for me.  It's not "wingable" the way a cake or a cookie is.  Because this was a hip and up and coming thing, no one had gotten around to doing the work to figure it out.  Until now.

I found a recipe for savory chicken hand pies on the Martha Stewart recipe.  If you're a glutenavore, you can try it straight here: Savory Chicken Pocket Pies.  I can not vouch for the dough in that recipe.  I didn't try it.  It looks pretty good but it uses cream cheese instead of some of the butter.  My husband, Michael, is trying dairy free for a couple of weeks so that was my first alteration.

Michael made a tart a couple weeks ago based on the Cook's Illustrated recipe.  It had been a pretty good dough so I decided to sub that for the cream cheese based dough.  Yes, it has butter, but in his lactose-world-view that doesn't count.  Feel free to use shortening of whatever type you use for pies, but make sure it's really cold when you add it in.  My favorite pie crust recipe calls for no gums and only starchy flours (white rice flour, tapioca flour, and corn/potato starch).  I frequently add just a pinch of gum to aid in the rolling out but these were going to have to be rolled out, folded over, pinched together - that's a lot of ductility.  Well within the capabilities of a gluten dough, but a bit difficult in the gluten free.  Some kind of gum was going to be necessary.  If I have any criticism for the manini's mulituso flour it's that it has so much gum that although it gives you the malleability you want, it's too sticky for ductility and leaves your dough tasting chemical-ly.  However, the recipe originally called for some all purpose flour and some whole wheat flour and the accompanying article pointed out that the hearty sweetness of the whole wheat complemented the filling.  With that in mind, I selected a teff flour to replace the whole wheat and used the manini's for the rest of the flour in the hopes that the teff would attenuate the effect and flavor of the gum in the manini's mix. (Spoiler alert: it worked!).

Makes about 4 pies.

Prep time: 10 min for dough, 2 hours for chilling dough.  1.5 hours for cooking and cooling filling
Bake time: 20-25 minutes

Dough ingredients:

• 1 1/4 cup manini's mulituso flour
• 1/2 cup teff flour
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 1/4 teaspoons salt
• 10 tablespoons unsalted butter (if you sub with a non-dairy shortening that's shelf-stable please refrigerate for several hours before hand.  I pulled my unsalted butter from the freezer.  Cold, cold, cold is the key to flakey pie crust - refer to note above) cut into 1/2 inch pieces and chilled.
•  7 tablespoons ice water (straight from the tap is fine if you pulled the butter from the freezer)
• 1 teaspoon white vinegar
• Potato starch for flouring work space.

Filling ingredients:

• 2 lbs (or so) chicken parts, bone-in, skin-on
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup onion, chopped
• 1 celery stalk, chopped
• 1 medium carrot, chopped
• 2 tablespoons white rice flour (or other low-protein flour/starch)
• 1 1/2 cup chicken broth (left over from poaching liquid)
• 1 large egg for egg wash.

Instructions for dough:

Using the pastry blade of a food processor, mix dry ingredients.  Add butter and pulse until it forms pea sized pieces. Add water and vinegar and continue to pulse until the dough forms as a loose, shaggy mass. This is drier than a pie crust would normally be, but you want to try to get it to incorporate all the flour.  Add a little more water if necessary but be careful!

Portion the dough into at least two pieces.  With a heavily floured surface, roll each piece out to be rectangular and approximately a quarter inch thick.  Wrap with tightly with plastic wrap (flour everything with potato starch just in case) and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

Instructions for filling:

Rinse chicken and dry with paper towels. Place in dutch oven or cooking pot and just cover with water.  Add half a teaspoon salt.  Bring to a boil and then lower heat to a simmer for 50 minutes.  Remove chicken with tongs and place on a plate to cook.  Further reduce broth for another half hour or until the broth is reduced to about 1 quart.  When cool enough to handle, shred chicken and dispose of bones and skin and excess fat.  Should have about 1 lb shredded chicken.

In a 12 inch skillet or saute pan, heat oil over medium heat until just shimmering.  Add onion and remaining 3/4 teaspoon salt and cook until softened, about 3 minutes.  Add carrot and celery and cook 2 or 3 minutes more.  Add rice flour and cook one more minute, making sure not to let it get too hot (a little browning is ok, though).   Add broth all at once and stir until thickened.  Cool in fridge.

Preheat oven to 375.

Instructions for roll-out/assembly.

Here's where it gets interesting, kids!  First, get out your dough and your filling. Then, using a knife, cut the first chunk of dough into two equal pieces (think about the fact that eventually you want the pieces you roll out to be circles - cut your dough in a way to facilitate that).

Doesn't need to be perfectly round - just approximate a circle.

Work with the first piece. Taking two pieces of parchment paper, flour both sides of the dough with potato starch and roll out between the papers.  This can be tricky.  The paper moves.  It works better early in the process but later there's potato starch everywhere and the paper sticks to the dough better than it does to the counter.  I had my husband hold it down for me.  If your dough is too irregular or has lobes sticking out, feel free to pull apart the paper, re-fold, re-flour, and roll out again.  Remember!  You can't form gluten in a gluten free dough!

When it's roughly circular, about an eighth of an inch thick, and hopefully around 6 inches across, remove the top parchment paper and take a spatula and slide it all around the dough to release it from the bottom piece (this bit of genius is credited to my husband, Michael).  Spoon about a quarter cup off filling into one side of the dough.  Do not overfill!  Fold over other side and pinch edges closed.  (Don't sweat the pinching.  Just try to make sure the filling is on the inside and the dough is on the outside). Place on greased cookie sheet.  Repeat with remaining dough.

They're beautiful - but they taste seventeen times better than they look

Slice a couple parallel lines with a pairing knife in the top to vent (and also it looks good).  Paint the tops of the pies with an egg wash.  Bake for 20-25 minutes or until the egg wash turns golden brown.  
Enjoy!



A note on cold shortening:  Most baking wants your butter to be room temperature.  Eggs, too.  Not melted. Not hot.  Room temperature.  That's because when you cream butter in sugar, you want a good homogeneity in your batter.  You want it to mix thoroughly.  Hot butter doesn't result in a cream - it's more like oil. Cold butter doesn't mix well and you end up with little pebbles of pure butter.  If your eggs are cold, even if your butter isn't, the cold eggs will re-solidify bits of your butter.  When your dough goes into the oven, those chunks of butter melt and you get greasy bits where they melt and dryness where the butter wasn't.  That's a weird cookie.  But that's a perfect pastry or pie crust.  The reason is, after your chunks of butter get rolled out, they're flat bits.  They melt and leave tiny layers or "flakes" as we call them in the bizz in your crust.  The flakes are crusty and discrete (in the mathematical sense - please don't tell them your secrets) and everyone things you're a hero.


A note on the advantages of making gluten free pie crust versus the glutenated alternative: There is a concern if you over mix or over roll or over knead or over process wheat flour dough for pie crust that you may "develop gluten" and make the crust tough.  Because we can't eat gluten, we're avoiding that possible pit fall.  Although gluten free dough can be tougher to work with, you're allowed to screw up and try again over and over without fear of turning out tough dough.

Allison! Did you make a gluten free funnel cake? Yes. I did.

There are things you oughtn't make at home for various reasons:  home equipment isn't up to the task, it's somewhat dangerous, the ingredients are tough to find retail...and some food is so rich, greasy, and/or delicious that having access to it without at least having to put on pants is dangerous to a person's long term health.  (See this xkcd: Stove Ownership) These include (in my book) tiramisu, prime rib, and anything deep fat fried.

A person does not need uber convenient deep fat frying.  That way obesity lies.

But!  I have celiac disease.  I'm not on this diet for image or lifestyle reasons.  I'm a normal person. I just happen to have a gene that resulted in me not being able to tolerate wheat.  The gluten free "community" is dominated by people who are gluten free because it's the latest thing-to-be-given-up. And the people who produce commercial gluten free food do not make real junk food.  Even the cookies brag about how much fiber they have or low-glycemic index sweeteners or some such nonsense.  They put flax in things and talk about how old their grain varieties are.  Just look at how often gluten free bakeries are gluten free vegan bakeries. They're not down with Krispy Kreme, you know what I'm saying?

And although I can appreciate the leek, mushroom, and gorgonzola tart my husband made for dinner Saturday (America's Test Kitchen recipe with Manini's multiuso flour), there is no way to say that I'm too good for a doughnut - and they're all verboten now.

That's not to say there isn't some gluten free frying going on.  The Corbett Fish House and the Hawthorne Fish House in Portland both do fish and chips and chicken strips in rice flour.  The Bridgewater Bistro in Astoria has a celiac chef and they do fish and chips that are even better. But those are not here in Seattle and clearly have limited fried offering.

So if I ever, ever want to have anything fried again even in the healthy-enough once-or-two-times-per-year consumption rate, I will be making it myself.  It's taken me awhile to get there for a number of reasons - images of horrific grease burns come to mind, but really it has more to do with what does one do with the waste oil?  That's part of the reason I went with a funnel cake as my first fry job.  It doesn't require more than a quarter inch of oil.  After asking a lot of my friends who also cook, I was reminded that if you're doing a pretty mild thing (like a pastry), the oil can be used multiple times.  So I bought some coffee filters and poured in 2 cups of vegetable oil

The other thing I've had to learn to do is use a pastry bag.  This was another barrier to fancy food I would not have overcome if I had been able to leave it in the hands of a professional.  I'm getting better all the time but it tends to be a very big mess. So when I mixed up the

Cooking a funnel cake

My recipe is from the oft-used Gluten Free Baking with the Culinary Institute of America.  It uses the mid-level strength of flour with white rice, potato starch, guar gum, and dried egg white.  It's got an egg and some milk and baking powder and baking soda.  Whisk it up, scoop it up into a pastry bag with a small round tip.  Get the oil hot (I used a candy thermometer) by putting it over medium high heat and turn it down when it gets to the desired temperature.  Squeeze it in a swirl.  It cooks fast so it'll probably want to be flipped about 3 minutes later.  This has been flipped once.

Powdered sugar on top.

I wanted to try using coconut oil but I didn't actually enough on hand.  Coconut oil costs about $6 for 2 cups.  This is closer to 3 cups.  I'm hoping I could use the oil enough times to make it worth it but it's not going to happen this time.  The oil takes longer to filter than I realized it would - it's still filtering through the coffee filter while I write this.  It's going into a ball jar that used to have homemade jam in it.

The texture is delightful.  I was hoping for just a little more crispy outside squishy inside - it nailed it on the squishy.  It's possible leaving it in longer may work or else baking it in the oven for a little bit longer.  I'm also considering adding a bit of lemon to the batter.  I think a little tartness may help but I won't recommend it until I find out if the chemistry still works out.

I want to try apple fritters next time I get the oil out.