Today I went to a store that sells baking ingredients and asked for ingredients to use for baking meat pie. My wife is still surprised. I ended up buying the following:
- Flour
- Baking powder
- Nut meg
- Margarine
- Sugar
- Electric mixer
- Mixing bowls
- Measuring cups
- Carrots
- Meat (was told how to create minced/diced meat from normal meat, much cheaper)
- Potato (not sweet potato)
- Eggs
After some hours of reading online and watching YouTube videos with conflicting information, I created my first meat pie.
My wife loves its crunchy taste but I was hoping for a non-crunchy meat pie. I don't even eat crispy fried chicken. You should see how I fight KFC staff when they put crispy chicken instead of the regular chicken in my ordered food. So now, I am begging my wife to eat all the meat pie I have spent 5 hours (learning) to bake. She's the captain of the crunchy team.
I suspect it's the two tablespoons of baking powder I put that's made it more like a cookie pie. I am researching online. If that's the actual cause, may the Microsoft Excel of the owner of the website crash.
That minor issue aside, it has been a very enjoyable process. I am even to begin a one month baking school/class next week. I can't wait to stop paying Domino's Pizza. I came across a YouTube video of how to make pizza at home. Especially the pan pizza. I am definitely going to try it. Wanted to this night but when the lady started mentioning pizza sauce, cheese and those other stuffs I didn't have, I decided to stick with just the meat pie today.
I started with cooking the meat after slicing them thin to make dicing easier afterwards. I bought N1000 meat from my regular butcher/meatseller. He knows he cheats me because I always leave the person I meet there. He agrees to my price faster than he agrees to other peoples' price. I hope they just put a fixed price on meat like the suya sellers now do. I put in good amount of water in a small pot, added curry, added one cube of Maggi Naija Pot and added some salt. 30 minutes later, I had produced the nicest soft meat. I then diced the meat.
I used my wife's potato chipper to create easy to dice chips from the carrot and potato. She helped me dice them.
I then watched 4 videos trying to figure out which is the (most) correct one. The creators better stick to their baking and not go near computer programming. One said 4 cups of flour + 1 spoon of baking powder, another said 2 cups of flour + 2 table spoons of baking powder, still another said 3 cups of flour + 2 tea spoons of baking powder.
In the end, I mixed the following:
- 2 cups of flour
- 2 table spoons of baking powder
- 1 small sachet of nutmeg
- Enough margarine to make the mixture feel like breadcrumbs (or garri, as one online teacher said)
- 1 table spoon of sugar
- A small pinch of salt
- 1 egg (used half for the mixture and the other half for the inner lining of the meat pie at the point of baking)
- Quarter of a cup of cold water (real cold water from the water dispenser). Don't know why it must be cold water, not warm water.
I mixed them. And mixed them. And mixed again until it looked like what I saw in the YouTube videos. I then placed the dough in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
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| It's so rich, you can see the nutmegs |
I put small oil in a small pot. Placed on the cooker. Poured the diced carrots, diced potato and diced soft nice meat into it. Stirred for 4 minutes. Added small salt and black pepper. Added small water. Left for 8 minutes. Added 2 spoons of flour. Stirred for 3 minutes. All looked awesome. I could see the meat pie coming together. Baker's Street would want my special meat pie fillings recipe. Without exaggeration, it is patent worthy. Just take a look at it.
I took a glass bottle of groundnut and rolled out nice circular flat thin doughs from small cuts from the entire dough.
Put them in our halogen oven set to 170 degrees centigrade. Went back to the videos to sort out which to follow regarding number of minutes to set it to. Everyone agreed on the temperature but duration was as wide apart as 25 minutes is from 60 minutes. I went with 30 minutes.
I hope I have delighted you with my personal story of how I made my first meat pie. I also shared the photos with the owner of the baking school I have paid to begin class next week. I want to go pick up my Suzuki 600cc (power) bike from my trainer this week so can't afford to start the baking class this week. With my work load, I can only squeeze out small time for one small side class at a time and settle with sleeping very late at night.
