not exactly full
22/10/2008
So yesterday, I duly started on them curry puffs I was thinking about.
First order of business – shortcrust pastry. I love shortcrust pastry, cos it’s usually a little flaky, buttery, and oh. Buttery. When I think shortcrust pastry, my grandma’s pineapple tarts pop to mind – I found out from my aunt that my grandma uses shortcrust pastry for the tart base – so naturally I thought, what better pastry to wrap my curry puffs in, right?
I used two cups of flour to one cup of butter and went to work. I love that over here, the butter is portioned into 1/2 cup sticks, which is so neat. Anyway, the cutting and rubbing in took me about 1/2 hour in total. I left the dough to rest on the dining table, laid out a rolling mat, took out my brand new rolling pin and went to work on the filling.
I chose to use red potatoes, because they’re kind of in between the powdery Russett Burbank and the really starchy Yellow potatoes. I wanted them to hold their shape and not mash, but still be a little fluffy. So I skinned them and cut them into little 3/4 cm cubes. On hindsight, even slightly larger cubes would’ve tasted ok, it’s just a pain trying to fit them into the little pastry cut outs.
I diced 2 chicken thighs up into 1 cm cubes and marinated them with curry powder, sesame oil, soy sauce and pepper. The chicken is ok in larger pieces, because it’s going to shrink a little anyway. For kicks, I also made a couple of hard boiled eggs and sectioned them into wedges.
The filling is easy, I fried up 1/3 of a diced large white onion and some mashed ginger till they were soft, added the potatoes and stirred it around a little. Took maybe 5 mins for the potatoes to cook. Then I added the chicken. In went a little more curry powder and some salt. Once the chicken turned white – and it’s really quick, maybe a minute and a half, I turned the heat off and took it off the stove.
Everything went well until that bit. What I should have done was
1. Put the dough in the fridge
2. Let the filling cool
Because I neglected those two steps, the dough would break. And that means the puff would split in the oven, and the meat inside would overcook and turn hard.
So anyway, I used a medium soup bowl to cut the dough, which was a bad idea, because Corelle bowls have a rounded lip, and they’re so smooth. It was hard trying to cut the rolled dough with something you can’t grip. Anyway, in each little 4 inch round I put a wedge of egg, and two spoons of curry.
At one point I got bored of struggling with the pastry, so I just lumped the rest of the egg into the last piece of pastry, spooned the filling in and wrapped it like a popiah.
Then I popped it into the oven. I used 375°F, and I was just winging it, but I think it would’ve taken maybe 1/2 hour. I didn’t give the tops an eggwash – I hate that stuff, so I just kept peering into the oven to see if the puffs changed colour.
In between waiting for the puffs, I washed everything up, and decided to take a break by watching some tv. That was the fatal mistake – the bake and flake. I shouldn’t have flaked off.
Because, when I went downstairs and thought I turned the oven off, I really turned it onto Broil (which is super high heat) and hastily went back to my Korean Drama. Needless to say, I was impressed with the smell of the shortcrust pastry and downright pleased with myself until the smoke detectors went off.
By the time I got downstairs, smoke was spewing from the oven like industrial waste into the Yangtze.
In the end, I only managed to salvage two puffs, and I ate one just now. It was pretty good, but the crust was a little too thick. Maybe next time I’ll just buy the pastry. It was such a hassle rolling it and all, and cleaning up after was also a pain. Cleaning up was also made worse, because the smokey house compelled me to do some major cleaning around the house. I was so tired last night from the washing, scrubbing, vacuuming and mopping I crashed to bed at 11pm. Way early by my standards.
Anyway. There went my curry puff experiment. It was a crash and burn, but better tasting than Old Chang Kee despite the burnt spots, so I’m pretty happy with it. I will savour the last perfect piece as my tea time treat today and maybe concentrate on experiments that don’t require so much cleaning up this week.
