This is an Australian pasty. Traditional Cornish pasties contain only seasoned meat, potatoes, swede (rutabaga) and onion. Often made in the rooster’s crown method, they date from the days before pastry was edible, when it was just flour, water and salt and was used as a carrying case, to be discarded after eating the filling. Another theory has it that the miners could hold the rooster’s crown in their dirty hands down the mine and discard it when they were done with the rest of the pasty.
Ingredients
- 2 onions, diced
- 4 large potatoes, peeled and diced
- 1 small turnip (half if large), diced
- ½ cup diced rutabaga
- 4 carrots, peeled and diced
- ¾ cup diced winter squash
- 1 egg, lightly beaten for egg-wash glaze
Instructions
For the Pastry
Either buy your puff pastry and adjust the shape of your pasties to it, or make your own short crust pastry, which works just as well, and roll it into 8-inch rounds.
To save time, use a food processor. I use the shredder blade, but the chopping blade works equally well. Be careful not to over-process; you don’t want pulp.
Preheat oven to 350°F. Place vegetables in a roasting pan. Add a generous amount of salt and pepper, and mix thoroughly so that all the vegetables are spread evenly throughout the mix. The orange vegetables and the black pepper will guide you: When they look evenly spread you can be confident the mix is too.
Place a mound of filling in each pasty. If you are using rounds use about a cup of filling each. As a guide you want at least half an inch of pastry around the edges so that you can fold it over and seal it. Brush the edge of the pastry with the egg wash to help it stick together.
There are 2 ways fold the pastry. One is to place the filling in the middle of the pastry and then pull up the edge, pinching it together, sealing it along the top so that it resembles a rooster’s crown. The other method is to imagine a diameter through the pastry and place the filling to 1 side of the line. Fold the half with no filling over and seal it around the edge like an empanada.
Bake until the pastry is golden and the filling cooked (about 45 minutes for small pasties, 1 hour to 1¼ hours for large, multi-serving pasties).
