Chicken Pot Pie!

Soooo, we can finally post about the Chicken Pot Pie! There has been so much chaos going outside the house since they are putting in new water pipes, it has been difficult to do anything. Tonight we finally get a break. Unfortunately they will continue to shut the water down until Friday. Yay for us.

Now to the recipe. Sadly because it was an order we do not have a picture of the final product. We do have it before it was baked.

We made our pie with a sour cream dough but you can use any type. You can even use the store bought if  that's what you prefer. Because this order was only a 9 in, we were able to put crust on the bottom of the pie tin and on the top which was exciting. We normally get orders for bigger ones (Usually about 5lb! Holy cow!) and since we want to keep the prices reasonable we only do the crust on top. We cut a few pieces of crust and put them into the pie to try and give it the a slight effect of crust on bottom.

Okay so for the inside of the pie you will need:
-Preheat oven at 400 degrees F.
-Chicken
-Green Peas (You can get the bag of frozen peas and carrots and use that instead, I recommend to stay away from the can)
-Carrots        
- Salt TT (To Taste)
-Pepper TT
-Garlic Powder TT (or you can do a few cloves of garlic)
-Potatoes
-Chicken Stock
-Flour
- Butter

-If doing pie on the bottom, spray the pie tin or pan with cooking spray and line with dough.
-Cut potatoes into cubes and boil until almost done. Remember they will cook again ones inside the pie as well.
-Cut the chicken into cubes, season with salt, pepper and saute for about a minute or two depending on the size of the cut. Do not cook all the way thru or it will over cook in the oven. Set it aside and let it cool.
- Mix in chicken, potatoes, peas, and carrots. Pinch of salt and pepper,garlic powder and spoon the mixture in to your pie pan tin with the bottom crust fitted to the pan.
- In a saute pan, put equal parts of butter and flour to make a roux which is a thickening agent used for sauces.
-In a sauce pan, put chicken stock, bring to boil, reduce heat and add roux, mixing with whisk to get rid of lumps. Bring the stock back to a boil. You will see it thicken. If to thick add more stock, if not thick enough add more roux. (We like using the unseasoned stock but you can use any preference.)
- Let the thicken stock cool then add to the pie filling mix.
- If you are going to bake it the same day, after it's lined with the top layer of dough, make a few cuts in the dough to let the steam out. Do either an egg wash, milk wash, or olive oil.
-Bake until the crust is golden brown.

If you want to cook it the next day, don't do the wash on the top until desired, cover and place in the freezer.

That's how we did our design, you can make it prettier if you would like. This is before the wash and before the baking was done.
If you want to know more, comment.

Pot Pies, Pumpkin Pies, Sweet Potatoe Pies, Apple Pies Oh My!

It is the season for delicious pies, chili's, and hot chocolate milk. Who doesn't enjoy laying under a blanket, watching a movie and enjoying a small slice of pie with something hot to drink every now and then? Me? I take 3/4 of the pie and leave a slice.

On a serious note I just got an order for a Chicken Pot Pie which I will be making for Monday. I have made a few changes here and there for the recipe. Granted it is not one of the hardest recipes to do out there, but putting the right combination inside and paring it with the right crust will make your taste buds sing and your pallet will cry every now and then after making it eat one of the frozen pot pies that you can buy at your local supermarket.

I am Stephanie, the savory part of Kicken Confections. I am the one in charge of making the chicken and the stock for the dog treats, and as you read earlier, I also enjoy making Pot Pies which in reality is the only thing I can put in the oven that involves a pie crust and it won't catch on fire. I also enjoy and have come to learned that I am also pretty good at making breads. The rest, I leave it to my partner.

I will be taking pictures of the pie as it is constructed and maybe putting in a recipe or giving a few hints on how to make your own. It all comes down to technique and that is what separates a home baker from a pastry chef, or a cook from a Chef.

Technique in the Culinary world is everything. That's how you get everything cooking evenly. For example, cutting an onion. If you cut an onion and the pieces are not as even (rough chop), you will notice how some brown faster than others and eventually you will have pieces of burn bitter onion and pieces that haven't fully cooked. Now have it all cut into uniform pieces, everything will brown up evenly.( That is one of the tricks to French Onion Soup for those soup lovers out there.)

Did you know it can take hours to get the perfect caramelized onion? (Hm, second trick?)
Constantly stirring will stop the item from caramelizing and the process restarts making it take longer.

I think we are on a role. If you want to find out more, read our next blog post.

A tale of two Pumpkins

Hey guys !

Its Antoinette and its Fall here in the sates and y'know what that means right?! The air is getting cooler the tree's are changing and I watch Tim Burton's films 50% more then the rest of the year. Baking  doesn't feel like I'm sitting in the oven with my cookies cause its over 90 degrees outside. I love Fall its my favorite time of the year.

Fall also gives me my favorite flavor in practically everything now, there is pumpkin in my coffee, candles  and of course my baked goods. Thought I have only starting baking with pumpkin for about a year or so.
It started with a seasonal dog treat flavor then a butter cream flavor and just yesterday I finally made my own pumpkin pie from scratch for a client.

This start's a tale of two pumpkins, one which was a normal sugar pumpkin that I purchased at a farmers market. The other was this bizarre odd pumpkin my mother bought at a local chain food market.
The normal pumpkin was everything a sugar pumpkin should be, not to big in size a bit tender fleshed when opened with a decent amount of seeds. A sugar pumpkin is small in size but it provides a nice amount of meat that can be used for a few things.  Instead of one can usually only makes one pie .

Pumpkin X aka odd mutant pumpkin bought from a food market. It was smaller then the one I bought and its outside was hard and felt like one of those plastic carving pumpkin. Words can not describe how hard this little pumpkin was . It took four different knives and three different people to crack this little sucker open and when it was open the flesh was hard and had more seeds then the pumpkin I bought. After roasting it with the other pumpkin we tasted them both. The sugar pumpkin I bought tasted as it should but the other pumpkin X tasted almost like butter nut squash . I could not use that for baking at all  so I just added some butter to flesh (which wasn't that much to begin with) and a few spices and served it as a side for dinner .Oh and by the way even after roasting at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes the out side of this things was still hard!  

The Sugar pumpkin became an awesome pie and will become even more delicious pumpkin baked goodness. I'll share some recipes in my next post.

Here are some pics:

 Sugar pumpkin bought from the farmers market. This is after it was roasted. The skin pealed right off. Clean.

 This is how the inside was. Cleaner and fewer seeds.

 This is pumpkin X. You can see how the other sugar pumpkin the skin shriveled with the meat. In this one you can see the skin stay hard and in the same place while the meat shriveled. Skin was still as hard as a rock.

 Here is the inside of the store bought pumpkin. It has more seeds for being a smaller pumpkin than the other one.

This is the pie before and after. It was made with a home made pumpkin custard and a sour cream dough. We use this dough with a few other foods that we like to make and because is such a nice, melts in your mouth, moist dough, we though it would be a great pairing with the richness of the pumpkin custard.