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Pasties (plural form of pasty), for those of you not in the know, are a traditional Cornish food brought to my area of the UP in the early days of copper mining. The traditional Cornish pasty consists of a rather thin flakey crust and is filled with potatoes, carrots, beef, rutabagga, peas, etc. It is then baked. After it cools the pasty is portable, making it the perfect lunchtime food for miners (they couldn’t surface for lunch). It does all this while tasting good and providing plenty of nourishment.

I’m not sure when I had my first pasty. It was certainly not at least until my freshmen year of college. I had never heard of one before driving through the UP. My first one may have been in MTU’s dining halls. Let me just say that their pasties do them no justice. Rochelle and I tried our hands at making pasties a couple of months ago, and they turned out really well! They aren’t too tricky to make and they really do make for an amazing lunch, considering their low cost and it only takes a minute to heat one up in the microwave. Here’s the recipe we use:

Crust:
1 cup shortening
1 cup water
3+ cups flour
1/2 tsp salt

It’s best to microwave the shortening beforehand to get it soft. I find the dough usually needs a little more flour and sometimes more water to get it to roll out properly.

Filling:
Start with 1 lb of ground beef. Chop it up into small chunks and add a couple of carrots, potatoes and about half of a large onion (all items diced up). I also season with Lawry’s seasoned salt and pepper. Put 3/4 of a cup or so of this mix onto a large flattened out piece of crust. Close the dough into a pocket around the stuffing and crimp the edges. Then bake it for about an hour. They can also be frozen right away and baked later, this works nicely.

Tags: food, pasty

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 12:22 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.