How do you do your Cornish pasty?

[ImAGoofyGoober]

My auntie showed me how to make Cornish pasty’s a few months ago and now we’ve made them a few times together. She insists that you don’t need to add any gravy as the meat is enough flavour, however I do find her recipe very dry.
I secretly made some by myself today and added some gravy granules as an experiment...they are lovely and juicy!

So what else could I add to flavour them? Or any other ideas what I could fill them with?

Shameless placemark as I want to try making them!

You don't cook the meat beforehand?

Nope, don’t cook the meat before putting in pasty, and add more salt & pepper than you might think possible. I should have added that the clotted cream was added on eating, not before cooking.

How do you stop gravey mixing with the apple?
Apple??

I didn’t put any apples in!

Glad to see some of you will be trying these out, would love to know how you get on.

Yes Apple, you put the Apple at one end don’t you as the pudding for a Cornish pasty. So you get the meat first and eat your way through to the Apple at the other end for the puddding / but like Apple pie

I can't believe the beef cooks through! My mum does it with leftover casserole.

This would be a great lunch too, the day after.

Madness about the apple. Perhaps include a little pocket of custard top?

We were always told the double-ended pasty thing in school too, as what they did “in the old days”.

I’ve never seen one in real life anywhere, shop or home made, and when i repeated it to my many elderly Cornish great-aunts and uncles in the 1980s, some in their 90s, and therefore ACTUALLY victorian, they all looked confused and asked how that would work?(and then - why wouldn’t you just have yeast bun after a normal-size pasty )

I’ve always assumed it wasn’t a particularly wide-spread technique if it ever did really exist...

It's the way they were made for miners originally apparently. But no one makes them sweet and savoury now.

I know, but given they were all children of miners, and lived in entirely mining communities and hadn’t heard of it, i grew up assuming that was a “made up for the tourists” fact. I’m possibly probably entirely wrong but i just don’t see how it would work without your apple pie tasting entirely of meat juices.

Snozzlemaid
Speaking for everyone are you?

Speaking for Cornish Pasties, I presume.
They have a PGI.

Do you put in cold beans and a few knobs of cheese for the alternative recipe?

For beans and cheese I simply open can cold baked beans and give a good stir as they then to be quite sauce heavy at the top of the can.

Then depending on the size of the pasty I put about 2 tblspns of beans and a small handful of grated cheese (enough to cover the palm of my hand but slightly rounded iyswm).

My only disaster was when I didn't stir the baked beans - there was too much liquid and it all burst out the sides when baked. I just ended up with most of the filling crisped up around the pasty and a double layer of soggy tomato flavoured pastry .

So stir the beans is my top tip!

Oh and I have done savoury and sweet before.

I just put a pastry "dam" in the middle.

Worked fine but tbh as a family we just prefer the savoury ones so tend not to do these often - last ones I did were for DS DOE and made huge (really really big) ones with sweet/savoury for when he was walking on his first day 12km hike - he said it was lovely!

Btw I put traditional Cornish on one side of the dam and apple custard on the other (made it a bit sweeter than usual to counter the savoury pastry).

Sorry - other tips.....

Yes to a knob of butter or better still dripping.

No you don't have to cook the meat.

However how you cut it is important.

All the meat and veg need to be the same size.

Vitally to need to cut the meat against the grain.

I use rump normally. You need to look at the meat and see the way the fibres run.

Then you need to slice across that so that you end up with a very small cube of meat that has very short fibres iyswim.

Otherwise it will be stringy and chewy.

Remember it's a miners dish - the ratio of meat to veg was a way of making a small amount of meat go a long way. If it's dry it's probably because you don't have enough veg in it. A relatively small amount of meat will flavour a pasty beautifully (especially with a dab of beef dripping that the veg cooks in).

Thank you, I will try this.

I don't see how adding some dry gravy granules can add to the moisture levels?
As others have said, it is not meant to be runny as they were designed to be eaten one-handed in a pretty filthy environment, you wouldn't want to be licking gravy off your fingers down a mine.

I don’t live down a mine so like mine a little juicier. I was unsure if it would work too but with the juice from the meat they turned in to a nice little gravy. I didn’t add much, just a little sprinkle.