This Chicken Pot Pie Technique Is a Game Changer

What's up, dude? Everybody loves a good chicken pot pie, but the main problem I find with all the recipes online is that they just end up way too dry. Today, I'm gonna show you how to make a chicken pot pie filling that stays nice and saucy post-bake, and we're gonna pair that with the most flaky, buttery, delicious shortcrust pastry you'll probably ever try. Now, let's go. Now, for starters, I have absolutely no problem with you using store-bought puff pastry. Having said that, making your own homemade shortcrust pastry is really gonna make a big difference in this pie. I've got some ice water here, and I'm just pouring it over to measure it out, and then immediately pouring that into four beaten eggs. A little mix, and then put that in the fridge straight away. Everything needs to stay nice and cold. Next, I'm gonna take my plain, all-purpose flour and get it into a strainer along with the salt, and we'll simply sift this through, and here I have my cold, unsalted butter cut into tiny little cubes, and the most important thing is that this butter doesn't warm up. It needs to stay very cold, so we're gonna dump that straight in, and right now, if I had a pastry cutter which looks like this, I would be using that. I don't, so I'm just using this little bench scraper right here. It'll work too, and we're gonna start cutting the cold butter into the flour, and by the way, my friends, I'm doing a double batch of this recipe because I wanna have some leftovers as well as some for decoration, but if you plan on just making one pot pie, you can definitely get away with doing half of this recipe, and if you have one, you can definitely make this pastry using a mixer, although be warned, that is gonna blend the butter too much into the flour, which results in a mealy texture that's better for tart shells. Making it by hand and trying to leave pretty big pieces of butter in there and not overworking the dough is gonna result in a super flaky, delicious crust. There really is an art to this, and I wouldn't say I'm a master, but I'm gonna do my best, and after about three minutes with the tool, I have this sort of structure. There's definitely still big pieces of cold butter in here, which is what I want. Another trick I learned is to submerge my hands in ice cold water, maybe just 30 seconds or so. Oh God, that is painful. Wim Hof in it, baby. Because human hands, and especially mine, are super warm, and they're gonna warm up that butter if I don't do this, and we don't want that. Okay, that is excruciating. Let's take them out, and now what we're gonna do quickly is just pick this up. I'm smushing the butter and just spreading it out, which should result in a really flaky dough, and all I'm doing is this. So I'll do this for about 90 seconds, and then I'll re-ice my hands, and remember, if your butter warms up too much, you can throw it in the freezer for about 10 minutes, which is what I just did because we're filming. I left this out a little too long, and the butter was starting to get too close to room temp, so I just did that. I'm just continuing to work my way through, doing that little pinching motion. Most important thing is you don't hang out on the butter too long. You don't wanna be here going like this, right, because the warmth from your hands is gonna transfer. So you pick up, you smush, and you move along. So after just a few minutes, it's looking like this. Just remember the larger chunks of butter that are left in here, the flakier your pastry is gonna be. Now we're gonna make a well in the center, and we're gonna pour in our egg and water mixture. It's very cold, and I'm gonna take my bench scraper again, just start working it together. Now we're just gonna take a lightly floured work surface and dump out our pastry, and we're gonna finish working this together by hand, and it may look a little flaky at this moment, but it will come together. What's really important right now is that we don't overwork this. A few needs too many, and we'll essentially have a different dough, because right now we have all those chunks of butter throughout the dough, and that's what we wanna see. I'm gonna just bring it together just a little more. There we go. I'm really happy with this. Now I'm gonna flatten it out, and then divide it in half, and that's because I doubled the recipe. Put it onto our parchment here, and we're just gonna go ahead and wrap it up, and then straight into the fridge for at least 30 minutes, but I recommend you do an hour. Now before we get to work on our chicken pot pie filling, a quick word from our sponsor, Wild Grain. Wild Grain is the first bake-from-frozen subscription box for sourdough breads, artisanal pastries, and fresh pastas, and they partner with small bakers and pasta makers across the country to keep the tradition of artisanal food alive. Wild Grain is constantly adding new seasonal items to try when you build your next box, and they even offer plant-based and gluten-free boxes to suit your dietary needs. My personal box had a sourdough loaf, some slow-fermented ciabatta sandwich rolls, these pumpkin cinnamon biscuits that just sound perfect on a cold October's day, some all-butter croissants, some giant snickerdoodle cookies, and some maple Belgium waffles. I had just made some healthy green soup, so to be able to take that sourdough straight out of the freezer and just bake it in the oven in about 20 minutes was super convenient, and I mean, come on, who doesn't love some warm and fluffy sourdough bread with a crunchy exterior, smothered in butter, sprinkled with a little bit of flaky salt with your soup? It's amazing. We also tried those pumpkin cinnamon biscuits, and they definitely hit the spot. They were super fluffy and delicious. And of course, I had to try their croissants, and I was super happy to see that they're made with butter. It's hard to find croissants made with butter these days. Every item I've tried from Wild Grain so far has not only been really delicious, but also super convenient. I just love having all that stuff in the freezer, ready to go. If you wanna check out Wild Grain, be sure to click on my link down in the description and use code THATYOUCANCOOK to save $30 off your first box. And as an added bonus, you will be getting some free croissants in every box. And for every new member, Wild Grain donates four meals to the Greater Boston Food Bank. Thank you, Wild Grain, for sponsoring this video. Now let's get back to that pot pie. While the pastry is resting in the fridge, this is the perfect time to make our chicken pot pie filling. Medium heat pot. I'm gonna add some butter. And a lot of times when I add butter to pots, I tilt it. This just really helps it not to burn. Depends how hot your pot is, of course. Once that's melted, I'm adding in my carrots. And we'll cook these on medium low heat for about five or six minutes first. Now I'm gonna put in my onions. Celery can be cut off. After seven or eight minutes with the onions, we're gonna add our flour. Just all purpose. And basically what we're doing is just building a little roux all in one pot. Heat's on medium low. An amateur mistake right now would be to add your liquids right away. Whenever you're working with roux or flour like this, you wanna cook it down for at least four minutes to remove that raw flour flavor. And now this is totally optional, but I'm gonna do a little bit of wine just to give this chicken pot pie a new angle, but you don't need to do this at all. Just a splash. And I'm not doing mushrooms in mine, but if you wanna add them, do it at the same time as the carrots. Two or three minutes with the wine, and I'm gonna start adding my chicken stock. Whether you use homemade or store-bought, it's really up to you. And with the chicken pot pie, I would be inclined actually to use store-bought because my homemade chicken stock is kind of precious, and I tend to save it for pan sauces, although I did use homemade here. So I just added half my stock, and once this comes up to temperature and starts bubbling a little bit, I'll add the rest. There we go. Rest of the stock going in. And we'll bring that up to temp once more. And just remember, when you're building these sauces with the use of flour, you're not gonna know how thick it is until it begins to boil. Now, just a little bit of cream going in. Now, if you want, you could just add salt to this, but I have two secret ingredients that I really love, and it's gonna blow this chicken pot pie straight through the moon into the water. The first one is Marmite, which is a yeast extract. Personally, I was born in England. I grew up eating this stuff. It is like concentrated kind of bouillon, and it makes incredible sauces, gravies. I really love it. It's sticky and thick. And the second one, just a little bit of Dijon mustard. That's gonna give it a really nice kick. And so I'm adding these ingredients before I add the salt because both those ingredients are really salty. So definitely don't do that in reverse order. And the last thing I'm gonna add, which really gives it that kind of festive flavor for me, is a little bit of chopped sage and rosemary. These are potent herbs, so I'm not doing too much, but I just love that flavor. Obviously, you can skip those if you want. And because I have some on hand, I'm also just gonna pick a few little leaves of thyme. Thyme, rosemary, sage, those are the three amigos in my eyes. And of course, a little bit of Sergeant Gilbert reporting for duty. Wait for the horn, and there it is. And that's just black pepper. Do as little or as much as you like. I personally really like black pepper here, so I'm gonna do maybe even close to a teaspoon. At this point, I'm gonna kill the heat and we'll taste for seasoning. Absolutely delicious, but I'm doing a little pinch of salt, about half a teaspoon. And I'll stir it and let it sit for a few minutes because that salt doesn't just dissolve immediately, right? So if you taste it right away, you're not gonna get a real accurate description. For the chicken, I have leftover meat from a whole roasted chicken, which is my preferred method for chicken pot pie. Having said that, you could just go out and buy a rotisserie chicken, or if you want, you could even cook some breasts and thighs in a pan, although that's probably the worst method. If you wanna cook the chicken, just lightly oil them, season them, stuff the cavity with shallots, garlic, thyme, and lemon, and then roast at 400 degrees for 50 minutes. Let them cool down, pick the meat, and it really is that simple. Now with the heat off, I'm adding all my chicken in. And it's important you have the heat off now. I don't wanna cook this chicken anymore. Perfectly cooked right now, and it's gonna cook again when we bake the actual pie. So just fold it through. And as it sits here, it's gonna begin to suck up all that beautiful gravy and become the perfect consistency for your pot pie. And lastly, we're gonna be adding our frozen peas. And there is something I've noticed about frozen peas straight out of the bag. They have a really, really powerful flavor. And if I just dump them right in, it takes over too much. The whole thing just tastes like peas. So what I did was just run them under hot water for about 30 seconds, just to kind of remove that like pungent penis. I don't know. Let me know if you know what I'm saying. What? Oh my God. Yeah, no, that was a, that was legit an accident. No, but like, I can explain that. Like when you say like a pungent, like onion-ness, or a pungent, like pungent, uh. This point, get your filling out, because you need to cool it down. I just realized I poured it into a separate dish for no reason. You definitely want to pour it out into the dish you're gonna bake it in. So that's what we're doing. You could use rectangle or round or whatever you like. I've got about two cups of leftover filling, but nobody's complaining. And this is going straight into the freezer for about probably 40 minutes to chill. Shortcrust dough was in the fridge for an hour. Now before rolling out our shortcrust dough, we want to let it sit at room temp for about 10 minutes. You want it to still be cold, but not rock hard. We're gonna prepare a really lightly floured work surface, as little flour as possible is best. I'll get some of my pastry. And in hindsight, I kind of wish I had it done more of a round shape to start, but we will get it done. Starting from the center, I'm just gonna push out. And if your dough sticks, you can always just put down a little more flour and continue working. Just take your time. The most important thing is you make sure it doesn't get stuck. So every time I do a roll, I kind of just move it to make sure that it's still free. We're getting pretty close now. And because this chicken pot pie only has the pastry on the top, I'm okay with it being a little thicker. The pastry might be the best part of this whole recipe. You can always take your pie dish and just hold it above. See where you're at. I'm looking for about an inch and a quarter of overhang. And here we go. I think I can carefully just guide this over like so. And I'm gonna pull up the side while pushing down in the middle. We don't want it stretched tight over here. We want it to sink into the middle of a pie a little bit so it doesn't crack while it bakes. Now I'm gonna go ahead and trim off the overhang, leaving roughly an inch and a quarter. I mean, we're just making pies here. It's not like it's exact science. And of course we can save this scrap for all kinds of decorations. I patched a little area over here. And what I'm gonna do now is just take that overhang and just crimp it up like this. Really doesn't need to be perfect. I'm no pie master, but I do think that this edge is not only gonna look nice, but it's gonna be a nice crunchy bite as well. This is kind of what I was going for, but I just figured it out when I was at the end. Now this next step is pretty clutch and that's using egg wash. This specific recipe is one egg yolk to one teaspoon of water. And we'll just lightly brush this. Most important thing here is one even layer. You don't want big blotches. Should be nice and evenly spread out. And of course we'll do the edge as well. Now at this point, it goes into the fridge for 10 minutes for that egg wash to really dry on. You can actually do several coats if you want to get a really, really deep, rich color. Now I'm gonna take a little bit more dough for the decoration. And of course you can just skip this part. I'm just having fun. So I'm gonna roll it out just like the last one, except a little bit thinner. Now here's where you can get creative. I'm just using this little diamond cutter, but you could literally do whatever shape you like. Just cut a bunch of these out. And now this is super extra and you definitely don't need to do it, but I'm going for diamonds within diamonds. So I'm just taking the back of a paring knife and doing some lines to give us this kind of effect. And now I'm gonna just lay these on top of my pie, see if I can find some sort of pattern here. Hopefully by the time we're done, we'll have created a sort of lattice effect. And these ones obviously go here. And now all we need to do is egg wash the top of our little decorations. Now I'll hit it with a little bit of coarse salt and it'll go back in the fridge for another 10 minutes. And finally into the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. And here we are after one hour of cooking. And depending on how thick your pastry is, it could take a little bit longer, a little bit less. And unfortunately I had some issues with my crust. I could have just stuck with that one sheet, egg washed it, baked it, and then trimmed around the outside and it would look perfect. But of course I had to try and get fancy on you and here's what happened. When I crimped that edge, I had a little too much overhang. And what happened was the whole thing unraveled and then flopped over the side, like you can see right here. And then on another side over here, it tore away completely. But of course, if you're making this one at home, you can just skip all the fancy stuff and just use the one sheet. All that's left to do now is let this cool down a little bit and give it a taste. And unfortunately, Marcus had to go home. So it's just me today. I don't know, it feels wrong to do this without Marcus, but we gotta give it a taste. Here's a quick look at the pastry. You can see it's really kind of flaky. It has all these layers, which you can see really well right there. I'm happy with how this turned out. It feels amazing. Let's try this pastry alone first. Oh, oh, oh, no. Five second rule. The pastry in itself is such an experience. And if anybody's wondering where I got the recipe, it's from this book called The Pie Room. This guy, Callum Franklin, is like the Jimi Hendrix of savory pies. He's the best in the world. A true treasure of a book. I'll put a link down in the description. Now, the filling's still pretty goopy because I haven't given this proper time to cool down, but let's get everything in here. Runners, take your mark, set. Oh, oh, dude. In all honesty, you know what really makes that filling for me, and it's probably not what you think. The sage and the rosemary, they're just coming through so nice right now. It's just such a beautiful flavor in here. If I would have nailed that crust, I would say this pie is legendary. It is so good. And I truly hope you will give it a shot and let me know how it goes in the comments. Thanks for watching today, my friend. And if you are a fan of written recipes with directions, you can check out my Master in the Making ebook. It's linked down in the description. We just hit 2,000 copies sold, and I just want to thank every single person who's already bought one. There's also links to products and equipment that I use here in my kitchen. If you're looking to stock your own. And if you want to keep learning today, here are two more comfort food recipes involving chicken that I know you are going to love. Until next time, you know I love you and I'm out.