Bake VS Boil- The Age Old Cooking Question

What if we boiled a pie instead of baking it? A lot of times when we think of pie in America today, you're going to be thinking about fruit pies or pumpkin pie, something like that, or possibly chicken pot pie. Well, today we're going to be doing a sort of a pie experiment, a beef pie, a beef steak pie. Sounds good, doesn't it? But we're going to be trying it a couple of different ways because of the cooking techniques that they used in the 18th century. Many, many recipes in the time period were boiled instead of baked, and that usually has to do with the equipment available to the individual household. If you are not in the city or if you don't have a high-end kitchen, you probably don't have an oven, and so many of the recipes you will use a boiling technique instead of a baking technique. We've got a recipe here called beefsteak pie or beefsteak pudding, essentially exactly the same thing. One is baked and one is boiled, and there are some other recipes in the time period that are pies and called pies, but they're boiled, something like a sea pie. They are very, very interesting, but so, so different than anything we're used to eating today. When it comes to baking in the 18th century, ovens are very different from ovens today. So today, we have our standard kitchen oven and we've got a knob on it. We turn the dial to a particular temperature and off it goes. When it gets to that temperature, it's going to stay there the entire time, but baking in the 18th century is so very, very different. The ovens are heated generally with wood and they are heated way high to something like five or six or maybe 800, 900 degrees, and then you stop up the oven and its temperature goes down slowly until you get to the temperature you want. You put your cooking item in there and then it keeps going down and down. These kind of ovens are difficult to build, they're expensive, most homes don't have them, and the people who want to bake, say in the city, they'll probably take the items they need baked to the baker, maybe the bread baker or someone else, and he will bake the items for you. This happens many times in these larger kind of urban centers, but most poor people, they don't have access to that. Now, the recipes we're going to be working from today are called beefsteak pudding and beefsteak pie, but you'll find other pudding recipes that will say in the directions, you can bake this or you can boil it, and these recipes show up in the 17th century and many, many times in the 18th century. So the 1700s, Hannah Glass and all these other recipe books, especially after Hannah Glass, have these recipes. They're utterly simple. Now, we're going to complicate it a little bit like some of them, we're going to add optional ingredients, but they are very easy to do and they generally turn out a tremendous product. Recipes today usually have very, very specific directions on how you're going to cook it. You wouldn't normally see a recipe that says, well, you can bake this, and they don't tell you the time, or you could boil it, you know, but that happened certainly in the 18th century when the cook has to have more options than possibly we need today. So let me read to you Hannah Glass's 1747 recipe for a beefsteak pie, and then we'll compare it to the pudding recipe. Beefsteak pie, quick and easy. Take fine rump steaks, beat them with a rolling pin, then season them with pepper and salt according to your palate, make a good crust, lay in your steaks, fill your dish, then pour in as much water as will half fill the dish, put on the crust, and bake it well. Very simple. Basically, it's like, oh, you put steaks in a pie, right? I'm pretty good. But here is a steak pudding. Make a good crust with suet, shred fine with flour, mix it up with cold water, season it with a little salt, and make a pretty stiff crust, about two pounds of suet to a quarter of a peck of flour. Let your steaks be either beef or mutton, well seasoned with pepper and salt, make it up as you do an apple pudding, tie it in a cloth, and put it into water boiling. If it be a large pudding, it will take five hours. If it's a small one, three hours. This is the best crust for an apple pudding. Pigeons eat well this way. Now, these are just a couple of recipes. Again, even this pudding recipe is basically, well, you take the steaks and you put them inside of a pudding crust. Basically, we're going to put these into a cloth bag, essentially, with crust all around it, and it will boil for three hours. We're going to make one that's probably about a softball or large softball size, and that will cook for a long period of time. So, three hours is a long time. Now, when we're boiling in the water, it's only going to go up to 212 degrees. That seems like a low temperature to cook red meat at, but that works out really well. If you look at the modern cooking technique called sous vide, it is a cooking in a sort of a plastic bag and in a water bath that's only maybe 150 degrees. A very similar cooking style, except in this case, it's 212 degrees, and we have a crust that's around it. So, it's like they were channeling that same idea. Maybe we can cook something at a lower temperature. We just extend the time period out, and they did that in the 18th century, even experimenting with that very, very low cooking temperature and just expanding the time. So, how different will our two dishes be when we bake it, and we're going to be baking it at 350 or maybe even higher, or we're boiling it at 212 degrees, but basically exactly the same ingredients. To start off, let's prepare our matching ingredients. First off, we have our meat. We want some beef here. I've got some chuck steak. We're going to cut this meat down into bite-size pieces. I also am going to add some other ingredients to this. Now, obviously, both of these recipes just included the meat. If we dig deeper into our 18th century recipes, they do have several different ones where they add other kinds of ingredients to a pie or a pudding like this. So, we've got some mushrooms here. These are just standard button or brown mushrooms. Slice them up into smaller pieces. I also have some small potatoes. We don't want to just overfill this with potatoes, but it really kind of fills this out nicely and has a great texture. So, we've got some smaller potatoes. I'm not even going to bother to peel these. And of course, I'm going to add also some onion here. So, we're going to slice up the onion. Not too fine, but not too thick. Let's make our crust. Now, we're using the crust recipe that she mentions in the pudding. We can use that for the pie. It'll work great. It's a standard kind of pie crust, but instead of using butter, we're using tallow or, as she calls it, suet. It's a lot more popular today, suet, than it used to be, say, 10 years ago. We have it available on our website as cooking tallow or suet, and you might be able to find it locally. We're going to start off with regular unbleached flour here. I have enough for both of these projects together. If you're just going to be doing the pie or just the pudding, you can half this, but we've got five cups of unbleached flour. I'm also going to add a little bit of salt here, and we have about 16 ounces of our suet, and we're going to mix those together. We're going to rub them together. If you've got a pastry knife, you can just cut that together until it's nice and crumbly, and we're going to add just enough cold water to hold it together. That might be about a cup or a cup and a half. Really, it depends on your flour and your suet. Now that our mixture looks great, we're going to roll this out in halves. One half I'm going to use for the pie, one half we're going to use for the pudding. So let's roll this out. It's got a great texture to it. It's ready to use. We have to get the cloth ready for the pudding. We're going to take this cloth, and we're going to place it in the boiling water, and then once it's heated up, we can just pull it out, let it drain a little bit, and then spread it out on our countertop, and we're going to flour this. I'm going to add just enough flour that it'll seal up the pores of the cloth so that the pudding will boil properly. We're going to put our paste on here, or our dough, and then we add the ingredients of our We're going to put this kind of in layers here. Put down some pieces of the beef. We're going to add a little bit of salt and pepper. Then we're going to add in our other ingredients. If we use them, they are optional. We can add in our chopped mushrooms, our chopped onions, and our chopped potatoes. Again, a little bit of salt on top of that, and then we need to very carefully wrap this up. Now, this dough is very, very soft. You might want it to be a little stiffer than this one because it's breaking up, but make sure it's sealed everywhere. That's the important part. The dough needs to seal in the components so the water doesn't get into it, and it will cook properly. Once that's all sealed up, we can close our bag and then tie it tightly. It doesn't have to be very, very tight. It will probably grow just a touch as it's boiling. We can place it into the boiling water. It needs to go into boiling water, not just warm water or water that's coming to a boil, but make sure it's properly boiling. It's got to boil for three hours. Now, the water is going to boil down as it does that, so when you add water to the pot as it's boiling, make sure it's as hot as possible. In fact, it should be boiling water that you add to it. You don't want to add cool water and make the whole thing cold and then have to come back up to heat. This pudding is going to boil for three hours, one this size, about a softball size. If you made it bigger, yes, you will need to boil it longer, up to five hours, depending on how big it is. Make sure the water is boiling the entire time. Now, let's put together our beef steak pie. This is equally simple. We've got our dough that we have already rolled out into the pie shape. I'm going to put this dough into our pie pan, and then we'll start with a layer of steak. Again, I've cut this meat into nice, smaller pieces. We're going to put a layer in the bottom, then a little bit of salt and pepper on top of that. Now, I'm going to add a layer of our other ingredients. We've got the mushrooms, we've got the potatoes, we've got the onions, a little bit of salt on top of that, and then another layer of meat. Now, you could make this pie kind of bulge up a little bit if we wanted to make it serve more people, even in the same size pie pan. That's okay. I'm going to go ahead and add a little bit of butter to the top of this to add a little bit more gravy, and then, just like the recipe calls for, I'm going to put some water in there, fill it up about half full of water. Unlike the one that's boiling, which really doesn't lose any moisture at all, this one, if it goes in the oven, it's going to lose some moisture, so she adds the water in here. That will really increase the amount of gravy, the sauce of this pie. We're going to put the top on. I've made sure to put water along the top so we can seal the top to the bottom, and then cut a couple of little vent holes. We don't want the air to build up and puff the top up too much, and then we're going to crimp the top, and then it goes into the oven. Now, in our period oven, who knows how long this would take. It's one of those things where you're not sure exactly what the temperature is, but in your home oven, 350 degrees, definitely more than an hour, probably an hour and a half. I don't bake it at too hot a temperature or else the top cooks too fast and will be too dark brown, so you might want to cook this at a lower temperature, maybe 325 for an hour, and then look at the top, see how it's browning. If it's still very pale, then you can turn up the temperature and it will start to brown the top, so that way it's cooked all the way through. This is beef, though, so we don't have to be quite as concerned about getting it cooked all the way through. I cooked this for about an hour and a half, and it turned out perfect. As an experiment, I'm really excited about this. The smells on both of these, very, very good. A little different because of the cooking techniques. They both looked great coming out, and, you know, obviously meat pie always looks great, and this very, very interesting pudding with the meat on the inside. When I dish them out, we can kind of see the ingredients, and the ingredients look like they really cooked similarly, so let's find out what the tastes are like, how those textures are different, and really kind of get into the differences and the similarities, because that's what I'm really looking for, is such a different cooking technique, different equipment that you have, and almost exactly the same ingredients. So here's the boiled, basically, beef pudding or beef steak pudding, and the crust is very bready, almost like a dumpling flavor, and soft. It isn't hard like a lot of the boiled puddings, where it's kind of like a noodle, which would be interesting in and of itself, but it's very bready and great flavors there. So here's the pie. It, of course, did not have to bake nearly as long. It's at a higher temperature, and we have to add that moisture into the pie to, you know, make sure it doesn't get too dry. Much more meat pie-like. Of course, it's exactly the same crust in both of these. This crust, of course, bakes up. It's nice and light and fluffy. The suet really does a great flaky job here on the crust. Everything's cooked through perfectly. All the flavors are in there. I love the way the pie really holds the gravy and keeps everything so moist. I think that one is really tip-top when it comes to the ease of making it. You can just bake that in your oven. If you don't have an oven, or if you're demonstrating, or you want to try out something that's different, the boiled one is going to give you almost exactly the same flavors and a different kind of cooking experience, and even an eating experience that modern Americans aren't used to. Both just tremendous recipes.