Tourtière - From Scratch Canadian Meat Pie Recipe for the Holidays or Anytime

Welcome to Creative Cooking. Today we're making Canadian meat pie, also known as tortilla up in Canada. So we're going to start off with two sticks of butter, which has been frozen and cubed, roughly seven to eight tablespoons of ice water, and we have three cups of all-purpose flour. I'm using a food processor for this because it makes it a lot easier than chopping it with a pastry knife. But if you don't have one of these, use a pastry knife. It works. It's just a little more work for you. And usually when I do this, I'll usually put down one layer of flour, a layer of butter, then another layer of flour. That just makes it a lot easier. And then just pulse it until you get little tiny pieces of butter floating around in there. Then gradually add your ice water while pulsing. Now once you put this down on your work surface, you'll know if it has enough moisture. And in my case, it doesn't. You see how it's crumbling? That means there's not quite enough water. That's in part because it was very dry that day. So I added another tablespoon of water. And worked it in. And that worked out just fine. But be careful not to overhandle the dough because you don't want the heat from your hands to melt the butter. So you have to work very quickly. And once you've done that, divide it into basically two-thirds and one-third or somewhere in between because one portion will be for the bottom of the pie and the other portion, the smaller one, will be for the top. And this is a very important step. You have to make sure that you wrap it and put it back in the refrigerator for an hour. Sometimes I will do this one day in advance and that works even better. So be sure to take each piece. If you can make it into sort of disc shape, that's good. Wrap it very tight and squeeze it. Push it together and let it sit in the refrigerator for one hour while you go on to do the rest. Next thing you want to do is boil a few potatoes. These are three small russet potatoes. We're going to boil them gently with a little bit of salt and when they're cooked, well cooked, we'll set them aside with the water. You don't want to throw that water away. Then you want to saute your onions with a little bit of butter. And here we have just over a pound of pork and just over a pound of beef. We're going to cook that until it's well done and then add in the potatoes. The potatoes become part of the filling, also part of the binder. There are more ingredients coming, but what you want to do is mash them. You don't have to be perfect with the mashing because this will cook for an hour. Those will fall apart and then add the potato water in. Enough to cover, but don't throw it away. You might need to add some during the cook. And here we have the spice mix. If you want to see the spice mix, it's up here. Pause here to see it or check in the description below. All the ingredient amounts will be there. Give that a fair mix, since you'll mix it at least a few times. Cover and simmer for one hour, 45 minutes to one hour. At the end of that cooking time, if you want to, you can remove some of the excess fat from the top. Then remove from heat and allow it to cool down completely to room temperature. Because the next step is to add one beaten egg. We don't want to cook that egg, do we? It's part of the binder. And to that you'll add one quarter cup of fine breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs. Not too much, just enough to combine with the potato, starches, the eggs. All of these things will help it hold together. So now that we've done that, we're going to roll out the dough. And then I'm going to shut up, which I often do on the long videos. So sit back, relax, watch the process, and enjoy the music. One of the things that I like about making pies at home is that you have artistic license to make them look as pretty as you want. I originally made this for Christmas and I wanted those to be holly leaves. But, hey, I usually do that triple leaf pattern on my English pork pies, this type of pie. It just looks nice. Now I have it on pretty good authority that in Canada they like to serve this usually with a brown gravy and a lot of them like to use ketchup. So what I say is if you're going to use ketchup, kick it up a notch. And this is my favorite recipe for making a spiced ketchup for just this sort of thing. I'll give you the ingredients right here on the screen and they'll also be in the description below. Now I'll be honest with you here, I should have waited to cut into this pie but I couldn't help myself because it smells so good. See how it's falling out? Well, if I had waited another 20 minutes that slice would have come out perfectly. But like I said, when you have your face in this and your nose in that kitchen for that long, you want to try some. So a word to the wise, if you want to make it pretty, let it cool down completely before you cut into it. And that's just my advice. All in all, this turned out to be a delicious pie and it never disappoints. So I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope you come back each week for more great videos made for people who like to cook. Until then, bon appétit!