Mushroom Pie with Potato Pastry and Pearl Barley

Well, as usual I'm flat out these days - still building a house and still moving to Ireland NEXT MONTH!! On top of that my son's first holy communion is this Saturday which so far is looking more complicated than my wedding. Seriously. So with all this going on I haven't had much time for the blog or cooking in general. Nor anytime to read all my other favourite blogs and comment, so do forgive me if you haven't heard from me in awhile - I'll be back for sure :-)

This is another dish I made ages ago, finally found a moment here to blog it. The recipe comes from one of my favourite cookbooks, Beatrice Ojakangas's 'The Great Scandinavian Baking Book' - it really is wonderful. It's mostly sweets and breads but the back has a few savoury dishes and this was one of the only vegetarian dishes. For ages I wanted to have a go veganising it as it called for eggs, butter and sour cream and finally did. We really loved this, it tasted fantastic and the potato pastry was really good. At first a little chewy but even better the next day.

I used vitalite in place of the butter, tofutti sour cream for the sour cream (straight swap) and for the eggs I decided to use this egg replacer I've gotten good results from lately using xanthan gum and potato and cornstarch. However, I forgot what happens to cornstarch when heated, of course it thickens like mad! You were to stir the eggs into the pot and cook for a few minutes, so of course mine thickened right up and I had to add quite a bit of water. This didn't affect the taste or the end product though. So, you may want to use a different egg replacer, pureed silken tofu would probably be really good in this, I try to keep my soy levels low. I'll post the recipe I used though, just keep in mind the thickening issue ;-)

Potato Pastry:

3/4 cup cold mashed potato (just potato)

210g plain flour

100g vegetable fat/shortening (I use Trex)

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

60ml cold water

Filling:

40g vegan margarine (I used Vitalite)

1 cup cooked pearl barley, I cooked up 80g raw and had a bit left over.

100g chestnut mushrooms

150g regular mushrooms - or any type of mushrooms you like.

140g chopped onion

115g tofutti sour cream

1/8 tsp ground allspice

ground black pepper

First make your pastry. Combine the flour, salt and baking powder in a large bowl. Add the fat and cut in with a pastry cutter until it resembles coarse crumbs. Mix in the mashed potato until a dough forms. Now mine was too dry at this stage, I assume different potatoes will give different results and had to add some cold water. You just want it to come together as a dough you can roll out. Gather the dough into a ball, wrap in cling film and chill for at least 30 minutes.

For the filling, heat the margarine in a large saucepan and fry the mushrooms and onion until onions are soft and mushrooms are cooked and any pan liquids have evaporated. Mix in the cooked barley, sour cream, 2 'eggs', salt, pepper and allspice then bring to a simmer then leave to cool. Again, I'm thinking 1/2 cup silken tofu would be a good replacement for the eggs, but this is what I used: (with more water to counter the thickening that went on)

1 Tbsp cornstarch

1 Tbsp potato starch

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/8 tsp xanthan gum

1 tsp vegetable oil

100ml water

Mix the dry together then slowly whisk in the water and oil. Whisk really well until you have a thick, slightly foamy mixture.

Preheat the oven to 220C and remove the pastry from the fridge. Cut it not quite in half, you want one section slightly larger than the other. Roll out the larger section to fit a 10 inch fluted flan dish and fit it in. Tip your filling in smoothing out the top and set aside. Roll out your other section of dough and cut out strips for a lattice topping. I won't go into how to do this as I followed the instructions here. It was my first time doing lattice and besides missing a few links, not too bad a job ;-) Make sure you pinch your edges to seal then pop it into the oven for 25 - 30 minutes until the pastry is golden and the filling is set.

♥

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