A man's type of dinner - Sausage and apple pie

....also featuring homemade sauerkraut.

Putting eggs in pies must be a curious British thing, or is it? Anyways, we enjoy it because there's something very satisfying about biting into that smooth, cold white and creamy yolk, surrounded by savoury sausage and apple. Add a flaky crust and you have a portable meal in one, similar to the pasty, although perhaps more suited to being eaten from a plate than carried around.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I used to write all my kitchen endeavours down in notebooks. This recipe is one that I actively searched for from my notes. Inspired from an old cookbook entitled Savoury flan fillings, it is simply a man type meal and one I always think of making when I aim to please Neil. It is substantial, shall we say, although it can be attributed a sort of elegance if you slice it finely and arrange it on a nice plate.

The original recipe was titled Sausagemeat and apple slice and although I tweaked a little, I stayed with the original idea of using a loaf rather than a round baking tin. For some reason, anything made with sausage tastes nicer when the shape of the actual product is replicated, probably due to some ridiculous psychological logic. Feel free to scoff and make this any shape you like.

Recipe : Sausage, apple and egg pie

Pastry : Half wholewheat

7 oz all purpose white flour

7 oz wholewheat flour

a few pinches of salt

4.5 oz butter

water

Preheat the oven to 400oF

Sieve the flours and salt into a bowl and add the butter in small pieces. Using your fingertips, rub the butter into the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs. Add water, a few tbsp at a time and mix with your hands until the mixture starts to bind together and become a dough and leaves the bowl clean. 

Remove from the bowl and roll out on a floured surface to a rectangle big enough to fit comfortably into your baking tin, (or into whatever shape your baking tin is). Lay a piece of parchment paper at the bottom of the tray and grease and flour lightly, including the sides. 

Carefully lay your pastry into the tin and press down with your hands, trimming off any excess. Pour some rice or dried beans into the bottom and bake blind for about 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and remove the beans or rice. Set the pastry aside while you make the filling.

Filling

7 oz sausagemeat or sausages, removed from their skins

1 apple seeded, peeled and cored, half diced finely and half sliced

1/2 bell pepper, seeded and finely diced

1 stalk celery, finely diced

1/2 medium onion, peeled and finely diced

3 tbsp breadcrumbs

8 chives, snipped with scissors into small pieces

2 eggs, hard boiled and peeled

salt and pepper

1/2 cup strongly flavoured grated cheese

In a large bowl, mix together the sausage meat, diced apple, bell pepper, celery, breadcrumbs and chives and season generously with salt and pepper. Use your hands to really mix everything together to ensure all the vegetables are evenly distributed amongst the meat. Lay half of the mixture into the bottom half of your prepared pastry case.

Cut each egg in half and place, yolk side down, onto the sausagemeat, arranged in a line. Top with the rest of the sausagemeat mixture and lay the apple slices across the top. Sprinkle the cheese over the top of everything and bake at 375oF for about 45 minutes. Check the pie is cooked by inserting a skewer into the middle. Once removed it should feel piping hot and be clean. At this point there may be quite a lot of juice in the pie, which has been released by the sausages. If you like, you can carefully lift the pie with some oven gloves or tea towels and pour the juice away. Leave the pie to stand for a few minutes and then remove from it's tray to a plate.

This pie is filling enough to be eaten alone, although a green salad or some pickle (such as sauerkraut or chutney), would make a nice accompaniment to provide some tang to the richness.

Some other recipes where eggs have been used:

Ham, egg and pepper pie

Vegetable lasagna, sunny side up