by
Sep 14. 2024
Steak and Ale Pie
Recipe: Full of classic British flavours
Serves 4~6
Preparation time 20 minutes
Cooking time About 1 hour 30 minutes
Ingredients 1 tbsp vegetable oil/ 800g diced beef braising steak/ 100g bacon / 2 onions/ 2 chopped garlic cloves/ 2 carrots (medium size)/ 160g mushrooms/ 1 tsp dried thyme/ 1 tbsp plain flour/ 1 tsp apple cider vinegar/ 1 tbsp tomato puree/ 300ml beef stock/ 300ml brown ale/ 1 tsp salt/ 1 tsp ground black pepper/ 30ml milk/ about 950g pastry
Measuring terminology: tbsp=tablespoon (15ml)/ tsp=teaspoon (5ml)
1 Cut the bacon into 3cm squares. Drizzle 1 tbsp oil into a frying pan on a medium heat and fry the bacon pieces all over for 5 minutes. Remove and put on a plate, then fry the beef until it turns brown for about 10 minutes. (In the UK, braising steak is sold already cut, but beef shin, cut into 2~3 cm large chunks, is also good for this pie.)
2 Cut the carrots, onions and mushrooms into about 3 cm chunks. Fry them in a large saucepan with a little oil on a medium heat for about 5 minutes, then add the chopped garlic, flour, thyme, apple cider vinegar, tomato puree, beef stock, salt, pepper, beef and bacon and simmer while stirring occasionally for about 1 hour until the sauce thickens.
3 Preheat the oven to 200°C/ 180°C Fan/ Gas 6.
4 Heavily butter a pie dish (26~28cm). Roll out 550g of the pastry to 5mm thickness and put into the pie dish for the bottom half of the pie. Make sure the pastry fully covers the dish and goes over the edges at the top.
5 Put the beef mixture into the pastry base. Brush some of the milk over the edges of the base and roll out the remaining pastry to a 5mm thickness to make the lid. Lay it on top of the base, stick the top and bottom pastry edges together and press them all around with a fork to seal. Trim any leftover parts off. Pierce the centre of the pie with a knife a few times and brush the top with milk. (If you have excess pastry you can make some decorations and stick them on the top of the pie.)
6 Bake for about 20 minutes or until the pastry is golden-brown and puffed all over. (Depending on the pastry thickness or pie dish size you can adjust the time by checking the colour.)
When my Korean friends ask me about typical British food, pie is the first thing that comes to mind. Steak and ale pie is a classic dish found in most pubs around the UK. Tender pieces of steak are cooked with vegetables and British ale, then wrapped in the buttery pie crust. If you serve the pie with chips and peas it is a proper British meal.
The pie we know and and are familiar with today has its roots in Northern Europe and the early “pyes” were predominantly meat pies. If you want to know more you can read an article about the history of the UK pie from Jamie Oliver's website.
Steak and Ale Pie can be made using leftover roast beef, just like cottage pie. However, the crust for this pie is made from pastry and fully encloses the pie. In the UK you can buy ready-made pastry easily and cheaply at supermarkets. I usually buy a 500g pastry block (which costs about £1.70) and use that. You could say it is equivalent to buying the mandu outer when making mandu at home in Korea. I am not sure how easy or expensive it would be to buy the pastry in Korea so if you want to make it yourself, please see the recipe below. There are several different kinds of pasty. The shortcrust pastry recipe (from my grandmother-in-law recipe book) below can also be used to make dessert pies like mince pies or jam tarts by adding 1 tbsp of sugar to the flour at the start.
Shortcrust Pastry Recipe
Makes Enough for 1 steak and ale pie from above recipe (about 950g)
Ingredients 350g butter/ 2 tsp salt/ 500g self-raising flour + extra for dusting on a board/ 2 eggs/ a little milk for glazing
Instruction
1 Mix the flour and salt together well in a bowl, cut the butter into small pieces and add this in. Rub the mixture together with your hands until it looks like breadcrumbs.
2 Beat the egg and add it to the bowl, then mix with a spoon until you have one smooth lump of dough. Put the ball of dough in an airtight container and leave in the fridge for at least 20 minutes to rest.
3 If you roll out all of the pastry in one go it can tear easily when you try to move it, so I recommend dividing the dough into two balls - one for the base of the pie and one for the lid. After covering a board with flour, you can roll each ball out to about 5mm thickness.
I usually use a smaller pie dish and cook half the quantity of beef mixture and pastry, storing the remaining beef mixture and pastry in the fridge for 2 or 3 days before cooking them. The pie dish in the photo is about 20cm oval shaped, which is a good size for cooking each half. The pastry I bought is a pack of 500g so when I cook the pie with a smaller dish there will be a little bit left. I used the leftover pastry for decorating the pie lid and to make some pastry rolls, which I baked with the pie. Baked pastry rolls are great as a dessert with butter and jam.
Most people use beef legs, but other parts of beef suitable for stewing are fine as long as they are cut into large chunks and don't fall apart too easily. It is important to fry the beef well in a pan first to keep the juices in. The beef mixture for the pie must be cooled sufficiently before assembling the pastry to make a crispy crust. The cooked beef mixture can be stored in the refrigerator for 2-3 days before baking.
Ale makes the taste of beef deeper and richer. We recommend using the rich, sweet British dark brown ale for this pie, but any ale will work. If you want to avoid alcohol, non-alcoholic beer is good, and if you already have wine, you can use it instead of ale. The beer I used is Adnams Broadside England ruby red ale. It's full bodied with a balance between sweetness and hops.
Actually, I didn't know much about the different kinds of beer, and I didn't have any special taste for it. Occasionally, I enjoyed a subtle and light beer like Cafri, which is easy to drink. When I ordered beer at a pub and I saw names like IPA, lager, stout, I didn't know what they meant, so I just ordered whatever they recommended. When I first made steak and ale pie, I didn't know what ale was or how to prepare the ingredients, so I looked up information about beer.
There are several ways to classify types of beer, but it can be broadly categorised into lagers and ales. An article of FIRESTONE WALKER brewery explains that the difference between lagers and ales is that they use different yeasts during fermentation. This affects the temperature at which the yeast ferments. Lagers generally have a 'cleaner' taste that allows the malt and hops to be more noticeable. Ales, on the other hand, tend to have strong fruity and spicy flavours that balance the malt and hops. Ale beers include IPA, wheat beer, stout, and porter.
Beer has been brewed in England for thousands of years. More styles of beer first brewed in Britain are India Pale Ale, Pale Ale, Porter, Stout, Imperial Russian Stout, Mild, Bitter, Barley Wine, Brown Ale, and Scotch Ale. In the Middle Ages, when clean water was scarce, beer was one of the most common drinks and was drunk daily by all social classes. Women brewed ale which they drank every day at home by themselves, selling any surplus. These women who brewed ale were known as alewives. Alewives wore pointed hats to stand out when selling beer at the market, and at home when the beer was ready, they put a stick up outside the ale house so that people could see and come to buy the beer. At the time, ale brewing was said to be almost the only means of livelihood that women could sustain if the male head of the family died. At that time the mediaeval state and church were carrying out witch hunts through the Inquisition for the purpose of confiscating property and social authority. The ale wives, who had economic independence with stable profits, were targeted and witches became symbolised by their brooms and hats.
ⓒSmithfield Decretals | A depiction of an alewife in the pictorial cycle of the “Thrice-Sinning Herm