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Tuesday 28 January 2014

Another Savoury Sunday

Slightly behind on my baking blog posts, but I'm catching up! With my brother visiting at the weekend, I thought it would be a good chance to try out one of the savoury plaits I'd had my eye on!  However, my brother isn't the biggest fan of mushrooms, and I'm not sure if he liked black pudding either, so I didn't risk trying out the Paul Hollywood recipe I'd previously noted!  After spending a bit of time exploring, and realising I'm really quite indecisive about this type of thing, I opted to make 2 different plaits! The first one was a Vegetarian Plait  that I located on the BBC Food website, and the2nd plait was straight from the BBC Good Food magazine (it was something like this one - http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2667648/sausage-plait - but by the time I'd taken out the chillies and extra ingredients that I didn't fancy, I would say it really was quite similar!)

I'm trying to have a bit of a post-christmas health kick (aren't we all), so am very conscious about calories, fats, portion sizes so I made sure I was only making half a portion of the two plaits, and I used a "lighter" ready-made puff pasty. Thinking back though, I literally just trusted that it was lighter, and I didn't actually look at the calories, fat etc, so on this occasion I'll just have to trust the manufacturers, and hope it really was lighter!

So for the two plaits, I laid out all my ingredients, which included red and yellow peppers, red onions, garlic, goats cheese, sausage-meat, spring onions, tomato purée and puff pastry.

Firstly I needed to roast the peppers, onions and garlic. I've done similar recipes before where I roast the veg with sausages in a big roasting pan, and just make a meal out of that - but I've never had proper instructions to follow of how you really roast veg, so in this case I had it on a baking tray, on gas mark 6, for 30 mins. They came out looking nice and soft with a bit of brownness to them, so I think I'd be trying that again :) I then mixed up the sausage-meat  with onions and tomato purée.

Then for the exciting bit, the pastry! So from not having done very much with pastry ever (I've made my own sausage rolls once) I've not experimented with 2 (well, 3 if you count these as separate items) pastry dishes since Christmas! Pastry is already pre-rolled, and much easier to handle than filo.....so I cut it in half, and filled on side with the veggie filling, and the other with the sausage-meat filling.

I've had some experience of plaiting bread, and so really enjoyed plaiting the pastry, it's not quite the same technique, but I found it easier to manipulate. I think the overall effect is really quite neat, and I like to think Paul Hollywood wouldn't turn his nose up at it, but since he'll never see it, I can just live in blissful ignorance ;)

Here's the two plaits, pre-baked:



(yes, I'm a bit of a photographer too, and had my nice Canon camera out from having taking photos earlier in the day, to do excuse the slightly arty shots of my food....) Here's the final result, baked, and then baked and cut open to demo the fillings. Even I was impressed with the photography, may be I'm biased, but I think it's good enough for a magazine??  Good Food, any offers?

 Meaty


Veggie
And finally, the dinner - a slice of each, and some home-made sweet potato wedges (expertly prepared and roasted by my brother)





1 comment:

  1. Oooh, they both look good! Bet they're nice cold, too :) x

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