The Blog of Pie

I had this delicious idea for a pie and I made it a reality. When it comes to pie, you have to dare to dream. Here’s what you will need:

It’s fennel, potato, mushroom, garlic, and gruyere cheese. You will also need flour, butter, a sheet of pastry, milk, and optionally cream.

First, I turned the oven on to 190C. Then i peeled all the garlic cloves and coated them with oil for roasting. I also put on water to boil for the potatoes, and also for the fennel to steam.

So next you cut up all the potatoes and put them in to boil.

You cut up some of the fennel and put it on to steam. I used five potatoes and one big layer of fennel bulb, but in hindsight i would have used more fennel and maybe one less potato. Then chop up the mushroom and put it aside.

Now you will need to make the roux for the cheese sauce. I used 200g of butter and enough flour to make a creamy roux, first melting the butter then adding the flour and whisking till nicely browned. Then i whisked in the milk and heated it till steaming. I then added some cream, and then a whole small block of grated gruyere cheese.

Stir until melted and creamy. Add generous amounts of salt and pepper. By this time the garlic will be golden and roasted, the potatoes will be cooked, and the fennel will be nicely steamed.

If this isn’t the case, you will have to wait until it is, to then dump everything into a pie dish. Here are just the potatoes, showing off my awesome pie dish.

So everything goes in and gets mixed round. Then the pie crust gets put on top. The sauce may still be quite runny, so be careful laying the crust on. And into the oven it goes, for about 40 min or until the crust is golden.

It would probably be beneficial to let it sit and cool slightly, for the sauce to thicken and become not molten hot. Although we were too hungry and it smelled too good to take this advice. It was yum.

This is a great vegetarian pie because it’s very hearty. There are changes I will make next time though. Instead of steaming the fennel, I should’ve cooked it in the roux butter and then taken it out and made the roux. Also, next time I think I’ll roast not only garlic, but some shallots as well. A different direction I could take it in would be to forego the garlic and shallots, and use chopped green onion and green peppercorns instead. It could be changed a lot to suit different tastes, but I would be careful not to use anything too overpowering in flavor, because the showcase is the fennel and gruyere, both of which are more subtle flavors. Enjoy!