My Baking Class

 Hi everyone. Happy middle of the week. 

Today I'm joining our hostess and all the ladies over at Kathy's blog (Hummingbird Studio at the Lake) for Food Wednesday .  This week I wanted to share the baking class I took last Friday at King Arthur Flour in Norwich, Vermont.

Some of you might remember that I have taken baking classes here before, but it has been awhile. I've done 2 different 4 day long intensive classes in pastry making, and I've also done a one day sourdough class. The class I took last week was British Meat Pies. Ever since seeing British meat pies made on the Great British Baking show and since I never tried them either time I had been in England, I was curious about them. 

And I know I could have just played around on my own with a recipe in my own kitchen, but every now and again it is fun to go take a class as well as to learn a few new baking tricks.

Actually meat pies have been on my baking bucket list for awhile. And I even clicked off 2 other baking list want-to-try items: using lard in a crust and  making a hot water pastry crust. Both of those are things I will definitely do again.

I thought I took more photos to share, but I guess I didn't. We were pretty busy for most of this 4 hour class.

At King Arthur Flour, the classes are taught by professionally trained chefs. They are really good at teaching you not only how to make what you are making, but also some basic skills in the way a professional chef would do them. An example of that is how to use a pastry blender to blend butter and other fats into flour mixtures. Here's a pastry blender tool in case you aren't familiar with them.

I've used them before, but I've never spun the bowl each time I cut the fat into the flour, which makes it so much easier, faster and really does the trick.

 

We made 2 different meat pies. First we made spice lamb filled Scottish meat pies. We made 4 mini ones a person. And then we made steak and root veggie filled Cornish Pasties. We ended up with 3 large ones of those. 

Our instructor that day first demoed how to make the pasties crust, then we made them and put them in the fridge to chill.  Then she demoed the crust for Scottish meat pies, and we made that crust. This process continued until we had completed our baking. Then we got to sample the items of the day because the instructor shared her baking with us.

The very first photo in (today's post) shows you the instructors work table and the agenda on the white board behind it. There is also a big screen above it so people in the back can see, but it didn't make my photo. 

Everyone made their own crusts, but we worked with our table partners to make our meat fillings. My partner ended up being this wonderful lady from Springfield, Massachusetts. As we chatted we found out we were both retired high school biology teachers. How fun was that?

We had so much filling for our pies, that most people seem to overfill theirs just a bit. No soggy bottoms but definitely a bit of a spill over.

Here's my Scottish meat pies. They are filled with spiced ground lamb . We also made a gravy to put over them. I've never added mace to cooking before, but boy did that make the lamb tasty.

There is a little space to add your beans if you want them. to the top, which I believe is a traditional way to eat them? 

And here's my Cornish pasties. I think the top looks weird because they did expand a just bit when we baked them, or else I did  terrible job brushing the beaten egg over them.

Vermont still has pretty strict covid regulations. In order to take this class I needed proof of vaccinations. Plus masks were required the whole time. I know a lot of people are sick of masks, but I felt a lot better wearing one.

It was a fun day, and I think I need to look for another class I might like to take. I'm not sure when I would do that, but since I haven't taken one since 2019, I definitely want to take one in a shorter period of time than that.

Thanks for visiting, and I hope you enjoyed this synopsis of my day at baking school.