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Automn Pie

Posted on Oct 17, 2021

This is a really hearty dish. I’d claim that the filling of the pie can easily be prepared in advance.

Core ingredients

Serves 4 okay-ish hungry people.

  • 1kg smoked tofu
  • 1kg green beans
  • 500 ml coconut milk
  • ~500g shortcrust dough
  • 2 cans of chickpeas
  • 3 carrots
  • 3 large yellow onions
  • 3 gloves of garlic
  • half a thumb of ginger
  • small chili
  • soy sauce
  • black bean sauce
  • tomato purée
  • soy sauce
  • red wine
  • 1 egg

Method

Strain your chickpeas and separate them out on a baking tray. Bake them in the oven at around 200 degrees Celsius until they are nice and crispy. You might add any or all of these: curcuma, ground cumin, ground coriander, sweet paprika.

Slice the onions, dice the garlic, dice the ginger and deseed the chili before slicing it. Cut your carrots into half-circles. Trim off the ends of your garden beans and halve them width-wise.

Start sautéing the carrots and continuously add onions, beans, cumin seeds, fennel seeds, ginger, garlic and chili in that order. Start off with olive oil and once the vegetables are starting to pick up the heat deglaze with a dash of a, preferably earthy, red wine. Rinse and repeat. Towards the end, add black bean sauce and soy sauce.

In a different pan, slightly fry 1cm cubes of smoked tofu. Once it starts getting crispy, add plenty of tomato purée, honey and soy sauce. Optionally cover it in sesame seeds.

Once everything is done, combine all except the tofu in a pot and pour in the coconut milk. Let the flavours mix without really cooking anything much further. Try to thicken up the collective - if needed, add some corn starch - after all, we don’t want neither want a leaky pie nor a pie with a mushy bottom. Once you feel it’s done, add a bunch of picked basil and coriander.

Lay out the dough in your baking dish. Consider pre-baking the dough on its own. Make sure to leave some dough to create a ’lid’ and to poke some holes in the lid - possibly also in the bottom. Glaze with a bit of egg wash, place it in the oven around 180 degrees celsius and patiently wait til it’s looking great. :)