RECIPE PROFILE
Recipe Type: Dinner
Vegetarian Classification: Vegetarian
Most importantly, it’s delicious.
And I can’t take credit for that. It’s all thanks to Chef Colman.
Confession:
Colman’s a food brand popular here in the UK. They make mustard and other condiments. They also make spice mixes for dozens of types of dishes. Most of them I wouldn’t touch (who wants to make hollandaise sauce from a paper packet?). But the packets I swear by are the cottage pie and shepherd’s pie mixes. You just mix them into the meat filling and it tastes great. Points for anyone who knows the difference between a cottage and shepherd’s pie. (See answer at the end of the post.)
For American viewers, it probably sounds odd to have a pie filled with meat. But it’s not supposed to be for dessert. It’s a savoury dish, sometimes with an unsweetened pastry crust. Shepherd’s pie is the kind of pie that is topped with mashed potato and baked so it gets a crisp, golden-brown topping; creamy, buttery mashed potatoes underneath; and saucy, savoury ground lamb underneath. Usually you have the lamb mixed with onion, carrots and peas.
The version I’m making is VEGETARIAN. Instead of the ground lamb, I’m using Puy Lentils, carrots and onions.
Puy lentils are a really interesting food. They are lentils that are grown in the Le Puy en Velay region of France. The soil in that region is mostly volcanic, and it gives the lentils an extraordinary dark-green, navy blue-ish color. When you’re rinsing them, they look and feel like tiny pebbles. They also have a unique flavor, which reminds me of the smell of dirt. I have to confess that I’m one of those people who perversely craves the taste of earth. These have that flavor, so they must suffice.
Right, let’s make a vegetarian shepherds pie!
Here are the ingredients, minus some olive oil, butter, salt and pepper dashed in here and there.
So we’ve got a lot of potatoes for the mash, puy lentils, an onion (although I used two in the end), some stock pots, grated carrot, worcestershire sauce, roasted garlic puree, dried sage and Colman’s Shepherd’s pie mix. I know, it says beef casserole, but that was the only one I had on hand. It’s pretty much the same mix anyway.
I start by cooking the potatoes, which I peel first. You can make it with unpeeled potatoes and it’s probably healthier that way, but prettier without the peel.
And this is how I cook the potatoes:
This steamer is great. I use it for just about everything. It steams the potatoes quickly and mostly painlessly, with minimal clean-up. It wasn’t expensive either, I got it from Argos for £15 (about $20) and I use it all the time.
At the same time, start cooking the lentils. Rinse them thoroughly (they might have bits of volcanic dust on them!) and drain them. Don’t they look fantastically like black pebbles?
Usually you just have to boil them in water for 15-20 minutes. You can also boil them in stock for an extra hit of flavor. So that’s what I did. By stock, I mean boullion mixed with hot water. I used this new product from Knorr (don’t know if it’s available in the States yet) where they just super-concentrate vegetable stock and put it into little pots. It gels up and you just dump them into a pot and add water. In this case I used 2 cubes and around 1 liter of water.
After the lentils are cooked, drain them again and you get this:
In the meantime, cook up the grated carrot and finely diced onion in some butter melted with olive oil.
Add the lentils once they’re cooked and mix it all up.
Add the Colman’s mix and stir it on in, along with half a cup of water. It's also at this stage I add a bit of sage, a traditional shepherd's pie seasoning.
Next add a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce. This stuff makes anything taste great. It’s not fully vegetarian because it contains anchovy paste, but it makes vegetable dishes taste slightly more substantial. If you're strict, just leave it out.
Once the potatoes are done, mash them up. I hate this masher, by the way, I’m looking into buying a new one, but potato ricers seem so expensive. I prefer light and fluffy mashed potatoes.
Partway through the mashing I add a heaping spoonful of this stuff:
It’s roasted garlic puree. I cut off the tops of several heads of garlic, coated them in olive oil, salt and pepper, wrapped in foil and put them in an oven for a long time. They come out nutty brown and almost sweet. I squeezed the garlic out of the bulb and blitzed it in a small food processor to get a whole jar of this puree, which I’ve been adding to just about everything. It is delicious but has a strong garlic flavor, so get your Altoids out. The Economist and I mixed some up with softened butter and spread it onto sliced baguette. Garlic is extremely good for you and we eat tons of it. Here it’s making garlic mashed potatoes.
Once the potatoes are mashed and the garlic is pretty much mixed in, add butter, salt and pepper. I also like a bit of mustard to give more flavor. Sometimes you want mashed potatoes simple, but here I want them to have a full-on flavor to stand up next to the lentils.
Now for the assembly in my humble Pyrex dish.
Spoon in the lentil mix.
Top with dollops of the mashed potato.
Then smooth it out with a fork.
Once it’s smooth, take the fork and rake it through in straight lines to make peaks and furrows.
When it’s baked, the peaks and little bits of mashed potato poking up will get golden-brown and crisp.
And there you have it, before it’s baked.
After it’s baked, it will look like this:
Then it’s just a question of getting it scooped up onto a plate and digging in. Enjoy!
Answer: What is the difference between cottage pie and shepherd's pie? Cottage pie is made with ground beef, shepherd's pie is made with lamb, hence the shepherd bit. Obviously not applicable with a vegetarian pie, but I call it shepherd's pie because of the addition of sage and because it sounds better.
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