Malaysian Pies - Home Cooking
Eating lots of Malaysian meals lately has given us a new appreciation of the versatility of this lovely, rich and fragrant food. As a meal there's always plenty to choose from, whether it's a light meal you're after or a full and hearty dish.We decided to mix two concepts together and see how it worked - Malaysian food and Aussie pies.
The idea was pretty simple, put Malaysian fillings into fresh home made pies. The next challenge was what fillings to actually use.
As beef rendang is always a favourite of ours, it became our first choice. Also, beef in a pie seemed pretty logical in Australia anyway.
We used a good Malaysian rendang paste we bought from the markets for only a few dollars, Tean's Gourmet Malaysian Traditional Tumisan Rendang Dry Curry Paste for Meat.
We cooked it in a pan and thickened it before adding the meat, rump steak cut into small pieces. The meat cooked and softened as the rich rendang sauce thickened even more and caramelised around the beef. We then set the mix aside to use later as filling for our pies.
Next choice was Malaysian satay chicken. We looked at a number of recipes but in the end we improvised and made our own sauce from scratch. We simply crushed and blended unsalted peanuts with some oil, garlic, Jeeny's Tamarind Puree and Jeeny's Palm Sugar. Normally the chicken is basted in rempah first - a spicy paste - but we simply added the spice to the peanut sauce with some Lingham's Chilli Sauce. Once the chicken was seared in the pan we just added the sauce, thickened it and set it all aside for later.
We've had curried scallop pies several times in Tasmania, it's a native delicacy there that people travel to try. We did. We decided to make our own Malaysian version, with Tasmanian scallops lightly seared then mixed with a traditional Malaysian curry sauce. Of course it needed thickening which was easy - and we then again set aside the mix for our pie. Finally we added some extra chicken to some extra curry sauce to use for curry chicken pies later on as well.
So we now had our four pie fillings - beef rendang, Malaysian satay chicken, Malaysian curry scallops and Malaysian curry chicken. They were all thickened varying amounts and ready to be used. The next and final step was the easiest, we just cut out our pie bases and tops from sheets of ready made puff pastry, put the bases in our pie maker, added fillings and a lid and cooked them It's such an easy way to eat leftovers - everything seems to taste great encased in pastry!
Our Malaysian Aussie Pies turned out great. The rendang was spicy, very spicy in fact, but just what we wanted. The Malaysian peanut satay pies were rich and tangy but quite mild. The Malaysian curry scallop pies were lovely - packed with many more scallops than you normally get in these pies. The Malaysian curry chicken was also tasty - but still quite mild. Sir and Mlady's Malaysian Pie experiment was supported by the Malaysian Kitchen Programme.
