I was watching “The Chew” a week or so ago and saw a piece on “Hand Pies”. Now, to channel my inner George Carlin, a hand pie is a pie that you eat with your hand—“Thank you Captain Obvious!”
It’s made with regular pie crust but rather than putting the crust in a dish and then filling it and then topping it with more crust, you roll out the dough, cut it into rectangles put a couple of spoons full of filling on it, fold it, crimp it and then bake it. What’s cool is that you can also freeze the pre-made hand-pies and pop them in the oven frozen sometime later.
This story on “The Chew” showed a restaurant in New York which specializes in “hand pies”. Mario Batalli never mentioned how much the restaurant charges but I bet it’s somewhere in the $5-$8 range. So I said to myself: “Self, you can do this yourself, easy and quick and cheap.”
In a certain sense these are kind of like Pop Tarts. But the crust is a lot better because it’s pie crust rather than whatever it is that passes for the crust on a toaster pastry. Don’t try these in the toaster, I don’t think they’d work quite right.
So here’s my Cheap Bastid version of these. I make my pie crust from scratch so start to finish these are going to take maybe an hour to make. And yes, you could use store-bought, ready made pie crust if you want but I like the challenge and reward of making my own crust.
Just to let you know, I made these in 2 batches to try to get the technique down. Most of the directions I saw said to use 2 pieces of dough for each hand pie—put filling on the bottom one and then put the top one down and crimp them together. That didn’t work too well—in fact it was a pain in the butt. Make them twice as big, spoon some filling on one side then fold it over—that’s actually pretty easy. And, they look a lot better!
First here’s a link to Cheap Bastid’s Old Fashioned Lard Pie Crust recipe: http://www.cheap-bastid-cooks.com/old-fashioned-lard-pie-crust/
Recipe: Hand Pies
Summary: Tasty, crispy pie crust filled with fruit, meat or anything else you can imagine. Hand pies are Great!
Ingredients
- 1 recipe Pie Crust
- 3-4 apples
- 1 lime or lemon (juice only)
- 1/3 cup brown sugar
- ¼ cup margarine or butter
- ½ tsp salt
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- Chipotle powder
- 1 tbsp Cornstarch
- 2 tbsp cold water
- ¼ cup milk
- Flour for dusting
Instructions
- Get out a your pastry board, a cooking sheet, silicone baking mat, bowl, rolling pin, thin spatula, cutting board and chef’s knife.
- Make the pie crust according to the recipe through the step where you wrap the 2 halves of crust in plastic wrap and put them in the freezer.
- http://www.cheap-bastid-cooks.com/old-fashioned-lard-pie-crust/
- Make the filling. Peel and chop the apples—make the pieces smaller than a traditional pie, about ½” by ¼” thick.
- Squeeze the juice from the lime or lemon over the apples and stir.
- Put a sauce pan on the stove set to medium (because these are going to bake faster than a traditional pie, simmer the filling ingredients for a few minutes before making the individual hand pies).
- Add the margarine & let it melt.
- Add the brown sugar, salt, cinnamon and chipotle.
- Make the cornstarch slurry with the cornstarch and cold water and add to the pan.
- Turn heat down to medium low and bring to a simmer. Cover and let it simmer for about 5 minutes. Let pan sit on burner for a few minutes.
- Turn oven on to 375 to preheat.
- Get out the discs of dough. Dust the pastry board with flour.
- Roll out one of the discs into a rectangle about 16 x 8 or so.
- Using a sharp knife, cut the edges of the dough so that you form a “true rectangle”
- Cut the crust into 4 equal size rectangles.
- Put a couple of tablespoonsful of the filling on each rectangle (off center). Carefully peel up one of the long edges of each rectangle and pull over the filling.
- Crimp using the tines of a fork and carefully move it onto the baking sheet.
- Repeat this process on the second dough disc.
- Put in the oven for about 8 minutes. Remove from oven and use a silicone brush to lightly brush top of each crust with the milk. Lightly sprinkle pinches of sugar on top of each hand pie.
- Put back into oven for another 4-6 minutes. They should be done! If they haven’t browned, turn the broiler on for about 1 ½ minutes.
- Remove, put on a cooling rack and enjoy.
Preparation time: 30 minute(s)
Cooking time: 16 minute(s)
Number of servings (yield): 8
These are worth making! What a great dessert. Double the pleasure of crispy, flaky pie crust with a tasty filling on each bite.
Here’s what’s really cool. There’s all kinds of hand pies you can make: Fruit hand pie Taco hand pie Beef, vegetable, gravy hand pie. Leftover Thanksgiving hand pie—Turkey, mashed potatoes & gravy hand pie and Stuffing Handpie. Cheese and jalapeno hand pie. Breakfast hand pie—scrambled eggs and sausage. Pizza hand pie. Veggie hand pie. Spinach hand pie.
Let your imagination run wild! Plus, you can pre-make these and then freeze them. Take them out of the freezer, pop ‘em on a baking sheet and you’ve got almost instant dinner or dessert.
Pretty soon I’ll make a breakfast version of this and write about it. But let me just let you know that these were really tasty. A bit labor intensive, especially the first time figuring out the best way to make them–and by the way, make them any shape you want. We really enjoyed the crispy, flaky crust that was such a treat each and every bite with a just right apple pie filling playing and dancing with our tastebuds.
The Cheap Bastid Test: The pie crust costs maybe $1 to make. I spent $1.50 on apples, $.25 on the lime and maybe another $.50 for the remaining ingredients. That’s a total of $3.25 for 8 scrumptious hand pies. That’s tasty and cheap.
That’s the Cheap Bastid Way: Eat Good. Eat Cheap. Be Grateful!
Turnovers?? Kind of??:) Look delish..
Linda, thanks. Turnovers are a different kind of dough rather than the pie crust used in “hand pies”
That looks wonderful.
Fill these with meat and potatoes, and you have a pasty, which was a staple of my Michigan childhood. Mmmmm, pasties!
Rae, I’ve got “pasties” and “fleischkugel” on my list of recipes to tweek, cook and write about. I mentioned to my wife last night that you could do a whole meal with pie crust wrapped food. Thanks.
i cant wait to learn about pasties, which are also like empanadas, too. yes, a pie crust-wrapped meal sounds in order, cheap!
Daisy,
Seems like I’m doing a lot of baking lately in my blog. And, yes I’ll be doing a piece on pasties aka fleishkuegle in North Dakota. And then maybe a version with vegetables. That way you could do an entire dinner with “hand pies”.
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Mmmm, hand pies. If you ever find yourself in Reading, Berkshire, UK (for instance taking a train between London and Oxford), do yourself a favor and drop by Sweeney & Todd’s pie shop. When I lived in Reading around 1999-2000, takeout pies were 1.50 (maybe like $US 2.50). I don’t recall whether they did dessert pies, but they had a huge assortment of savory pies, like hare&cherry; duck&apricot; five nations (a tribute to the Rugby league: guinness from ireland, leeks from wales, beef from england? etc).
RubeRed, thank you for your kind words. If ever I am back in the UK I’ll be sure to do that. My next hand pie project will be the “savory” meal type pies–taking more than a little inspiration from the Welsh. And I’ve even given thought to purely vegetable hand pies–that way one could do a “3-course meal” of savory/meat hand pie, vegetable hand pie and dessert hand pie. Thanks again.
Sounds delish! Reminds me actually of an empanada place here in San Diego (Papa Luna’s in Pacific Beach) I enjoy, that has vegetarian, meat, and dessert varieties. It’s a nice place, but hey, I’m a cheap bastid like you and it would be even better to enjoy at home without the beach community restaurant markup.
Tried to comment again, it got lost apparently. Go ahead and delete if this is a duplicate. But browsing around, apparently you are in San Diego? (I’m up in Poway)
I like your idea for meat-veg-dessert hand pies, it could save me a lot of money vs Papa Luna’s empanadas in PB!
Also, I have a recommendation for your next book review: (New) Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I’ve used their no-knead refrigerated dough method for about a year now, it has replaced sandwich loaves in our house, it can also be used for nice little boules to go with dinner, pizza crust, etc. $15 for 50lb flour at costco, and miniscule costs for yeast and salt, and we’ve got bread for months! I forget what I calculated out one time, I think it might have been about 10c a loaf.
I just calculated it out again, it’s 50c/batch, and a batch makes two sandwich loaves, or four little round boules, or 4 pizzas.
That’s pretty close to what I end up paying for a loaf of bread or pizza crust using the flour that I buy in 5 lb bags at either Stater Bros or WalMart. I don’t make sandwich loaves, not yet trusting my baking skills to making loaves of white bread. And yes, I live in Vista but work in Poway (at Mossy). Living in Vista is why you’ll see references in my foodblog to Fraizer Farms all the time (Vista’s equivalent to Henry’s or Sprouts). I’ll track down the book you mention. By the way Hollan’s “Cooked” has a full section on bread (it’s the chapter called “Air”) and it’s really interesting.