Halloween recipe #1: Pumpkin, Feta and piquillo pepper pie

 

Here's our first recipe using our lovely organic pumpkins. This pie is on the menu at Mildreds but we re-sized it for making at home to make a 24 cm/ 9 inch pie to serve 4-5 for a main or 6-8 for a starter. If you cant get these spanish piquillo peppers then use some roasted and skinned red peppers.

(Recipe by Daniel Acevedo)

For the Filling:

1kg Pumpkin

1 red chilli

4 garlic cloves

4 sticks rosemary

200g feta

6 piquillo peppers

Splash olive oil

Few pinches of Maldon sea salt

For the Pastry:

200g butter (cubed and cold)

400g plain Flour

1 egg yolk

Ice cold water 

1 Tbsp (more or less) fresh herbs (oregano, sage or thyme)

First make your pastry. We always use the mixer for this as the more you touch pastry the more rubbery it gets but you can crumb it by hand by rubbing the flour and butter together with your fingertips. 
1) First crumb together your flour and butter (make sure your butter is fridge cold, it makes this easier)
2) Add the herbs, egg yolk and enough ice cold water to bring the crumbs together but not so much that it gets sticky. 
3) Leave it to rest in the fridge.

Then start your filling.
1) Peel and de-seed and cut pumpkin into even bite sized chunks. 

2) Finely dice chilli and finely slice garlic cloves, hand strip rosemary and roughly cut.  Add all the above to a baking tray, lightly splash with olive oil, season with Maldon sea salt and bake for 25-30 min until fully cooked (it should be really soft). 

3) Once pumpkin has cooled down, crumble in the feta cheese and add chopped piquillo peppers combine well.

Now assemble your tart.
1) In a 24cm pit tin (with a drop out base) roll and line with savoury pastry (recipe to follow). 

2) Pack the pumpkin mix into the tart and seal with top layer of pastry and bake at 170c for 30-40 min or until golden brown. 

You can if you like lay top layer of pastry out flat on top of the pie or as I have let it fold and wrinkle around, to avoid wastage and in my opinion give you a better finish, as I'm a sucker for a good bit of extra pastry with my pie.

This is also the same with glazing the pie I don’t bother as this does nothing to the final taste of the pie, as it is purely cosmetic and adds shine to the finished product. If you do like the shine, then we use either a traditional egg yolk wash or, more often, soy cream which works really well.