While I am calling these venison pasties because that's what I like to fill them with, pretty much anything goes in terms of the filling, as I describe above. That said, what follows is pretty close to the official recipe for a Cornish pasty. No matter what the filling, keep the dough the same.
Recipe by Hank Shaw on March 15, 2021
Prep time: PT45M
Cook time: PT50M
Total time: PT275M
4.84 stars (18 reviews)
Dumplings, pastry, pies, venison
- Mix the flour and salt together. Add the two fats, and work them into the flour with your fingers until everything looks like a coarse meal. Pour in the cold water and knead for several minutes, until you get a smooth dough.
- Squeeze off 10 equally sized balls of dough. Set them in a plastic bag and put that in the fridge for 3 hours.
- Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl. That's it. In this case, you put raw ingredients into the pasty and they cook as the dough cooks. I either do this, or add a premade filling as I mention in the headnotes above. Whatever you use, use the recipe above to give you a sense of how much filling you will need.
- You can do one of two things. You can roll each ball out into a disk, which is traditional, or, do what I do and use a tortilla press to flatten out the balls into perfect disks every time. It's a great hack!
- Set filling in each disk and close them into half-moons. Press the edges, and try to get any big air pockets out. Crimp the edges as shown in the video in the text above. Set each pasty on a piece of parchment paper on a baking sheet. Preheat the oven to 360°F.
- Whisk together the glaze and paint each pasty with it. Bake your pasties for 50 minutes or so, taking a look about 40 minutes in -- if they are not browning well, up the temperature to 400°F for this final bit. Remove and let cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes before eating.