Hand pies

We picked up some incredible hand pies from the Hoosier Mama stand at the Green City market one day--one a savory sausage, one apple--and they were so delicious I was inspired to try my hand at them. It wasn't the crust alone or the filling that was so good, but the combination of the two, and I hoped to be able to achieve that myself.

I foolishly thought hand pies would be relatively simple, but not so! Instead of making one big pie you shape to fit a pie plate, meaning you have to roll out one piece of pie crust, two at most--you're making a bunch of little ones and shaping them free form. And crust and shaping pies is really my weak point. My crusts rarely come out the enviable pretty crimped edge you see in cookbook photos, but more like lumpy bits of utilitarian forget-pretty-let's-just-get-the pie-closed-ness.

But as always, as long as they taste good, no real problem. I used a galette dough recipe that is dependable, easy and nicely buttery. More importantly, it's a little more forgiving than "regular" pie crust.

For the sausage hand pies, I took some ground pork, minced garlic, and fresh sage and shaped the meat into little nuggets of meat. Not having a hand pie recipe to consult, I decided it would be best to cook the sausage before baking the pies so that I wouldn't have to worry so much about juices oozing out and making the crust soggy, or the sausage shrinking, leaving a tiny piece of
meat inside a huge empty crust.

So. The sausage itself was really quite tasty--better and fresher tasting than pre-made sausage, and just as easy. I wasn't quite ready to take the step of grinding my own meat, but supposedly that makes even BETTER sausage....

Mmmm....sausage hand pies--success!


The apple hand pies proved a bit more difficult. Juices really abound in cooked apples! I decided to cook the apples first, to try to avoid the pies oozing too much. But putting that filling into the crusts, I found that there were still plenty of juices....when I baked them, the juices came out again, with a life of their own--and most of those pies opened during baking. I'll gladly make more savory hand pies, but I think I'll leave the fruit ones to the professionals.