Pie de Résistance

In this final week of my inquiry, I finished things off by making a steak pie. I based the recipe on Jamie Oliver’s video from last week and this recipe for epic chunky beef and mushroom pie. I stuck with the same pastry from weeks past and I think settled on a good quantity (based on two cups flour) for a double crust pie:

2 cups flour (used compliments GF again this week)
2/3 cups butter
2 egg yolk + 5 TBSP cold water (plus extra if needed)
1/2 TSP salt

Here’s how it turned out:

• It was good! Definitely checked all the boxes for a decent steak pie.
• To really match the flavour of a butcher shop/pub pie an obscene amount of salt, pepper and herbs are needed. Next time I’d double what I used to two sprigs of rosemary, a mountain of thyme and just heaps of salt.
• It was a lot of work: making a stew for the filling is pretty much a full meal prep in itself… plus making a pie.
• The crust was good, with practice it seems to be getting better and better.

Overall, I feel like I learned quite a bit through this inquiry exercise. I’d made pie infrequently in the past, but after making three in short succession I’ve really improved my baking skills. I enjoyed the mix of theory and practice in this topic. I gained some great recipes and techniques from the research I did, and the hands-on experience was just as valuable. An unexpected win was the success with gluten free: I had never made gluten free pastry from scratch before, and it turned out great! My partner is celiac so it’s nice to be able to make something everyone can eat, and to not get wheat flour all over everything in the kitchen. Last, I don’t think the history of pie is something I would have ever explored on my own. I enjoy learning some history from time to time and found the origins of pie to be really interesting!

I liked the process of free inquiry. I found it to be basically: learn whatever you want, however you want. Having ownership over the assignment really helped me get motivated and being able to choose something I was interested in and figure out for myself how to explore the topic really contributed to this. The blog functioned well as a portfolio to document my learning, and the weekly posts kept me on track. A takeaway for me was that a regular method of accountability is important. With such an open-ended project, I wouldn’t have gotten as much out of it without the accountability of the blog posts. Thinking as a teacher, it’d be hard to adequately support students without some regular means of seeing the progress and learning. Another aspect I found valuable was the initial planning, and development of questions and lines of inquiry. My inquiry was somewhat shallow and wide in that I explored a different aspect of pie each week rather than dig deep on a single path. Even still, I found having the project planned out in advance to be really helpful and kept things low stress. This would be especially crucial for an inquiry that went deep with many interdependent steps.

I think this assignment increased my appreciation for the potential role of technology in the classroom. Going into this project I might have been inclined to write off blogs as technology for technology sake, and so 1990s. Why not just word process it like everything else? But as I mentioned above, I found the blog to be a great platform for building a portfolio. It has many advantages, including simplifying logistics of submitting something each week, the ability to share between student, teacher, parents and/or classmates if desired, comment functionality, and support for a wide array of potential learning artifacts (video, photos, audio, etc…). For my project, creating photos and video was a great way to document what I’d done. Some light use of photo and video editing tools was required to get media in shape to post.

Here’s a video I made earlier in the term, as well as some photos from this week’s pie:

Steak pie – getting started with the filling

Stew is cooking

Turning it into a pie

In it goes…

Out of the oven