Beef Patties

While picking chillies for picking, I noticed we have even more habanero chillies coming than we had regular chillies. You can’t really pickle that many habs, but you can make hot pepper sauce: so that’s the plan. But that reminded me of what you use hot pepper sauce for: Jamaican patties. So I planned to make patties to go with the hot sauce when we make it… and then I decided I couldn’t wait so I bought some hot pepper sauce and decided to make our own patties.

Various online recipes didn’t meet the mark, but our Jerk from Jamaica has a recipe on p100 that looked right: turmeric in the pastry to make it nice an yellow, and two scotch bonnets in the mixture, without any of this ‘remove the seeds’ nonsense.

I decided to half the pastry, as we only needed two each today, but as the local shop doesn’t do less than 500g of beef mince, I’m doing a full batch of filling, and freezing the leftovers for future patties (for when we have home made hot pepper sauce from the garden!).

So for half a batch of pastry, which the book says should make 12 mini patties, we did:

280g flour
110g lard
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp (double) tumeric — still not that coloured in flour
Up to 125ml iced water — I used 100ml in food processor

I started by mixing the dry ingrdients. Using just 1/2 tsp of turmeric didn’t give any colour to the flour, so I doubled to 1 tsp. It still didn’t have any colour, but I thought I couldn’t add any more.

I cut in the lard in the food processor then added the water: only 100ml was needed. And then the colour came through:

This went in the fridge while I made the filling.

2 onions (from the garden :)
3 escallion / scallion / spring onion (from the garden :)
2 scotch bonnet (not from the garden garden, as we only got habs, not scotch bonnets :)
500g lean beef steak mince
1.5 cups fine breadcumbs (sourdough breadcrumbs, made fine in the spice grinder :)
3/4 tsp dried thyme
3/4 tsp turmeric
Salt & pepper
4 garlic cloves (not in the original recipe: clearly an oversight :)
1 cup water

The onions & chullies get minced and mixed with the mince and fried up for 10 minutes until the mince is cooked. Then the water, breadcrumbs & spices get mixed in and simmered for 20 minutes until, quote, “wet, not dry nor runny”.

While that cools the pastry gets rolled out. According to the book this wants to be a bit thicker than pie dough: which makes sense. But then it goes on to say 3/8 inch. Which appears to be 1cm thick: that can’t be right. They must mean 3/16 inch… right?

Anyway we rolled out to a bit thicker than pie dough, and cut ourselves four circles, using a dessert dish to what we thought was normal pattie size: about 15cm diameter.

Following the instructions to fill to 1/4 inch form the edge and crimp with a fork gave this result:

We refined this to about 1.5 heaped dessert spoons of filling in the middle, with lots of space to the edge, and wetting the edge before crimping with a fork.