barbecued beef potpie with a chipotle masa crust

I had a day off yesterday, so I decided to try a recipe that took a little more time than normal weekday food. I chose the Barbecued Beef Potpie with a Chipotle Masa Crust from the Red Sage cookbook. It's a cookbook I borrowed a while ago, and it has some great recipes. This one looked like fun. Kind of a challenge for me because I've never made a pot pie, and I'm not so good with baking-type things. But we love chipotle and I've been craving something tamale-like. So I got my potpie on. Here's the recipe:

Barbecued Beef Potpie with a chipotle masa crust

Serves 4

Barbecued Beef
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 ¼ pounds lean beef chuck, cut into 1-inch cubes
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
½ cup red wine
1 cup premium-quality barbecue sauce
1 ½ teaspoons pureed chipotles in adobo
2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme
½ cup diced celery
½ cup diced white onion
½ cup diced carrots
1 teaspoon unsalted butter
2 plum tomatoes, blackened and cut into a ½ inch dice
2 small new potatoes, scrubbed and cut into ½ inch dice
16 pearl onions, peeled
1 teaspoon brown mustard

Chipotle Masa Crust
1 2/3 cups masa harina
½ teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
¼ cup barbecue sauce
¼ cup pureed chipotles in adobo
1 or 2 tablespoons water, as needed
1 large egg, lightly beaten with 2 tablespoons water

To prepare the beef: Preheat oven to 350. Heat the olive oil in a heavy casserole to medium-high heat. Sear the meat well on all sides and season with salt and pepper. Remove the meat from the casserole and set aside. Pour most of the fat out of the pot. Deglaze the pot with the vinegar, then add the wine, barbecue sauce and pureed chipotles. Bring the sauce to a simmer and stir in the meat and thyme. Cover the casserole and braise for 45 minutes in the oven.

Saute the celery, onion, and carrots in butter in a saute pan over medium-low heat for 5 to 8 minutes, or until slightly softened. Stir the vegetables into the casserole, add the tomato and cook for 1 hour more, or until beef is tender but not falling apart. Stir in the potatoes and pearl onions during the last 10 minutes of cooking. Stir in the mustard at the end and adjust the seasonings to your taste. Set aside to cool. This filling may be made up to 2 days in advance.

To prepare the crust:In the bowl of a heavy-duty mixer with a paddle attachment or food processor, combine masa, baking powder, salt and sugar. Add the butter and mix for 2 to 3 minutes, or until well blended. Add the barbecue sauce and pureed chipotles. Beat for 10 to 15 minutes if using a mixer or process 6 to 8 minutes. The dough should be fluffy and light. Add water as needed. The crust can be prepared to this point up to 24 hours in advance.

To assemble pot pie: Preheat oven to 325. Transfer the meat mixture to 4 individual baking dishes or to a 1-quart baking dish. Roll out the dough ¼ inch thick to the shape or shapes of the baking dishes and place on top. Brush the surface with the lightly beaten egg. Cut vents in the crust. Bake for 30 to 45 minutes, or until the top is well browned and the filling is bubbly.

Here's my ball o' crust:


It was pretty crumbly, hence the not-so-perfect finished product:

But it sure was tasty.

I used Ravenswood Ragin' Raven Zinfandel BBQ sauce. This is a great sauce. It's got a lot of heat. Also, for the red wine, I used Ravenswood Zinfandel. It was on sale, as was the sauce, and of course they are meant to be used together!



I skipped the pearl onions because the quality didn't live up to the price-tag, and I used roughly diced vidalia onion instead. I also used dried thyme instead of fresh, because I had it on hand. Considering the stuff cooked for more than 2 1/2 hours, I don't think it made too much of a difference. Then end result was really worth all the slow-cooking. The beef was flavorful and the sauce and filling were very bold and spicy. The crust had that distinctive masa corn flavor, which paired well with the barbecue filling. The crust has quite a kick to it, too. Although there was a fair amount of time involved, as the recipe points out, the components can all be made ahead of time. Even so, it's a fun vacation day or weekend dish.

kansas city here i come!

Well, there I went, anyway. Last weekend my sweetie and I headed out there to visit his sister and her hubby, and to be total gluttons for the weekend.

Saturday, we went to Arthur Bryant’s for lunch. A small, unassuming old place, packed with people and smelling like smoke. It's one of the most famous BBQ places in the country. We'd seen it featured on several television shows, and Jack has a friend from KC who always goes there when he visits home. So it was tops on our list of places to go. And it was a good choice. The 4 of us split two beef sandwiches, an order of fries and a pint of beans. It was very yummy. Different than the sauce I'm used to here in St. Louis, more vinagary and thin. Really good. Sopped it up with my thick slice of bread.

Saturday evening, after visiting the Nelson-Atkins art museum and cruising around downtown in the Plaza and Westport areas, we went home with take-out from Oklahoma Joes BBQ. Being big food network nerds, we saw this place on tv, too, and had to have it. It's a BBQ place located in a gas station! We got a pound of beef and a half pund of pulled pork, a couple bottles of sauce and a pint of beans. Their sauce was more like what I'm used to, but I liked it, too. And Pulled pork, oh my, I adore pulled pork. I liked their beans a little more than Arthur Bryant’s. AB’s did have big pieces of burnt ends in them, though. Oklahoma Joe's beans had 3 different kinds of beans, and some small meat pieces and onions and a tomato-ier sauce. I ate lots of them.

That evening, after a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit DVD edition, we went o Sheridans for late night frozen custard. Oh my bob, was it good! I know I come from the land where Ted Drewes reighns supreme, but I really enjoyed my caramel pretzel concrete more than anything I’ve had at Ted’s. Shocking, I know. What’s more shocking? I found out just yesterday that there is a Seridan’s in town!! This could be trouble.

Sunday we had dinner at a Mongolian BBQ place called Ghengis Khan. I really like the concept of Mongolian BBQ. A buffet of raw goods…veggies, meats, sauces, seasoning, that you pick out yourself. Once your bowl is full with everything you want, you take it over to the guys at eh big hot round platform, where the dump it and cook it, stirring it around with two big wooden sticks. The buffet at Ghengis khan had a bunch of seafood, so I skipped the typical chicken and beef and got myself stuffed on scallops, squid, mahi mahi and shrimp. My first bowl was just a simple mixture of edamame and some other greens, seafood, soy sauce, ginger, garlic and sesame oil. While waiting for my first batch to get cooked, I grabbed some pork satays from the little appetizer bar. One of the sauces for dipping was a peanut curry sauce. I was inspired! For my second plate, I added lots of fresh cilantro, some more seafood, a couple kinds of greens, tofu, garlic, ginger, then, here’s the good part, crushed peanuts & lots of curry powder. What a great meal! It’s hard not to eat too much. So I ate too much. Like it was hard to walk afterwards :)

After that, we went to Cold Stone Creamery. We got it to go, because none of us could fit another moresel of anything into our stuffed bellies. I got the German chocolate cake specialty. The girl messed it up a little and added chocolate chips and forgot the nuts. But basically it was a brownie, some caramel and coconut in the chocolate ice cream, It was so so so so delicious!! It was my second time having Cold Stone. I had it a couple weeks ago when a gal from work and I decided to do an “Ice Cream for Lunch Day.” That time, I cot French vanilla with cake and chocolate and graham cracker crust, and it was a little too sweet. But the germanchocolatecake (however the heck they spell it…) was pure heaven.

Oh, I forgot, On Saturday afternoon we stopped by at this place called The Red X on Riverside. It’s this crazy big place with…well, just about everything. They have groceries (we needed Texas toast for our Oklahoma Joe’s), a 99cent section, antiques, Farm gear, etc. But the best part (besides the collection of antique glass eyes and false teeth…eeeek) was the wine section! Believe it or not the selection was really big, and well-priced. And the guy working seemed to really know his stuff. He recommended Syrah to go with our bbq dinner. We ended up with Guenoc Petit Syrah. It was very good wine, and really went well with our pulled pork and beans.

A couple more neat BBQ links... Next time we visit KC, there’s some other places we want to try for BBQ, such as LC’s and Gates. This site has tons of reviews of KC BBQplaces. What about outside KC? This site is all about BBQ styles around the world, with the US broken up. Very interesting.