Recipe: Evan Kleiman's Chicken Pot Pie With Duck-Butter Dough

Remember when I took that pie making class with Evan Kleiman and Sherry Yard as a fundraiser for KCRW? Well, here's Evan's amazing chicken pot pie recipe. I get hungry thinking about this pie!

The first part is, of course, the pie dough. Evan uses part butter and part duck fat for her chicken pot pie dough. Love ...

Evan Kleiman's Duck-Butter Dough
Ingredients:
12 oz flour
pinch of salt
5 oz high fat butter (Plugra, Kerrygold) cut into 5 pieces, chilled
3 oz rendered duck fat, pulled into 3 pieces, chilled
4 to 5 oz ice cold water

Directions:
Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Toss the butter and duck fat lumps around until they are coated with flour. Use a pastry cutter or your fingers to mix the fats and flour together until you have a mixture with uneven crumbles, some as big as almonds and some as small as peas.

Add the water a tablespoon at a time, fluffing up the mixture after each addition with a fork. Once you can create a clump by squeezing the dough in your fist it has enough water. Don't worry if it's a little shaggy, as long as it sticks together.

Divide the dough in half and form into flat discs.
Dump the crumbly mixture onto your work surface and bring the mass together by first pushing it away from you with the heel of your hand then gathering it up with a bench scraper. Repeat if necessary. Here's a video of Evan's instructions on rolling the dough:

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Learning Pie Making with Sherry Yard and Evan Kleiman

Evan Kleiman started "Pie a Day" on the KCRW Good Food blog a few years ago by making a pie a day for 100 days. That took off and culminated in an annual Pie Contest where home cooks compete. Sherry Yard is one of the best pastry chefs in LA. She's put in years at Spago but is now set to open her own bakery in Culver City. The two came together to give a pie making class at Culver City's New School of Cooking recently to raise funds for KCRW.

To be precise, they're raising funds for the 5th Annual Good Food Pie Contest, which will take place on Saturday, September 7 from 2-4pm at LACMA. If you want to enter, you can sign up before September 1 on the website, and the fee is $10 per entry! There's also a Kids and Vegan category.

I don't know a thing about making pie, but I can tell you what tips I learnt from the pie class! First off, the set up is pretty nice. A glass of sparkling wine greeted us as we were seated at the tables. There's a full table setting because we're not just watching a cooking demo, but will soon be eating three delicious pies while drinking more wine!

The pie class was completely sold out, so it was a full house, but most can see what they're doing pretty clearly on the overhead mirror.

First up is Evan Kleiman making her chicken pot pie (I will post the recipe tomorrow!)

So Evan uses part butter and part duck fat for her pie dough, genius! She passed it around so we can smell it.

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