- Today we're shaking it up a little bit and making something savory.

We're making turkey pot pies.

Let's get started.

(gentle music) For our turkey pot pies, we are going to be putting them in individual little ramekins like this.

This is four inches across.

So in order to get our top all nicely even and ready for the top of our pie, we're using puff pasty, the puff pastry that I just purchased from the grocery store.

I didn't make this.

We can do that another time.

But today, here we have our puff pastry.

It's defrosted, and I put a little flour on the board, and now I'm gonna put just a little bit of flour on the top, not a lot, and we're gonna roll it out just to the point where it's combined.

We're really not gonna get a lot of movement from this puff pastry.

It's pretty much the size that we need it to be, but I just want to give it a roll or two and smooth it out.

So there we have that.

Now, these are four inches wide, so I have a four inch wide scallopy cutter, or you could use the plain if you so prefer.

We're going to cut four rounds out of this size of puff pastry.

So let's just place our cutter where we think it will fit best, and we want to leave enough puff pastry area here, because I'm also going to put a little decorative flower on the top.

But here we've got four, and I'm just pressing down.

I'm not doing anything fancy here or twisting.

I'm just pushing straight down.

We have our four cutouts.

Now, before I lift everything all up, I do want to do our little flower decorative edge.

So here you see I have a little cutter, and I love this because it punches out.

So it's easy, we can get our dough cut, and then get it out fairly easily.

Now, I do know from experience that this cutter sometimes is a little tricky, so for me, what I like to do for this is just kind of go underneath the puff pastry and make sure that I have it in the cutter itself.

Then all I do is lift it off, kind of remove the pastry from around the cutter, like this.

You see, I have it pretty perfectly in the cutter, and then all I need to do is, voila, we have a nice little flower there.

So I'm gonna do three more for all four of my pot pies.

And again, push it down in.

For whatever reason, I think this cutter just isn't as sharp maybe as it needs to be.

So I just give it a little help here.

We remove it from the pastry itself and there we have that one.

I need two more, so here's a good spot for one of them.

And again, just press as hard as you can press.

And so this one didn't quite come out the way I want, but do you know what?

We're gonna see what happens when we pull it out.

I don't like it, so we're gonna re-do it.

Hey, that stuff kind of happens.

Here we have a nice enough size for another cut.

Let's try it again (laughs).

And there we go.

This is going in nicely, this one.

There's three.

And now I'm looking for a nice space for my fourth one.

I think I'm gonna go right in the middle here of my four rounds.

I'm gonna move this guy and move this guy over here, get my fourth flower.

There we go, all nice.

And out it goes.

All right, so what we need to do with our rounds and our flowers is stick them back in the fridge for a while while we make our filling.

So I've got a parchment-covered pan here.

Let me just put it over to the side, get this stuff kind of out of the way so you can see.

And all I'm gonna do is place our rounds here on the pan, and then we're gonna put them in the freezer just to firm them up, or you can put them in the refrigerator while we make our filling.

And then right before we put them on top of the pot pie, we are also going to cut little holes.

We're just gonna use a little piping pastry tip, and I'm gonna cut holes in the pastry itself to give the pot pies some room to kind of breathe while it's baking, okay?

So here you have it, here's your rounds.

Onward to making the filling.

(gentle music continues) So now we're on to our turkey pot pie filling, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna melt four tablespoons of butter in a pan over medium heat.

We're gonna let that get fairly melty, and to that, then, we are going to add one medium chopped onion, four carrots that I chopped up and diced, and then three cloves of garlic that are also finely minced.

As my butter's melting, I'm just gonna go ahead and get my onions started.

We just want the onions and the carrots to get soft while we're doing this, so let me put those in for us here.

And then I'm also going to add the garlic.

And I'm gonna stir this to get everything well distributed, but I'm also going to turn the temperature down just a little bit because I don't want the onions to color.

I just want them to get nice and soft.

So we're going to let this go for about 10 minutes so they get really nice and soft.

And when we are ready, we'll then start to add the rest of our ingredients.

Our onions are now getting nice and translucent.

We've got some softening of our carrots, as well as our onions.

I can smell the garlic and the onions together.

It's fabulous.

And to this, we are adding a fourth of a cup to a third of a cup of just all purpose flour.

And then we're going to stir, stir, stir, as it's the flour that's gonna help us to get that nice, thick sauce.

We don't want the flour to burn, but we just want to cook it through so that we don't taste any of that flour.

We're gonna let this go for a few seconds here, get that cooked off.

Don't worry if it's looking kind of dry at this point.

That's exactly the way it's supposed to look.

And now to this mixture, we're adding two and a half cups of chicken stock.

So in it goes, and we're gonna stir that around.

I am also adding a fourth of a cup of sherry to give it a little extra wonderful flavor.

Stir that around.

And I am adding also a tablespoon of thyme that I've chopped up, because I just think that thyme adds just a wonderful flavor.

And then we're adding a teaspoon of salt and a half a teaspoon of pepper.

Get that all kind of stirred up in there.

And at some point, we're gonna stop and we're gonna taste for salt anyway, so if you think it needs a little bit more at some point during the cooking process, then that's the time to add.

But right now, we're just starting with the one teaspoon.

So we need to keep stirring this because we don't want anything to stick to the bottom, but the flour that we put in there is going to help to thicken the sauce.

We actually need to kind of bring it up to a boiling point, and then we're going to lower the temperature and just simmer for about, it takes about five to eight minutes, and you will feel it start to thicken under your spoon.

I also like to use any sort of wooden spoon or utensil that has kind of an angle to it so you can get in the corners of your pan.

You don't miss anything from the corners there.

All right, so I'm gonna continue to watch this and stir for a while.

(gentle music continues) So see how our sauce is thickening and it's really bubbling around.

It's really looking wonderful, it's smelling wonderful.

But at this point, I just want to taste for salt before I add my turkey, because I want to see.

Mm, perfect.

So at this point now, I'm going to add, this is four cups of cooked turkey that I diced up.

You could use chicken.

You could use whatever really protein that would be appropriate for this.

But we're making turkey pot pie, so this is turkey.

And I'm just kind of getting that all in to the sauce.

Get all those wonderful little turkey cubes covered in our sauce, and just kind of heat through the turkey.

And look at how nice and thick that is.

So at this point, I think we're ready.

We're gonna turn off the heat.

We're adding a half a cup of cream because what's not good with a little cream?

We're gonna stir that up, and then once that gets stirred in, we are adding today, we're adding peas, a cup of peas and a cup of corn, but you can really choose whatever veggies you prefer.

This is just what I have.

Peas are pretty standard, but corn can be controversial, I think, at times, but that's what I have, and that's what's going in, and it's gonna be absolutely delicious.

So we're just gonna stir this up, and we can let it sit and just kind of, the peas, the carrots, the corn, the turkey can all get to know each other a little bit while they're hanging out.

And we're gonna pull out our pot pie tops that we made out of the puff pastry and assemble our turkey pot pies.

(spoon banging) (gentle music continues) Our pot pie filling is all finished, and now we are ready to fill our ramekins with our filling.

So again, we're using four inch round ramekins here.

The recipe makes enough, probably for, you could probably get six of this size, but right now I'm only making four.

I'm gonna save the rest of the filling for something else later.

So we're just going to ladle our filling into our ramekins.

You don't want it to get to the tippy top, but I do like to fill them up as much as I possibly can here, and get some of that good sauce in there.

That's good, that's a good height.

I'm gonna fill my other three here.

Make sure I get all of the good turkey and veggies into my ramekins.

There we go.

(dishes clinking) If you guys could smell this, it really just smells absolutely fabulous.

You can smell the sherry, you can smell the thyme.

Mm, it is a good combination of flavors.

That one's a little high, but we'll take a risk here.

The one thing you absolutely don't want to do is put it to the very, very top, brimming over, because then you're gonna lose all of your filling when you put it in the oven.

So now I'm just gonna move this aside because I want to show you guys.

Here is, let's get that out of the way a bit.

And here are our filled ramekins.

Now remember we cut out our puff pastry into rounds earlier.

So here they are.

I just took that piping tip that I showed you before and made a little hole in the center.

That just gives the filling a spot that, if it's gonna overfill while it's baking, then it has some place to go.

I almost forgot, but I want to just take a little bit, this is just one beaten egg, and I want to take my pastry brush, and I'm using it kind of as a glue to keep the puff pastry on my little ramekins.

So I'm just going around the edges first of the ramekins before I put my puff pastry rounds on.

So let's do our final ramekin with our egg wash.

Okay, so we have all of our ramekins, kind of the glue is in place.

We're gonna take our puff pastry rounds that I took our little tip and made a circle in the middle, and all I'm gonna do is just place a round on top and just press it in place.

So we let the egg wash kind of glue, do its thing.

I'm gonna do this to all of our rounds.

Just press, press gently.

I don't want to lose my little scallopy edge.

I think that just makes a little pretty touch to our finished product again.

And see, this is why you wouldn't really want it to be overfilling.

It's not like an apple pie where we're scooping everything and making this nice little kind of mountain of filling.

So here we are with our last one.

Now I'm gonna take this egg wash and just go over the top of our puff pastry.

This will serve as not only a glue for our little flowers that we're going to put on next, but it also makes the top of the puff pastry nice and brown and gives it just a beautiful golden color, which is also what we're going for.

So I'm just going to put this on all of our rounds.

And don't worry if you miss a spot at this point because when we put our flowers on, we're gonna go over just one more time.

So as you're preparing these, you should be preheating your oven.

Preheat to 425, and we're gonna then let these bake, once we're finished, for 25 minutes until they're nice and golden brown.

The other thing here that you can maybe see is I put a piece of aluminum foil on the tray so that way, if the pies do kind of bubble over, it makes clean up a whole lot easier.

So now I'm just taking my little flower that we cut out and putting it smack dab in the middle there of our pot pie.

I also put a hole in our little flower so that we're not covering up the hole that we made in our round.

That would kind of defeat the purpose.

But as you see, we're just gently placing these guys.

Some of the petals, you know, you kind of have to rearrange maybe a little bit if you so desire.

But I just think that putting this little flower on gives it such a cool and easy presentation when you're all done.

So here, now we take our egg wash, and with one more swipe, we just cover up our flower, and flower as in F-L-O-W-E-R, not F-L-O-U-R. And last one.

And now we are ready to put these in the oven.

(gentle music continues) So now our turkey pot pies are out of the oven and ready for tasting.

Look at how wonderful that flower looks.

You can kind of hear the crunch of the puff pastry as I'm digging down in there.

I'm trying not to make too much of a mess, but there, oh there you can see the filling.

So let me grab some so I can taste it maybe, maybe.

Yes, all right.

Oh goodness, you get that crunchy butteriness of the puff pastry, you get the creaminess of the filling.

I had some turkey in there and some thyme.

It is absolutely delicious.

It's a wonderful recipe.

I hope you guys try it.

Enjoy!

(gentle music continues)