Beef and Ale Pie

This is a classic recipe – beef and ale are a perfect combination, and make for a wonderfully rich and delicious pie filling. We’re using shin of beef here, which can be a bit tough if you don’t cook it nice and slowly, but it’s absolutely packed with flavour. We had no worries about cooking it too fast as we stewed it over a whole weekend – about 12 hours altogether – in our slow cooker, but you don’t have to be that leisurely! It’s served with some deliciously mustardy leeks and lovely kale.

Ingredients for 2 people:

• 250 g shin of beef (or any other diced cut of beef)
• 500 ml dark ale
• 100 ml beef stock (use a whole stock cube)
• 1 tbsp flour
• 5 pickling onions
• 2 large carrots
• 2 sticks celery
• 2 small turnips
• 3-4 new potatoes/1 large potato
• Pinch Sea Salt
• 1/2 tsp Black peppercorns
• 1 tsp dried rosemary
• 2 bay leaves
• 250 g puff pastry (we used shop-bought pastry that we keep in the freezer)
• 1 large leek, finely sliced
• 1 tsp butter
• 1 tsp mustard
• 100 g shredded kale
• Seasoning

This has to be one of the easiest recipes ever – to get the filling going, cover the beef in the flour, and then put all the ingredients up to the bay leaves into a large casserole dish (or better yet, a slow cooker), bring to the boil and then turn down to a very low heat for at least 3 hours – the longer the better! Stir it occasionally and make sure that it doesn’t reduce too much – you want it to be a silky consistency.

Once the filling is cooked, you can optionally take out the meat and pull it apart, to ensure it is spread evenly throughout the pie.

Roll out your pastry so that it will cover your pie dish – it should be about 1 cm thick. Brush around the edge of your pie dish with a bit of beaten egg to ensure the pastry sticks. Put your filling in the dish and lay the pastry over the top, trimming any excess and pressing around the edges with a fork to make sure it sticks down. Brush the pastry with egg for a nice golden colour – we mixed our egg wash with a bit of mustard, which was amazing! Make a hole in the middle of the pastry with a knife to let any steam out. Put this in the oven for about 20 minutes at about 180 ºC, or until the pastry is golden-brown.

To cook the leeks, melt the butter in a saucepan and add the leeks. Once this has started to sweat down, add the mustard and continue to cook until they’re completely softened. Braise the kale along with a bit of seasoning.

If you’ve timed it right, everything should come together perfectly! Serve with a pint of good ale.