Vegan pastry and tofu pies experiments

Blame the Grand Final for all the pastry in my kitchen recently.  When I decided to make vegan party pies, I had to practice making pastry.  It is not my strong point.  I remembered the tofu pies from the uni food co-op that I loved.  I decided to experiment with some tofu filling.

I mixed the vegies.  Beautiful colours!  Can you spot some of my stripey beetroot?  I added tofu and lots of seasoning.  I wanted the colours to shine through.  They faded.

The mixture reminded me of chicken.  In looks, not tastes.  It was ok.  The seasoning wasn't quite right.  Maybe a bit less tomato paste and a bit more soy sauce was needed.  I have since sampled the food co-op pies again and found they have tofu, tempeh, broccoli and carrot and far less seasoning.  More experiments ahead!  I have given a rough guide to what I did below to give me ideas for next time.

The crusty hot water pastry worked well.  It has never let me down.  Not even when I used vegan margarine instead of butter.  Wonder how it would work with gf flour?  I used my muffin cups for making the pies.  I found a flour tub lid and a glass to cut out the bottoms and tops of the pies. 

When I make pies, like dumplings, I always have leftover filling.  My solution is to serve it with some rice on the side with the pie.  This is what you see above.  It is a good way to minimise the pastry in the meal.  The pies were a good size for dinner.  Too big for party pies.  You can see below that I had to mark the one with P where I experimented with the party pie filling.

My proudest moment was using up the leftover scraps of pastry.  My mum used to make jam tarts with her leftover pastry.  So that is what I did!  I just spooned a bit of pastry into the last couple of muffin cups and baked them with the filled pies.  The tofu filling was work in progress.  The jam tarts were a hit!

Previously on Green Gourmet Giraffe
This time last year: GYO Tahini Caulflower and City Sights
This time two years ago: Beauty and the Beast for World Bread Day
This time three years ago: Broccoli Soup from AWW

Tofu pie filling - work in progress

1 tbsp olive oil
2 leeks chopped
1 carrot, grated
1 beetroot, grated
kernels of 1 corn cob
2 large button mushrooms, chopped
350-500g firm tofu, crumbled
1 tbsp tahini
2 tbsp tomato paste
1/2 cup white wine
1-2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp worcestershire sauce
shake of smoked paprika
lots of freshly ground black pepper

Fry the vegies in the oil (I add more as I chop the vegies) until nicely wilted.  Add tofu and remaining ingredients.  Cook until the flavours come together.  I didn't note times but these are far easier to work out than flavours.

I did note that I cooked the mixture in a batch of crusty hot water pastry with some soy milk to baste them.  I baked them at 200 C for 10 minutes and 180 C for 30 minutes.  Or you could just serve with rice, a la tofu scramble.

On the Stereo:
Transparency: Frank Zappa

This post is part of Vegan Month of Food October 2011.  Go to my Vegan MoFo list for more Vegan MoFo posts.