egg pie without white sauce
Mar. 14th, 2007 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleI learned to make a basic white sauce when I was 8 or 9. For many years, it was a very useful thing to know. A second-order effect of not eating dairy products is that I no longer know how to make a white sauce. I tried replacing the butter with non-dairy margarine (which is astonishingly rare--most margarine seems to have some dairy in it. Why do people eat margarine in the first place?) and using soymilk, and wondering why I bothered. With olive oil and mushroom stock, it tastes like something, but it doesn't thicken anything like a white sauce. With olive oil and chicken stock, it thickens gelatinously...which is different.
There is a recipe in _The Enchanted Broccoli Forest_ that has been catching my eye for weeks. It's called "Deviled Egg Pie," and it's based on a mashed potato crust. I like the idea of pies that don't use real piecrust, because I don't actually like real piecrust (that flaky pastry thing with shortening.) So I mashed 2 potatoes with minced onion and oil and pepper, pressed it into a pan and baked it. Then boiled eggs, not hard-boiled, just boiled enough to peel and slice. The recipe called for making a thick white sauce with flour and butter and milk, horseradish and mustard and dill, and pouring it over the sliced eggs in the crust. Then bake again to set. So I wanted my stand-in white sauce to thicken, as well as taste good. As Cattitude suggested, I used V8 instead of soymilk to replace the milk. Because I was uncertain about it thickening, I increased the flour from 3 tablespoons to 4, for what was supposed to be a cup of liquid. It ended up thickening like crazy. I had to add more liquid to get a sauce liquid enough to pour, using almost 2 cups of juice and more horseradish and mustard to taste. I think it's because V8 has so much vegetable pulp (it's mostly tomato juice and carrot juice.) The larger volume of sauce turned out to be the right amount for the 9" pie plate I was using, and the pie set beautifully. It tasted good, and the cold leftovers were good for 3 days.
I think the sauce, and the pie, are worth making again. But as a white sauce, it probably counts as a failure, as it came out bright reddish-orange.
There is a recipe in _The Enchanted Broccoli Forest_ that has been catching my eye for weeks. It's called "Deviled Egg Pie," and it's based on a mashed potato crust. I like the idea of pies that don't use real piecrust, because I don't actually like real piecrust (that flaky pastry thing with shortening.) So I mashed 2 potatoes with minced onion and oil and pepper, pressed it into a pan and baked it. Then boiled eggs, not hard-boiled, just boiled enough to peel and slice. The recipe called for making a thick white sauce with flour and butter and milk, horseradish and mustard and dill, and pouring it over the sliced eggs in the crust. Then bake again to set. So I wanted my stand-in white sauce to thicken, as well as taste good. As Cattitude suggested, I used V8 instead of soymilk to replace the milk. Because I was uncertain about it thickening, I increased the flour from 3 tablespoons to 4, for what was supposed to be a cup of liquid. It ended up thickening like crazy. I had to add more liquid to get a sauce liquid enough to pour, using almost 2 cups of juice and more horseradish and mustard to taste. I think it's because V8 has so much vegetable pulp (it's mostly tomato juice and carrot juice.) The larger volume of sauce turned out to be the right amount for the 9" pie plate I was using, and the pie set beautifully. It tasted good, and the cold leftovers were good for 3 days.
I think the sauce, and the pie, are worth making again. But as a white sauce, it probably counts as a failure, as it came out bright reddish-orange.
