When talking about mince pies, or mincemeat pies, you can’t … oh I’m just going to get it out here in the beginning, mince words. There’s suet in those gorgeous buttery crusted, sweet pies.
What’s suet? It’s essentially the hard fat (beef or mutton) around the loins and kidneys. It’s used to make tallow and pastries, especially mince pies and Christmas puddings. Sounds awful. But it’s really not.
People, hardcore people, make their own mince filling from fruits and raisins and brandy and suet (and occasionally meat), and then serve them in gorgeous pies or mini-pies around the holidays.
Other people (see: me) buy versions from Mr.Kipling or Hoppers (two of the only three I’ve seen Stateside). My absolute favorite, though:
Walker’s Luxury Mince Pies.
And we just finished the last of them.
This means that this week, THIS WEEK, I need to do what I set out to do when I stalked Dai Due’s booth at the Austin Farmer’s Market a few weeks ago and make a ton of them myself.
Dai Due doesn’t play around with their Mincemeat. Read their description:
“We begin preparing our Traditional Mincemeat in May, when the apricots first show at the markets. These are dried, along with Rain Lily Farm sugar figs and tiny, sour plums. When Fall rolls around, hundreds of pounds of Lightsey Farm Keffir pears and Apple Country Granny Smiths are diced and very slowly baked with sugar, spices and a little buttery Richardson Farm beef suet. As the temperatures finally drop a bit more, the final ingredients in a 6 month recipe present themselves: the first oranges and grapefruits are candied and juiced, and sweet new-crop pecans are roasted and added to the mix and baked even further. This syrupy compote is then fortified and preserved with copious amounts of brandy. This mincemeat is redolent of pears, apples, brandy and spice, rich depth from the dried fruits and suet, slightly bitter notes from the grapefruit, sweet and sour flavors from the orange and savory crunch from the pecans.”
I mean, for REAL. If your mouth isn’t watering right now, you’re dead to me.
The reason I haven’t made pies from the two GIANT quarts I bought from them is because I’m stuck on the crusts. (That, and the boxed Walker’s pies are SO GOOD.) I don’t know how to shape them, cut them and/or bake them. There’s a better than not chance I’m going to go with roll-and-go crust, but even then, how big is too big? Do I stick them in my cupcake tins?
I’m guessing yes and that I’m going to do some trial runs until I figure it out and eat so much mince that I turn into a giant bottle of brandy. Also, I’ll drink heavily whilst doing all of it it’ll just be fun either way. Y/Y?
If it turns out to be a giant disaster, that will be FINE because I’m going to England in T-11 days now, when on Christmas Eve, we’ll eat 234895793485798 of them at midnight mass and I’ll wonder why I felt the need to even try in the first place.
ELEVEN DAYS. I need to make mince pies, Mexican Wedding cookies and butter cookies in the next eleven days.
Stay tuned.
