Happy New Year! As a January baby, there is nothing that makes less sense to me than denying ourselves the things we love in one of the coldest, darkest months of the year. I feel unduly sad when people brand this month the worst of the year, when it offers little materially different from December. If only we’d see it in a new light!
With that in mind, I’m loosely terming this Pie Month. In this, my first newsletter of the year, I’m sharing a good-time recipe that’s as hearty as you can get. It’s Buffalo Chicken Pie. In The Interview, I’m speaking to my good friend Lolly Adefope who reveals which fast food joint she thinks makes the best chips, and the most recent food picture on her camera roll.
This January, do not hold back in the kitchen. Do not go gentle into that New Year.
This Buffalo Chicken Pie is inspired by the epic rendition of this dish Charles and I ate at Falco Bakery on Smith St, Melbourne, while on our recent holiday. I wrote to the team at Falco hoping they’d share the recipe with me but was fairly ignored, so I turned my mind to creating as close a tribute as I could in my own kitchen. I am so happy with it I could cry! It’s spicy, creamy and vinegary and everything I want in a chicken pie. It doesn’t rely on a flour-heavy white sauce either, which I love. Just a touch of corn flour stops the vinegar and hot sauce from splitting the cream. I think cauliflower would make a great substitute for chicken if you wanted to make the dish vegetarian.
At Falco, these are individual pies, but I’ve made this one family-sized because I don’t own four little pie dishes. If you do, the quantities will work the same - you will just need to cook the pies for about 10 minutes less time.
Only a few weeks ago* I put two-and-two-together and realised that Buffalo Chicken in fact hails from the Industrial city of Buffalo, and has nothing to do with the animal itself. Maybe this was common knowledge - after all, how could a bovine animal have anything to do with a poultry preparation? - but I felt thrilled to work this out. I recommend listening to this achingly sad song while cooking the pie, which makes reference to the city. Buffalo Chicken now joins my favourite-foods-named-after-cities list.
*If I were insufferable I might have claimed to have been ‘today year’s old’ here, but this is the latest piece of internet speak to drive me around the bend, so of course I didn’t.
Without further ado…
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