There are two kinds of people in this world: people who make pastry from scratch, and people who look at the perfectly good frozen puff pastry in the grocery store and think:
“Technology has already solved this problem.”
World HQ belongs firmly to the second group.
This is a practical chicken pot pie with a creamy filling, plenty of vegetables and a golden pastry top. It also happens to be an excellent destination for leftover roast chicken.
⏱️ Recipe Information
Servings: 6
Preparation Time: 20 minutes
Cooking Time: 10–15 minutes (preparing the filling)
Baking Time: 25–30 minutes
Resting Time: 10 minutes
Total Time: 65–75 minutes
The cooking time includes sautéing the vegetables and preparing the creamy chicken filling, using chicken that's already cooked. The baking time allows the puff pastry to become golden and flaky while the filling heats through.
The recipe should provide 6 satisfying portions, especially when served with a simple garden salad.
Ingredients
- 3 tbsp butter
- 1 medium onion, diced
- 2 carrots, peeled and diced
- 2 celery stalks, diced
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- ⅓ cup all-purpose flour
- 2 cups chicken broth
- 1 cup milk
- 3 cups cooked chicken, chopped or shredded
- 1 cup frozen peas
- 1 tsp dried thyme
- ½ tsp poultry seasoning
- ½ tsp black pepper
- Salt to taste
- 1 sheet frozen puff pastry, thawed
- 1 egg beaten with 1 tbsp water, optional
Make the Filling
Heat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Melt the butter in a large skillet or saucepan over medium heat.
Add the onion, carrots and celery and cook for about 6–8 minutes, until they begin to soften.
Add the garlic and cook for another minute.
Sprinkle the flour over the vegetables and stir continuously for about 1 minute.
Slowly add the chicken broth, stirring as you go, followed by the milk.
Add the thyme, poultry seasoning and black pepper.
Let everything simmer gently for 3–5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens.
Stir in the chicken and frozen peas.
Taste before adding salt, particularly if your chicken broth is already salty.
Assemble the Pie
Pour the filling into a roughly 9-inch pie plate or 2-quart baking dish.
Lay the thawed puff pastry over the top.
Trim any enormous overhang, then gently press the pastry around the edge of the dish.
Cut 3 or 4 small slits in the top so steam can escape.
If you're feeling unusually ambitious, brush the pastry with the beaten egg mixture.
This produces a beautiful shiny golden crust and may cause people to believe you knew what you were doing all along.
Baking
Bake for 25–30 minutes, until the pastry is puffed and golden and the filling is bubbling around the edges.
If the pastry is browning too quickly, loosely cover the top with foil.
Let the pot pie rest for about 10 minutes before serving.
This is not merely a suggestion.
The contents have recently been bubbling at approximately the temperature of the Earth's mantle.
🌙 Moonboot Modification: Refrigerator Management
Pot pie is exceptionally good at disposing of respectable leftovers.
Add cooked corn, green beans, mushrooms or leftover roasted vegetables.
Leftover turkey works perfectly instead of chicken.
If you've somehow accumulated leftover gravy, stir some into the filling and reduce the amount of broth slightly.
Nobody needs to know Sunday's supper began as a refrigerator clearance operation.
🥔 The Potato Question
You can add about 1 cup of diced cooked potato to the filling.
Cooked is important.
Putting large chunks of raw potato into the filling and hoping the oven sorts things out is less a cooking technique and more an expression of optimism.
🌙 Moonboot Modification: Individual Pot Pies
Divide the filling among oven-safe ramekins and top each with its own piece of puff pastry.
Suddenly you've gone from making ordinary chicken pot pie to serving individual chicken pot pies, which sounds approximately 40% more expensive.
The ingredients remain suspiciously unchanged.
From the Captain's Log
Chicken pot pie is basically stew wearing a pastry hat.
And yet somehow the pastry changes everything.
Put chicken stew in a bowl and you've made supper.
Put puff pastry over it and bring the bubbling dish to the table and somebody says:
“Ohhh, you made pot pie!”
Captain Moonboot has learned an important culinary lesson from this.
Presentation is apparently just lying with pastry. 😁🥧
🚨 WORLD HQ FILING NOTICE: Recipe #12 adds another proper comfort-food/main-course dish to Making Salsa: Recipes & Other Bad Decisions from Captain Moonboot while avoiding the territory already occupied by salsa, potato boats, French toast, soup, the Breakfast Melt, maple-mustard chicken, apple crisp, chili, spinach dip and Salisbury steak.