Thanks,
bmudd14474
, and the judges and to the forum for hosting.
Congratulations
civilsmoker
!
Admittedly, our entry got way out of hand. We knew the competition would be fierce. We knew
civilsmoker
was probably going to enter... We knew we needed something out of the ordinary to make an impression.
My wife, the other half of team Smoke-Chem, likes to make empanadas. Her ancestors were Welsh, so she occasionally makes Cornish Pastys. When we read the rules, she mused that a lot of cultures have a signature hand pie. So we decided to make 3 or 4 different ones, to showcase on a plate. But we soon found recipes from dozens of countries, and couldn't decide...so the number crept up to 5, 6... Maybe we could fit them on a platter. Then I foolishly suggested that we could have pies from all six continents! (Couldn't find one from Antarctica). We didn't want to drop any, so the number of pies increased to 9, hence the photo on our big cutting board.
The descriptions with the entry tell what went into each pie, though I didn't call out the particular spices. The Natchitoches and Empanada pies used commercial frozen empanada wrappers for the shell. The Australian meat pie used commercial frozen pie crust. The Samosa used puff pastry. The Piroshki used frozen roll dough. All of the rest used different homemade doughs for the wrappers. We did make some effort to include pies with shapes other than the classic empanada half-circle. The country flags and the shot glasses each with a traditional sauce to accompany each pie, are there partly to add some color to the arrangement. Photography was with an old iPhone 12 and room lighting, though I do take a bunch of photos and sort through to find the one I like best.
It took the better part of a day driving around to find all of the ingredients, since a few were exotic by the standards of the Idaho panhandle. Then we spent two solid days making hand pies and sauces--108 hand pies in total! We'll be enjoying hand pies from the freezer for many months to come.
congrats again!
