Tarragon pie

The introduction

Hello everyone, I hope, that you are all doing just fine!

In this article I want to tell you about the tarragon pie and how to prepare it.

Well, I know this tarragon pie from my childhood, when my grandmother used to bake them for us, however, I remember, that I didn’t really like those things comparing to my brother, who just loved eating them and, I guess, that’s why my grandmother always had them when we were visiting her back in those days, though she doesn’t really love cooking.

To tell you the truth, I haven’t seen that kind of tarragon pies anywhere in the bakeries and places like that, where they have so many things, including khachapuri and lobiani and beef pie and things like that. I remembered the tarragon pie now, because my father bought some pie the other day, which he thought that it was a tarragon pie, however, it was not. It was a spinach pie and that’s why it resembled the tarragon pie, because both of them are green and when you see the green colour in some baked dough, you think of that tarragon pie, I guess, because, usually you won’t meet some spinach pies in the bakeries that often, either.

I must tell you, that the tarragon pie is not like any other pies. It has a different taste _ a taste of tarragon, which gives it a special taste, which some people don’t like, if you want to know the truth. However, many people like it, because they are reminded of their childhood with the tarragon pies, I guess, so that when they see something like that in the supermarkets, they want to buy them and taste them, and, though they might not be the same, as their mothers or grandmothers used to prepare, they still eat those pies.

So, anyways, let me tell you about the recipe for those tarragon pies.

Ingredients:

• For the dough:
• All-purpose flour, 300 grams
• Milk, 200 ml
• Active dry yeast, 1 teaspoon
• Egg, 1 medium
• Unsalted butter, 60 grams
• Salt, 1 teaspoon
• Sugar, ½ teaspoon
• For the filling:
• Tarragon, 100 grams
• Green onion, 10 grams
• Salt to taste
• Pepper to taste
• Hard-boiled egg, 1 medium (optional)
• Cooked rice, 1 cup (optional)
• 1 egg yolk to spread on the top of the dough

Preparation process

1. Well, first of all we start with the preparation of the dough. It’s not that hard to prepare the dough, you know.  you should shred the butter on a shredder and that means, that the butter should be cold and like it should be in the fridge just until you need it to be shredded.
2. After that, you should add the flour to the shredded butter and mix them well together with your hands or with a spoon. However, I must tell you, that mixing them together with your hands is easier and better, than having a spoon in you hand and mixing them like that.
3. Then, you add the salt and yeast and sugar and an egg and the cold milk and then you mix them together as well. To tell you the truth, I prefer mixing those things with a mixer or in my chopper-blender, which is a great thing for those kinds of things. But in this case, the ingredients are a lot comparing to the capacity of my chopper-blender, so that I would prefer mixing them in my standing mixer, which would be easier, than having them mixed together with my hands. And, besides, you will get all dirty while mixing them with your hands, which I don’t really love and I don’t think, that anyone loves that.
4. So, after you have mixed everything well together, then you should put the dough aside for an hour or so, so that the dough will get doubled in size. It should be in a warm place and people usually have the bowl wrapped into some towels or things like that and then they put it beside the heater or someplace warm. But if you don’t want to prepare the pie at that very moment or whatever, you can have the dough put inside the fridge and leave it there even for a night.
5. In the meantime, you can wash the tarragon and have it dried on a towel or something. Then you should separate the leaves from those hard sticks.
6. You should also have the onions peeled and washed and chopped into very small pieces.
7. You can also have some eggs boiled and chopped if you want to have them into your pie and, well , my grandmother usually had the hard-boiled egg pieces into her tarragon pie.
8. If you love having some cooked rice in your pie, then you can also have it in this tarragon pie and, well, usually the rice makes the fillings be plenty and it makes them taste pretty good.
9. Then, you should add the salt and pepper for taste to the filling and it’s done!
10. So, once the filling is ready, you can take the dough and roll it out. You can have some pieces of the dough taken and rolled out and then add the filling and then seal them and turn them upside down and roll them out a little bit. You can even have some shapes for the tarragon pie.
11. Personally, I prefer having the tarragon leaves chopped or something like that, because I don’t really like when they are so long in the pie, however, most people just put them like that into the dough, because they like it that way.
12. Well, at the end, you can have an egg yolk spread on top of the dough, so that when it is baked , it will have a golden-brown colour on top, which gives the dishes even more delicious  look.

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