There are plenty of foods that have become popular to indulge in over the Christmas period, but few can top mince pies.
A well established staple of the festive season, the foodie favourite is a delicious treat packed with mincemeat, fruit and spices, all encased in a tasty pastry crust.
The treat became popular around Christmas time following a tradition from the Middle Ages, which saw people eat a mince pie every day for 12 days from December 25 to the Twelfth Night. It was believed that doing so would bring you good fortune and happiness for the year ahead.
Nowadays, tucking into a mince pie isn’t a treat reserved only for 12 days from Christmas, as they start popping up on supermarket shelves around October onwards.
But if you’re bored of the standard supermarket fare and are keen to create some of your own mince pies for the festive season, then there is one unexpected ingredient you should add to make your pies beautifully flaky and flavourful.
Most mince pie recipes suggest making the pastry crust with plain flour, butter, water and a pinch of salt, but one more old fashioned ingredient will help to elevate your pastry to another level.
Adding 3oz, or 85g, of lard to the same amount of butter will help to give your mince pies a wonderfully flaky texture that will melt in your mouth as you eat it.
Lard is often added to pie crusts because of its ability to produce a very flaky crust, which it can achieve due to its high melting point.
This allows it to stay solid for longer during handling and baking the dough, resulting in more distinct layers of fat. This creates the delicious flakiness when the fat melts during cooking, whereas butter, by comparison, melts much faster which can lead to a much tougher pastry crust.
Culinary website The Chopping Block explains: “Lard used to be extremely common in pie crust making, but then it became a sort of vilified ingredient. Now the all-butter crust is so ubiquitous a lot of people seem to have forgotten lard was ever in the mix.
“An all butter crust can be very good, and is almost guaranteed to be much better than any store-bought crust you’ll find, but they can also be prone to toughness.
“Mixing different fats in your crust will yield a pastry that’s not only full of delicious buttery flavor, but that also has an incredible texture. The coveted flaky-but-tender combo that we so often hear when describing the ideal crust is most readily achieved this way.”
