Chicken Ragout with Puff Pastry Pie

Wash and clean the soup greens, cut everything roughly into small pieces. If the greens of the celery should be there, also wash and roughly chop. Halve the onion with the skin. Wash the chicken cold (!) And place in a tall, larger saucepan. Then pour in enough cold water until the chicken is a little more than covered. Salt the water well, add the soup greens and onions and bring everything to a boil. Then immediately turn down the heat, put a lid on the pan and cook the chicken for approx. 60 - 85 minutes until it is gently simmering until soft. The meat should be easily detached from the bones. When the cooking time is up, lift the chicken out of the broth, drain and place on a plate to cool.

Pour the broth through a sieve, collect it in a bowl and keep it ready.

For the ragout, peel the carrots and cut them into large cubes. Clean the mushrooms, quarter them (larger eighths) and fry them in a pan in 1 teaspoon butter. Keep ready. Briefly blanch carrot cubes, frozen peas and black root sections in boiling water, drain and keep ready for a moment. Measure 1.2 L of the chicken stock, have it ready.

Melt the butter in a larger saucepan and stir in the flour. Let simmer (burn in) for approx. 1 min. Then gradually stir in 1 liter of the broth in smaller quantities. Do not stop stirring, because after each pouring the mass thickens a little. When the liter is used up, a creamy, creamy sauce should be created. The remaining 200 ml are only added if the consistency of the sauce may still thicken. When it's done, stir in the cream, lemon juice and Worcester sauce and season with sugar, salt and pepper.

Remove the skin from the cooled chicken. Remove all usable meat from the bones, roughly pull apart and add to the sauce together with all the vegetables. Now don't cook anymore, just let it steep on the lowest setting.

The preparation should take place before the ragout. Unroll the puff pastry rolls. First cut out 8 circles with a diameter of 10-12 cm from a sheet of dough, place them on a baking sheet lined with baking paper and brush with the whisked egg. Then coat the rest of the pastry sheet and the 2nd thinly with egg and fold them together so that they are 2-ply. Now cut out 16 circles, also 10-12 cm. Brush 8 of them with egg and put a second circle on top. This creates 8 circles with 4 layers of dough. Now cut out the center with a round cutter 5 cm in diameter, so that "rings" are created. Place these on the closed dough circles on the baking sheet and form the wall for the pies. Now brush the outside of all the blanks with egg. Also place the cut out middle parts on the baking sheet.

So that the pies stay in shape while baking and can bake straight up, a tube is formed from aluminum foil, which has the diameter of the interior space later, and it is placed in the middle. If the pies have got their shape during baking, but are not quite ready, the tube is removed and then baked to the end. In general, puff pastry is baked between 200 and 220 °. The duration depends on the size and compactness of the pastry and can vary. Please refer to the instructions on the packaging. The pies should have at least tripled in volume and be golden brown. The cut out middle pieces are used as decoration when serving.

The small pies were calculated for 4 people. The ragout, on the other hand, is for 6 people. The leftover chicken stock is easy to store frozen for later use.