Quorn Pie with a red wine sauce

📝 What you need

Ingredients

• Shallots 
• Baby / chantenay carrots
• Button mushrooms
• Garlic
• Bay leaf
• Thyme
• Vegan Quorn pieces ('chicken' style)
• Dairy-free milk (to glaze)
• Red wine
• Vegetable stock powder
• Tomato purée
• Rapeseed or sunflower oil
• Plain flour
• Ready-rolled pastry (either shortcrust or puff - check it is vegan)

👩🏽‍🍳 Variations

There are all sorts of tweaks you can make to this pie to make the recipe your own, or adjust it to your own taste. How about:

• Swap to a mash topping? You could pipe mashed potato, or even my butter bean mash, cauliflower mash or carrot and swede mash as lighter alternatives, instead of the pastry crust.
• Swap out the red wine? If you don't want to use wine or don't have any to hand, just increase the quantity of vegetable stock to 350ml boiling water plus 2 tsp stock powder. For an extra-rich filing you could add 1 tbsp instant gravy granules, (just check they are vegan).
• Make pasties? If you would like to take these on a picnic or in a lunchbox, you could make them into pasties instead. Just cut circles of pastry roughly the size of a saucer. spoon the filling into the middle, wet the edges with a little water and crimp to seal.
• Make a white wine sauce? You could swap the red wine for white wine, and the tomato purée for some dairy-free cream instead, and this would be a completely different pie. Some leeks and broccoli would be a delicious addition to the filling too.
• Swap the Quorn for borlotti beans? You could leave out the Quorn and use borlotti or cannelini beans - one 400g tin, drained and rinsed.

How will you make yours?

❄️ Freezing

This pie will freeze well if you follow these steps:

• Make the filling as per the recipe
• Add the pastry topping (and glaze too if you wish), but don't bake the pie.
• When the pie is completely cold put it into the freezer (wrapped in foil or in an airtight container) and freeze for up to 1 month.
• To cook, remove from the freezer and defrost fully in the fridge, then cook within 24 hours and ensure the pie filling is piping hot throughout before serving.

Quorn's own advice on freezing their products is available on their website.

🔪 What else can I make with ready-rolled pastry?

Depending on your pie dish, the crust of this Quorn pie will use up about half a standard pack of ready-rolled pastry. You could freeze the rest, or batch-cook and freeze two pies at once, (see above for instructions), but if you want to try making something different with the remaining pastry you could try:

• Vegan Apple Pie - you will probably only have enough to make a few mini-pies in a muffin tin, so scale down the quantity of apple filing accordingly.
• Vegan Pasties with mushroom and red wine - the recipe uses puff pastry but they work well with shortcrust too if that's what you have left.
• Vegan Sausage Rolls - these work best with puff pastry. They are so quick and easy to make, you could pop some in the freezer (uncooked) ready for your next party.
• Vegan Cherry Bakewell Tarts - super delicious, with a pastry crust, cherry filling and moist frangipane sponge on top.