Mini Mushroom & Walnut Pasties {vegan}

Ah, it’s good to be back! I have missed spending time in this creative space, but blogging is the first thing to go when life gets crazy! A couple months back, once my son started school, I began selling cakes at a weekly market, and life suddenly got very full. It’s been a huge learning curve, and valuable, but I have decided to pull back so that I still have time to develop new recipe ideas, test them and share the successes right here with you. I have several recipes up my sleeve, but this one has been tried and tested over several months.

I had put a request out to local customers asking what they would like to buy at market and someone suggested pasties. Already having an excellent, very popular pastie recipe on the blog, I thought why not, and proceeded to make a lentil-heavy mixture for my first try. Oh, but it made me sick! The bloating I experienced after eating that batch was most unpleasant. I wondered it there was an alternative filling I could use. It was soon after that I read about a ‘bolognese’ sauce using walnuts and mushrooms as the ‘mince’. I decided to try it.

Eureka! As they say. It was perfect. The combination of minced mushrooms and walnuts creates a texture not dissimilar to mincemeat, and that combined with root vegetables and spices is all you really need for an excellent, gourmet vegan pastie. They are really quite straightforward; all you really need is a food processor and a rolling pin. These pasties have been selling like hotcakes, and once you’ve made them I think you’ll know why! I have included a link to gluten-free pastry in case you need that as well. Bon appetit!

Mini Mushroom & Walnut Pasties {vegan}

Makes about 15 small pasties

Ingredients
For the filling:
2 carrots (about 200g), peeled and roughly chopped
1 large potato (about 200g), peeled and roughly chopped
2 sticks celery, finely chopped
2 tbsp olive or rapeseed oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 ½ cups walnuts
4 large flat-cap (Portobello) mushrooms, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon vegetable stock powder
½ teaspoon dried thyme
Salt and pepper, to taste
1 kg puff, rough puff or shortcrust pastry or gluten-free pastry
a little plant milk to glaze

Method
Place carrots and potato into the bowl of a food processor and blend until very small but still chunky (approx. 0.5cm diameter). Add in celery and pulse again. Heat the oil in a large, lidded saucepan or casserole dish, and fry the carrot, potato and celery for 3 to 5 minutes (covered) until starting to soften.

In the same food processor (no need to rinse), blend walnuts until nubbly like small gravel, then add in mushrooms and blitz into small pieces. Add walnuts, mushrooms and garlic to the pot with other veg and stir until heated through. Remove from heat and season with stock powder, thyme, salt and pepper. Mix well to combine.

Preheat the oven to 220C/428F (or 200C with fan).

Roll out pastry on a floured surface to roughly the thickness of a 20-cent coin, then use a small plate or cereal bowl as a template to cut circles of pastry roughly 14cm in diameter. Brush a little water around the edge of each circle, and mound 60g (2 oz) of filling onto each round.

Bring up the sides of the pastry to form a firm seal along the top of the pasty and use your fingers to crimp a wavy line along the seal. Brush the pasties with a little plant milk, pierce pastry lid once with a sharp knife (to let the steam out) and cook for 20 minutes until golden brown and crisp all over.

Notes
Inspired by The Veg Space and What the Heck do I Eat now?