The Secret Ingredients Martha Stewart Swears By For A Flavorful Chicken Pot Pie
Brown butter, butternut squash, and cremini mushrooms: Not exactly classic ingredients for chicken pot pie. But according to Instagram, Martha Stewart swears by them. "Brown butter turns the crust for this comfort-food classic into a flaky, nutty marvel," writes the entrepreneur's Test Kitchen team on her website.
A standard-issue chicken pot pie is pretty simple. According to a YouTube tutorial from Stewart, "pot pies have stood the test of time" and are "the ultimate one-pot meal." In the video, she cooks chicken and aromatics like onions, carrots, and celery in a creamy, brothy sauce, then bakes the mixture with a flaky pastry crust. This newer version from the culinary icon goes much further in the name of deliciousness. You don't just roughly chop up carrots and onions — only mushroom caps and diced butternut squash will do. You don't just make a bespoke crust — you make brown butter, freeze it, then use it to construct your own crust. The whole thing takes over three and a half hours, but it might just be worth it.
Why Martha Stewart's chicken pot pie works
What separates chicken pot pie from chicken stew is that golden, flaky crust, ideally made with butter. What's better than an all-butter pie crust? An all-brown butter pie crust. That's why Martha Stewart's chicken pot pie begins with the unusual step of making brown butter, or beurre noisette. Freezing it will allow for easy incorporation into the dough. It adds an unexpected yet welcome nutty flavor to your pastry.
Stewart adds more unexpected flavors to the dish with her vegetable selections. You'll find a few of the usual suspects among the ingredients: Leeks, celery, and frozen peas, but you'll also find butternut squash and cremini mushrooms. The lifestyle doyenne suggests adding the squash peelings and mushroom stems, along with leek tops and celery, to your broth. This infuses it with developed vegetable flavor to round out the usual chicken-and-allium. Then, you toss mushroom caps and chopped squash into the main mixture. That's a formula for sweetness, earthiness, and heft.
How to make sure your chicken pot pie tastes great
Martha Stewart's amped up chicken pot pie may be delicious, but you should at least be familiar with the basics. After all, you want to avoid the common mistakes people make with chicken pot pie – starting with the crust.
Plenty of otherwise competent home cooks are intimidated by pie crust. In theory, it's simple: Mix fat, flour, and a splash of water. In practice, perfect pie crust requires careful temperature management (melted butter means no flakes) and a light touch (heavy hands make tough dough). Of course, you could bake the most golden, flaky pot pie crust in the world — it won't make up for a lackluster filling. Don't cook vegetables for too long; you want them fully cooked but not mushy. One way to ensure tender meat is to make homemade stock with a whole chicken, which you can then use to make the filling.
Once you've got those steps down, you can add whichever ingredients you like. Take a page from Stewart's recipe book and drop in some butternut squash and cremini mushrooms. Or come up with your own creation — pretty much anything swimming in velvety sauce and topped with pie crust can't be all that bad.