Classic British fish pie

Hi, I'm Rob Morris and I'm here today to make you a lovely fish pie. I'm just going to go
straight in with about a pint of milk. I'm going to flavour this milk a little bit so
I'm just going to go in with two ingredients; so bay leaf and some pepper corns, probably
about 5 or 6 peppercorns. They go in there and what we do is just bring that up to the
simmer.
You can use whatever fish you prefer but for now we're using Responsibly Sourced Cod. That
will go straight into the milk and then we're going to bring it up to the boil and then
what we do is just take it off the heat.
I've got another frying pan on the side here. So a little bit of olive oil goes in there
and then I'm just going to soften a leek. They'll just go straight into our frying pan
here and I'm going to leave those too cook for probably about 5 / 6 / 7 minutes, just
keeping our eye on them. Add a little bit of salt and pepper. You can't rush beautiful
food! That's the thing you know, we're cooking things from scratch here.
We're now ready for this next stage here so the fish has been poached in the milk; it's
just on the point of being cooked. Pour the milk into this pan and obviously we want to
keep that milk Ð see that beautiful white fish there! Take our fish, pop it into your
bowl, pick out your peppercorns Ð very important you know because they can really take your
fillings out if you eat those!
So I'm going to make the sauce now. The basis for the sauce is that lovely flavoured milk.
I've got about 25 grams of butter here so we're making a basic roux which is just butter
and flour. So use a wooden spoon; just let that melt down.
In this bowl here now I've got some lovely mashed potato; this is just mashed potato
with a little bit of butter in. I'm just going to take the leeks and I'm just going to tip
them straight into the mashed potato; give those a nice little mix in and then we're
just going to leave those to one side.
Right, so the butter has melted now. The plain flour goes into there and what you need to
do is just mix the two together until you get like a paste almost okay? Just keep that
on a low heat and we start feeding the milk into it, a little bit at a time Ð don't put
the whole thing in Ð just put a little bit in, give it a little bit of a stir okay? It
will start incorporating straight away, so keep adding that in it will, you know, carry
on incorporating and what we're after is a beautiful glossy sauce. We need to taste our
sauce. So with a spoon just sort of taste it and you can taste the fish you know, you
can taste the bay leaf;
you can taste the peppercorn but it does need a little bit of salt. Not too much! That's
the thing.
And then the other ingredient I want to add in here is some lovely fresh parsley. So I'm
just going to leave that simmering away for a moment. We've got the cod in there. Next
thing, some baby prawns okay? Straight from the packet, they go over the top like so.
Now take your boiled eggs and roughly chop them. All Co-operative eggs are free range
and you can really tell and this is the old English part of a fish pie is the hard boiled
egg you know. This is how they've been doing it for hundreds of years. So that just goes
over the top there like so and this is the sauce Ð look at that, beautiful white parsley
sauce. Mashed potato, take a spoon using the back of the spoon and I'm just going to sort
of push it into the corners a little bit.
I've got some reduced fat Cheddar cheese here, just scatter it over you know, that's all.
You don't want too much, we want to have that sort of cheesy, crunchy topping on it. That
goes into a pre-heated oven 190 degrees, gas mark 5 for about 25 / 30 minutes just so the
top is all nice and golden; the cheese all bubbly and to be honest, you'll just smell
it's ready.
And that's a classic British fish pie. Truly tasty, truly rewarding, comfort winter food
of the Gods.