Recreating Wolfgang Puck’s Chicken Pot Pie From Taste

Hi, I'm Jesse and I'm in the BA Test Kitchen

to have a super secret conversation about Chris Morocco.

Once again, we're putting Chris's super tasting abilities

to the test.

This is Wolfgang Puck's chicken pot pie.

I'm challenging Chris to recreate

this dish using old ingredients in just one day.

He'll be able to taste it, touch it and smell it.

But at no point will he be able to see this dish.

At the end of the day we'll come back

to see his final creation and I'll bee the judge.

[upbeat music]

It honestly does smell a bit like french toast, like eggy.

Oh wow.

This like profoundly domed situation here.

There's kind of like a flake to it.

It almost has the aroma of puff pastry.

This like wonderful deep toasty dairy intense richness.

Is this like a lid that needs to be kind of undomed?

Oh wow, I'm getting a lot of butter

and I'm getting a lot of flour.

The open, airy construction

of this thing is just wild to behold.

That is really cool.

Inside is where it takes like a decidedly savory turn.

It's gonna sound crazy.

It sort of smells a little bit like pot pie filling, huh?

It just pretty hot.

So I just want to like let it cool down

and see if I can separate out any

of these components in here.

I seem to be tasting chicken.

Alright, definitely a pearl onion, baby peas.

I love a pea.

Expecting to find a carrot in here.

I'm not finding a carrot, found my carrot.

Okay, there's a lusciousness to this sauce,

like a meat based broth, sort of bound

and thickened with flour or roux in some way.

So other things that I'm thinking about herbs,

fresh thyme or something.

Maybe just a touch of brightness to this like touch

of white wine.

Just wanna make sure like there isn't mushroom

or something like that.

I think it's just the papery skin of the onion,

but there just feels so like weird and gelatinous here.

Like the thought that comes to mind

that it's like almost like a thin shaving of truffle

and yet it has like no a apparent flavor to it.

The flavors here are very right down the middle

chicken pop pie.

Yeah, we're gonna need to talk about this.

So working title is pop pie.

We've got a dough component, a dough that can skew sweet

or savory, like really eggy

and not flaky in the way that puff pastry is.

AP flour, butter, eggs, salt.

And then I've got the pot pie element,

chicken thighs, broth.

Maybe like a thyme, white wine.

I dunno, this is what I've got so far.

So where my brain is glitching, glitching.

If I kept tasting a piece of like weird onion skin,

it's a really specific thing to think,

oh this is a piece of truffle

and yet I don't taste anything.

That's my list.

Somebody's gonna go out and shop for me

and then I'm gonna have my first attempt at the dish.

I can never figure out

what the right order of operations is.

I was gonna punt on the plan and just start with the peas

and then sort of build outward from there.

Also I have a thing about baby peas.

If you just let them defrost in water, they don't get

that kind of like wrinkly, dried out skin.

Great, I'm gonna start with the filling here in the hope

that I can get our vegetables

and our chicken cooked in about the same amount

of time it takes to make our pastry.

I went for the chicken thigh

because I just felt like I was getting some like pieces

that felt a little bit irregular to me.

Whereas if you do chicken breasts,

chances are it's gonna be more like cubes.

I've often seen people use like pre-cooked chicken,

like shred them and then throw it in, get our onions going.

So I want generously salted water.

So we're gonna blanch those onions, get them cooked

before they go into our sauce.

I wanna cook these till they're tender.

I'm making roux,

so as soon as the butter is melted I'm gonna put

in some flour.

We want ultimately a pretty tight mixture.

Like we want a thick sauce

that really drapes over these vegetables.

Oh gosh, that's getting dark fast.

While I'm like yammering on a little darker than I wanted.

Let's get our broth in it and keep going.

I'm gonna go for half of this.

So that's about two cups white wine.

In the original dish there was like a little bit of a lift

to those flavors, so I wanna get it nice

and bubbly, fully activate the starch.

Let me just get some salt in here, thyme.

This is gonna give us like a pretty good base.

It doesn't taste amazing but it tastes like something.

I wanna end up in a place

that's like a little bit thicker than where we are now,

but at the point at which the chicken

and the vegetables feel tender to me, hit this

with a little bit of black pepper and we can let it roll.

Gentle simmer.

It is time to make some pastry.

The experience of eating the pastry felt a lot closer

to a super egg forward preparation.

I'm thinking about something in the pate brisee world.

Pate brisee is a short crust pastry,

something akin to pie dough

but rather than using water to hydrate it, it uses egg,

the eggness, the eggy aromas of the pastry.

This approach is the one that seems

to make the most sense to me.

Just wanna shape the dough,

get it integrated without overworking it.

Hopefully, this is looking good.

This is a great time to just make sure any bits

of dry flour are incorporated so that can hydrate and chill.

I'm just gonna drain off these onions.

Hmm, that is just objectively jammy.

[Participant] Was that the texture of the onion skin

you were? Absolutely not.

In the original dish there was a very thin slice

of something that had just a tiny bit of texture around it.

Shaggy firm edge around the exterior.

Like even if you look at like the roughest bit,

I'm certainly not getting that from these onions.

The chicken is cooked through it is wanting

to kind of break apart.

So honestly maybe we're in okay shape here.

Keep this going another 10 minutes or so

and then cool it down.

I don't want it going into baking vessel ripping hot,

it's just gonna heat up the vessel,

which is then gonna start to melt the dough.

Onions are gonna go in, drain the peas off.

I wanna discard thyme.

With that mixture getting cold,

it really wants to cook these elements

so I'm feeling okay about filling less great about dough.

In a perfect world,

it would have chilled for at least an hour.

That allows the dough to relax and fully hydrates the flour

and gets it cold.

The only way that it makes sense

to have the dough experience that I had would be

to essentially almost put like more

of like a liquid batter on top of the chicken mixture.

So the path is now gonna diverge.

Okay, I'm gonna do two approaches to a pastry topper.

One is gonna be topped by the pate brisee,

which is currently cooling in the freezer.

Other is gonna be topped by a kind of like a savory sort

of dutch baby kind of type batter.

And we're gonna see what happens when that type

of liquid batter cooks directly on top of a pot pie.

We're gonna find out here,

we're gonna settle this once and for all.

A Dutch baby, there's no chemical leavener in it.

It all works based on the ability of the egg

to incorporate air into it.

It's building volume

that trapped air expands in the oven into like all kinds

of like kind of crazy puffy shapes.

So flour and salt are gonna go in.

I've got my melted butter.

I don't know, I don't hate it.

Okay, dough is out of the freezer.

I'm gonna start to roll it out.

It's not entirely hydrated and not entirely chilled

but it's gonna be great.

So I just wanna trace around this.

I want to give myself like enough

of an edge for it to adhere.

Pop pie filling is going in to each,

so this is our pap brisee version.

I wanna really clamp this pastry down onto it.

So now I'm gonna brush egg wash onto it,

which is gonna help it develop really nice color

and turn crisp.

It feels really wrong to put this on that.

So Dutch baby floater here.

Pate brisee there going into a hot oven 425.

We want steam, we want transformation.

Want like a hot temperature to sort

of push things up and out.

Let's take a look.

Good color on both.

It's so interesting 'cause you know these doughs could not

be more different really.

This obviously has so much more egg proportionately

and the pate brisee has so much more fat.

It doesn't create a very extensible dough, right?

It's not a dough that you can bend the same way

that you might with like puff pastry.

The dough just sank.

It didn't have enough elasticity obviously like this

is a bit of a fail, right?

I'm very intrigued by the Dutch baby topper here.

The color is good.

The rise was really good.

The Dutch baby approaches is feeling more solid of the two.

Alright, here is my first attempt at the dish.

Even though we all know there was another attempt,

but we're not gonna talk about that anymore.

There's no way to really sort

of say this is a hundred percent the right way to go

until I pop this top

and see what's happening in the undercarriage, you know?

The dough definitely is not as good as the original.

A little tough and a little rubbery.

We lost a good bit of our sauciness

looking a little dry in here.

The pate brisee, you know,

I think we decided we're gonna move away from,

but that's a really nice cook.

Obviously it lacks the drama

but the dough's a good bit more tender melts in the mouth

and it's making me reconsider the Dutch baby approach.

I mean I'm thrilled

that a Dutch baby topper can theoretically work.

I just don't think I have the right batter.

Let's talk scores.

So for ingredients, 80 technique, 75 appearance

gonna be 80 flavor.

I'm sort of back down to like more of like a 70.

The filling is a little bit heavier on wine

and thyme than it needs to be.

Alright, actual scores coming in, woof, 65.

Not entirely surprised, I don't know.

I mean I, I think I'm like really counting

on the second tasting to reveal

the inner truth of this dish.

Second tasting, here we go.

Mm, okay, all right.

So we've got like some dramatic rise above.

What the is that?

Were these always on here?

Like even in the first one?

Well this is our thin shaved element, right?

Definitely giving me thinly shaved truffle.

I would've expected the flavor and aroma to be stronger.

The dough is kind of pinned down

to the outside of the vessel.

It's quite a dramatic kind of puff to it.

It's possible that this is just store-bought puff pastry.

It's buttery, it's tender, it does what you want it to do.

One thing that really strikes me is like the level

of filling is up to the rim.

Definitely getting a little more truffle aroma

than I was before, truffle acting in concert with cream.

I don't think the chicken was seared

or cooked outside of liquid.

I'm still getting some connective tissue and things with it.

Just overall I think I'm getting more richness.

Just wondering if there could be like onion

or shallot as part of like the savory base to this.

Maybe it's like the pearl onions just need

to cook into this sucker ship it

slightly amended group of ingredients.

Obviously most notably puff pastry

and black truffle.

It's a summer truffle.

Yeah, exactly like it smells like a truffle

but there's almost like a high note.

It's not as funky and deep.

A truffle undeniably has like incredible power

and used as a pretext to charge people a lot of money.

Having someone kind of cruise by

and like for like $125.

Like it's not the world I'm living in.

A key difference from last time is I'm gonna sweat out

some onion with the butter to develop a really nice base

of savory flavor before the flour goes in this time.

It got a little dark last time.

Temperature's much more moderate this time,

color difference should be minimal.

My working theory is that Stevie knew

I was gonna balls up the the first attempt

so she didn't even bother

to get me the good chicken stock for it.

She gave me the box stuff

but now she's giving me the like homemade rich,

just almost like verging on gelatinous.

You know, I don't know, this is like kind

of against my better judgment to just put these onions in.

Stick in with chicken thighs, carrot salt.

I'm gonna kind of just let this go at a slow roll.

Let the chicken cook out and see where we're at.

This has probably been 35, 40 minutes here.

Carrots are tender, onions are tender,

but to some, I wanna put in a little bit of cream

and I'm gonna put in the truffle.

This is a truffle shaver.

It's really good at cutting

through the knobby craggy exterior

so I don't wanna overdo it.

But I mean we are here.

So peas, truffle and cream are in.

Would've been good with the white wine, but it's fine.

We're here.

All right, so we're gonna use store-bought puff pastry.

There was such a dramatic puff to this dish

that the only way

to get this substantively thicker would've been

to fold the two halves together.

Then re-roll it, which we could have done,

but I don't know, that seemed maybe excessive.

So we're gonna go pretty full here.

One of them I might use a little bit of egg wash

around the rim and hopefully form a pretty nice seal

for me making the vent, doing a wash

in at 425 and see how we do.

Part of the deal with puff pastry

is that air gaps are created between the layers of dough

as water from the butter evaporates, allowing it to kind

of puff up and open up.

We're bubbling deep burnished brown a click farther than

it probably needed to.

Obviously kind of missing the dome here.

Fresh shavings of truffle over the top.

Final attempt at the dish.

Got great rise on the puff, great color, no dome.

So ingredients.

My actual was a 66.

Let's be bold and say that maybe we pulled this up

to an 80.

Technique wise like we, maybe we pulled this up to an 81.

For appearance, significant difference here we were at 57.

Maybe we're now at like 75.

Taste, I guess we'll see.

My judge is Jesse Chef Check.

Jesse calls 'em like he sees 'em

and I don't know, maybe not the easiest judge in the world.

Hey Jesse, how's it going?

Good, are you ready?

I don't know if I'm ready, but I feel like you probably

heard me talking about

what I thought the dish might be earlier

and probably got very nervous.

You ended a lot better than you started.

That is true.

Yes.

There was an evolution here, not a devolution.

Are you ready to see it?

Yeah, yeah.

May I present to you?

Wolfgang Puck's chicken pot pie.

Wolfgang.

It looks a little different.

What the hell is that though?

Does he do like a stack of puff?

Like what has he done here?

It is a stack.

This looks good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It looks different.

All right.

I wanted to see if I could get it to puff,

but then counterintuitively

to me on the second attempt I found that there was a vent

and I was like, well how do you vent it and get it to dome?

And I think the short answer is you don't.

Yeah, there's no vent here.

It makes sense why you did that to me.

'cause you're trying to cook the pastry.

But I think maybe it like worked against the lift almost

like it collapsed in on itself.

Given that it's Wolfgang Puck,

I feel like I'm probably missing some ingredients in here.

I know you used heavy cream.

He uses creme fresh to kind of reinforce the truffle.

He seasons the filling with oil,

which I know you are gonna hate.

I already know.

I know everything he is thinking right now.

It has like a synthetic taste almost.

There's also one other ingredient you missed.

Yeah. It's very old school.

Okay. White pepper.

Oh that is like so french.

It's so old school.

It's so annoying.

We don't wanna add black specks

but we taste to something that's white.

We wanna taste pepper, but we wanna taste pepper.

Yeah, but it's different even though like white pepper

has that kind of like, it's like funky.

Funky picky doesn't melt as well.

I agree.

With like understated Mediterranean cuisine.

I agree.

The first thing as I know

that you used the stock on the second round.

Yes.

So Wolfgang again, very chefy, takes stock

and then reinforces it again

with more veggies, more chicken.

Let's set similar for two hours

and those veggies are discarded

but the chicken is used in the pot pie.

He also pre-cooked his carrots

and his onions like in butter.

With water pulled down?

Just butter.

Yeah.

You kind of simplified his process honestly

and got to like a very similar result that appears.

I'm curious to taste these side by side.

Should we try 'em?

Yeah, let's try 'em.

I feel like you need to destruct it

'cause it's cathartic. I can serve you.

Thank you.

I definitely get truffle.

The cook on the chicken is nice.

It's really tender, it's very shreddy.

I can see why you'd get confused with the pastry though.

'Cause like here and it's kinda like a Dutch baby.

It's kind of like custardy.

Yeah, like a popover or something.

Let's try mine.

It's dark but I feel like it'll taste good.

Yes.

The filling looks very similar.

Yours is like a little more emulsified.

I don't really get any truffle in this one.

The thing that's probably ultimately flavoring

this more is the oil.

Yeah. Yeah.

It is good.

Overall I think it changed for the better.

For sure.

But like my, given my druthers,

I would always pre-cook pearl onions.

This is worth a try.

But you know it's like why we're here, right?

Yeah.

So let's talk scores. Yes.

Ingredient wise, I do think you're very close.

I think the only two buckets against you

were the acids and the truffle oil.

Yeah. You gave yourself an 80

and I'm also gonna give you an 80.

Okay.

In terms of technique,

your gut was telling you to simplify it?

Yeah.

Which great, you gave yourself an 81.

I'll give you another 80.

Appearance wise, you gave yourself a 75.

I also gave you a 75.

This one's like way darker

and just like the height and the shape.

Yeah. For tasting.

What would you give yourself now that you tried it?

I'd probably go like maybe like more of like 75.

Okay wow, I gave you an 84.

Oh wow.

Yeah, I mean I think the filling is like such a,

the foundation of this honestly.

And it tastes very similar.

Just like put some truffle oil in here and a touch of acid

and it is the same to me.

Yeah.

So final scores you gave yourself a 78.

Okay.

I gave you an 80, I think it's good.

Apart from the pastry, you're really, really close.

This was great, thank you.

Cool, thanks.

I'll go back to my station.

Woo, I mean tasting my second attempt.

Yes it was reading like a touch flat, creme fresh lemon.

You can employ a lot of different techniques

and sometimes even different ingredients

and ultimately come up with something

that's pretty darn close to the original.

I think you're gonna see like Dutch baby pot pie.

Dutch baby pie, that's weird.

Let's not call it that.

You're gonna see something someday.

It's gonna be like English roast dinner, but like casserole

and like maybe some live blackbirds are gonna fly out of it.

Crush it with a little egg

and you put your dough right on top.

I can smell it.

Wouldn't you be proud to fit with?

Hold on, hold on Stevie, here's what went in.

Chicken pot pie on the middle rock and smell it.

Magic of television.

Would you be proud to play that?

If that is not something special.

I don't know what is special.

This is one of...

The culinary producer on that shoot

definitely earned their rate that day but...