Wholemeal Pastry {5 Minute Recipe}

This is a simple Wholemeal pastry pie crust to top your favorite savoury pie. It's made with three basic pantry ingredients and really quick and easy to make. It takes around 5 minutes to get this pastry from pantry to pie and uses only three ingredients: All purpose Wholewheat flour, Butter, Almond Milk (you can use dairy milk too) and salt.

Also see: Healthy Puff Pastry Alternative

Wholemeal Pastry

My family loves pie. Any pie. Put a pie crust on it and it's all go. Pie pastry gets a bad name but it's a super easy 5 minute job.

This recipe shows you how to make my Clean Eating Wholemeal Pastry. It has a nuttier, more 'biscuity' texture compared to standard pie pastry and beside tasting delicious, it's really pretty with a beautiful rustic look when it comes out the oven.

To get the biscuity texture of the pie crust, use cold butter and mix it through the flour using your hands until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs. Only then you can add the milk and salt.

Knead until you have a smooth dough that's ready to roll out. There's really not more to it than that :)

Roll out as much as you need to cover your pie. This recipe makes enough pastry for two pies and I usually make more than I need because it's really handy to have.

You can pop any leftover dough in the freezer, and then simply thaw fully before using next time. It can stay in the freezer for up to a month.

Homemade Pastry vs Store Bought Pastry

The problem with store bought pastry, like many pre made foods, is the low quality ingredients and additives. Pastry is essentially simply flour, butter and milk (you could even use water at a push!) so when you look at a typical shop bought pastry ingredients list, you can see where the issue is.

This is the ingredients list of one popular store bought pastry I found:

Wheat flour, vegetable fats and oils (palm, rapeseed), margarine (vegetable fats and oils (palm, rapeseed), water, salt, emulsifier: mono and diglycerides of fatty acids), water, alcohol, sugar, salt, concentrated lemon juice.

So, having made it a priority to get the kids (and us!) eating healthier, I'm going to be making my own :)

More Clean Eating Recipes

• Creamy chicken pie
• Classic kids cottage pie
• Teriyaki meatballs and rice
• Slow cooked lamb ragu
• Mushroom and mozzarella pasta bake

Healthy Shortcrust Pastry

This recipe makes a shortcrust pastry. I don't have the patience to make traditional puff pastry even though I did used to love it, and you can find the healthy alternative to puff pastry I use here. Sausage rolls, pie crusts, most things really, can be made using this instead of puff pastry.

I make this by hand. I could use the processor and it would be less work on my hands but honestly, it takes longer to get it out and then clean it after using it, that I just use my fingers to make the pastry flour and butter crumb.

Wholemeal Flour

Being a Wholemeal pastry I use Wholemeal flour! I use an Organic flour so there's as few nasties on the Wheat as possible, and it's widely available nearly everywhere. You can also use other flours to make this recipe. The taste and color will change slightly depending on the flour you use, Spelt flour will give you a darker pastry for example.

As long as your flour is wholegrain, feel free to use it.

Storing Pastry

You can store this pastry in the fridge once you've made it for up to 2 days before using it. If you're not going to use it within this time frame, I'd pop it into the freezer and it can sit there happily for up to a month. Just defrost it fully on the counter top, or in the fridge (this will take way longer!) and you're good to use it again.

Pastry Consistency

A good wholemeal pastry consistency should be smooth, elastic and workable. You're going to see the grain in the pastry, this is fine, but the overall texture should be smooth. The key to this is to make sure your butter is fully crumbed into the flour when you start. Really work the butter until the whole flour butter mix looks like a bowl of fine breadcrumbs.

Rolling Pastry

I use my counter top to roll pastry. It's wood, and once it's covered in flour it makes a great place to roll out the pastry. The only problem I sometimes have is that I can only roll out a piece of pastry so big, there's simply not room to roll out a huge piece.

If you have the same issue and want somewhere bigger to roll out pastry, you can buy these large pastry mats that you can put on your kitchen table and roll the pastry out on. They're inexpensive and roll up for easy storage.

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How to Make Wholemeal Pastry

Ingredients

• 2 cups of flour
• 200 g of cold salted butter cut into cubes
• ⅔ cup 120ml Almond milk (or standard milk)

Instructions

• Add flour and butter to a large mixing bowl
• Using your hands, blend the flour and butter until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs
• Add the salt and milk and mix together until a dough is formed
• Roll out on a floured surface
• To bake: Preheat oven to 180 degree Celsius / 350 degree Fahrenheit. Place on top of pie and bake for around 20 - 25 min until crust is slightly brown and crisp

What To Use Healthy Pastry For

Wholemeal pastry can be used for lots of recipes. Here's some of the things I use it for the most:

• Chicken pie
• Cheese twists - sprinkle a little Parmesan on the pastry and twist it into strips before cooking
• Mini quiche - Line a muffin tin with pastry and fill with this cheese and onion filling
• Sausage rolls- Use the pastry for making home made sausage rolls

Wholemeal Pastry Recipe