The flagship: a flat butter-puff chicken pie in the Oven Marvel style
My closest attempt yet at the pie from Sunshine Plaza. Flat, all butter, peppery, with a crackling top and a soft, sauce-soaked inner layer. It takes a day, mostly fridge time.
Quick answer
To make an Oven Marvel-style chicken pie, make all-butter rough puff with four letter folds, poach chicken thigh gently, fold it with onion, carrot, potato and peas into a medium-thick bechamel seasoned with white pepper, and chill it. Sandwich about 130 g of cold filling between two 3 mm pastry rounds, chill the shaped pies, then bake hot until deep gold.
Home recreation This is my own attempt, guided by published descriptions of the shop's pies. Oven Marvel never published its recipe. It is one of my Oven Marvel recipe recreations, and the recreation log shows how each one got here.
Ingredients
Rough puff pastry
Peppery chicken filling
To finish
Method
Make the rough puff pastry, giving it four letter folds with rests in between, exactly as in the rough puff recipe. Wrap it and chill for at least an hour, or overnight.
Put the chicken thighs in a small pan with the water and a pinch of salt. Bring to the barest simmer, cover, and cook gently for about 20 minutes, until the thickest piece reads at least 75 C and the meat is just starting to separate along its fibres. Lift out, reserve 150 g of the liquid, and cut the chicken into 1.5 cm chunks.
Simmer the potato dice in salted water for about 8 minutes until just tender, then drain. Meanwhile melt 10 g of the butter and cook the onion and carrot gently for 6 to 8 minutes, until soft but not coloured.
Melt the remaining 35 g butter, stir in the flour and cook for 2 minutes without browning. Whisk in the warm milk and the reserved poaching liquid a splash at a time. Simmer, stirring, for at least 2 minutes after it thickens. It should coat a spoon thickly. Stir in half the white pepper.
Fold the chicken, potato, onion, carrot and the frozen peas into the sauce. Add the sugar, the rest of the white pepper and salt to taste. Spread in a shallow tray, press baking paper onto the surface, and refrigerate once it stops steaming. Chill for at least 2 hours, until completely cold.
Roll the pastry on a lightly floured cold surface to about 3 mm. Cut six 12 cm rounds for the bases and six 13 cm rounds for the lids, re-rolling the scraps once after a short chill. Lay the bases on a lined tray. Chill all the rounds for 15 minutes.
Put about 130 g of cold filling in the centre of each base and flatten it to a disc about 1.5 cm high, leaving a 1.5 cm border. Brush the border with water, lay a lid on top, press out any air, and seal the edges firmly with a fork. Cut a small steam slit in each lid.
This is the step that saves the layers. Chill the tray for 30 minutes in the fridge, or 15 minutes in the freezer, until the pastry feels firm. Meanwhile heat the oven to 210 C (fan 190 C) with a heavy baking tray inside.
Beat the yolk with the milk and brush it thinly over the lids, keeping it off the cut edges so they can rise. Slide the pies, on their paper, onto the hot tray. Bake for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 190 C (fan 170 C) and bake 15 to 20 minutes more, until deep golden on top and browned underneath. The filling should be at least 75 C in the centre.
Rest the pies on a rack for 10 minutes. The filling is dangerously hot straight from the oven and needs a moment to set. Then eat one standing up, out of a paper bag, the way it should be.
What is this pie trying to be?
This recipe is my attempt at the Oven Marvel chicken pie as reviewers recorded it between 2009 and 2020. The targets, each one sourced:
- Pastry: house-made, all butter, puff (ieatishootipost, 2013). Crisp on top, chewy where it meets the sauce (SETHLUI.com, 2020), “not overly flaky” but light (ieatishootipost, 2009).
- Shape: flat and round, pastry top and bottom (Miss Tam Chiak, 2019).
- Chicken: thigh, cooked slowly until the fibres just start to separate (ieatishootipost, 2013).
- Sauce: homemade bechamel, medium-thick, peppery.
- Vegetables: peas, onion, carrot and soft potato.
- No egg in the filling.
Everything else, the quantities, temperatures and timings, is mine. Oven Marvel’s own recipe has never been published, and I have no inside knowledge of it.
Why rough puff and not full puff?
Rough puff gives about 80 butter sheets after four letter folds, against several hundred for classic puff. For a flat pie, that is plenty, and it matches the “light, not over-flaky” description better than a towering classic puff would. It is also far more forgiving in a warm kitchen. The equal-weight flour-to-butter ratio and 30-minute chills follow a Singapore home baker’s rough puff method (Singapore Noodles), tuned for a thinner, flatter pie.
Why chill the pies before baking?
Because Singapore is warm and butter is not. By the time six pies are filled and crimped, the edges have softened. A professional Hainanese pastry chef at M Hotel rests his shaped butter puff pies at 1 to 3 C for about two hours for the same reason (Hong Leong Hi-Life magazine, 2018). At home, 30 minutes in the fridge does most of the job. Skip it, and the butter melts out before the layers can lift. I learnt this the greasy way, as the recreation log shows.
Why such a hot start?
A blast of heat at 210 C makes the water in the butter turn to steam quickly, which is what separates the layers. Dropping to 190 C after 15 minutes lets the base and the centre cook through without the top burning. Baking on a preheated heavy tray puts heat straight into the base, the best defence against a soggy bottom under a creamy filling.
How close does it get?
On my own scale, and it is only my opinion, an 8 out of 10. The pastry is right. The pepper is right. The filling is close. What is missing is harder to name: a certain richness to the sauce that I suspect came from a better stock, or perhaps a little more butter than I am brave enough to use. The full story of how I got here, including the soup-with-a-hat incident, is in the recreation log.
What are the most common mistakes?
- Warm filling. It melts the pastry from the inside. The filling must be fridge-cold.
- Too much filling. Overfilled flat pies burst at the seam. About 130 g for a 12 cm base is the limit.
- Glaze on the cut edges. Egg wash glues the layers together so they cannot rise. Glaze the top only.
- A pale base. Use a preheated tray on a low shelf, and do not take the pies out until the underside is brown.
- Under-seasoning. A filling that tastes right warm will taste bland cold, and you season it cold. Be generous with the white pepper.
How do I store and reheat leftovers?
Cool the pies on a rack, then refrigerate within two hours of baking, and eat within three days (USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service). Reheat on a rack at 180 C for 15 to 20 minutes, until the centre reaches 75 C. Oven Marvel’s own staff advised letting a chilled pie stand for 10 to 15 minutes before reheating, and that tip works. The full method is in reheating puff pastry pies.
Baked pies freeze well too, wrapped, for up to three months. Whether to thaw them first or reheat straight from frozen is the question donchickenpie.com’s freezing test set out to answer, and my own frozen-pie timings are on the reheating page.
What variations are worth trying?
- Sweet corn, for those who remember it: 50 to 60 g with the peas.
- More pepper, if you remember it hotter: go to 3 g.
- A quicker version with bought all-butter puff: the weeknight pie.
- The same pastry, curried: the curry puff recreation.
Questions people ask
Is this the real Oven Marvel recipe?
No. Oven Marvel never published its recipe. This is a home recreation built from what reviewers described: house-made all-butter puff pastry, chicken thigh cooked until just tender, a homemade bechamel, peas, onion, carrot, potato and plenty of pepper.
Can I add sweet corn?
Yes. Two reviewers remembered corn in the filling and others did not. Add 50 to 60 g of drained sweet corn with the peas if you remember it that way.
Can I make these pies ahead?
Yes. Freeze the shaped, unbaked pies on a tray, then bag them. Bake from frozen at the same temperatures, adding 8 to 10 minutes, and check the centre reaches 75 C.
Why use an egg yolk if the pie has no egg?
The yolk is only a glaze for colour on top of the pastry. There is no egg in the filling, which matches every description of the Oven Marvel pie. Brush with milk instead if you would rather avoid egg entirely.
Sources for this page
- Oven Marvel (formerly Delicious Muffins): hotel quality homemade puff pastry
- Oven Marvel: super duper addictive chicken pies
- Oven Marvel: chicken pies at Sunshine Plaza
- Best pies in Singapore: blind taste test
- The art of the chicken pie at M Hotel
- Eurasian chicken pie
- Leftovers and food safety
Every source we used, with notes on what each one says: sources and further reading.
More from the recreation kitchen
