The best and worst supermarket pork pies, from ‘claggy' to ‘beautifully crunchy'
Who ate all the pies? Me. At the World Pie Awards, which takes place every year in Melton Mowbray, I've judged vegetarian pies, football pies and steak pies. I've done novelty pies (the full English breakfast pie was a mistake, mostly because of the baked beans) and wedding pies which included multi-tier, pastry-rose-bedecked creations, as well as a glorious 'timpano', the pie at the centre of the classic Stanley Tucci film Big Night. Best of all, one year I was promoted to the top table to judge the king of picnic food, the Melton Mowbray pork pie.
So when I set about collecting supermarket pork pies to test for this article, in honour of picnic season, I was delighted to find that all bar one of the single portion (around 140g) pies were in fact, Melton Mowbray pies – i.e., produced in a specific area around Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, with a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status under the UK's Protected Food Names scheme.
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How we tested
The taste test
What sets a Melton Mowbray pork pie apart from a regular pork pie is that it contains uncured pork meat, rather than meat that's been treated with curing salt, containing nitrites and/or nitrates. This means it will be a muted beige-pink when cut open, perhaps still a little rosy in the middle, but not the admittedly jolly Percy Pig colour of a cured pork pie. It also arguably means it is more healthy, as cured meat has been linked to bowel cancer. However, loaded with saturated fat, wrapped in pastry (yup, refined carbs) and with a generous helping of salt, no one could call a pork pie of any kind health food.
Melton Mowbray pies are also always made by shaping the pastry on a wooden cylinder called a dolly. The dolly is removed and the pie is filled and topped, before being baked without any additional support. Other pork pies are generally baked in metal rings which keep the sides ramrod straight, while a Melton Mowbray's girth bulges voluptuously.
Partnered with an expert judge at the World Pie Awards I learnt to look for a 'shoulder' of fat on top of the jelly that should fill the gap between the meat and the pastry. This thin layer of white pork fat is an indication that the pie has been filled with the liquid jelly while the pie is still hot.
Probably more important is the pastry, so crisp and rich the knife rasps as it cuts in. Soft pastry has no place in a pork pie, except in the smooth pale inner lining before the layer of deeply savoury jelly around well-seasoned meat.
Picnic nirvana, however you judge it.
How we tested
All the pies were brought to room temperature, unwrapped and assigned a letter to anonymise them. They were judged blind.
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