Taste test: pork pies

Standing out from some of the industrially-made pies is this offering from Gill’s, made in Wolverhampton by F A Gill. It’s ‘hand-finished’, which can mean it’s been painstakingly made from scratch by a grandmother in a farmhouse or briefly crimped together on a factory line. Either way, it has a nice homemade look to it, and it’s a decent size for the price. The meat is good quality – no grey mush here – and it isn’t over-seasoned, with just enough pepper to counteract the fat. The pastry itself was moreish and rich, with a nice firmness to it.

While a few on our tasting panel found this award-winning pie a little too salty, the majority were big fans of the meat, which actually tasted of roast pork instead of just having a generic meatiness. That’s probably because it’s made by Poxons Butchers (a Q Guild member, placing them amongst the best butchers in the world), another Wolverhampton-based business that proves while Melton Mowbray might be the spiritual home of the pork pie, the West Midlands clearly has a fondness for them, too. The pastry was thinner and less firm than others on the table, but this wasn’t a bad thing, just a different approach to the art of pork pie production.

Now to the best of the supermarket pork pies – M&S have a few different ones on offer, but this was the one we found tasted the nicest. Made in Melton Mowbray to EU-designated standards that give it PDO protection, this is exactly what you expect when biting into a pork pie; porky, almost bacon-like meat with a kick of pepper, a thin coating of jelly and a crisp, fatty pastry that holds its shape when cut or bitten. Size-wise, it sits somewhere in between a mini and a sharing pie, so you can devour it on your own for lunch without overdoing it.