Four pies good, two pies bad

With the nation in the midst of a cruel cold snap, I thought it was high time to fire up the oven and get tasting mince pies. What could be a better food to snack on when the mercury starts falling than a combination of pastry and sweet fruity goo. In such a climate it is more important than ever to heat the pie through before eating.  And please, stay away from the microwave – soggy pastry is not satisfying.

I have opted for a slightly different format for this round of the evaluation.  A return visit to Budgens in Hampstead yielded a pack of eight assorted mince pies, provided by a Dunn’s Bakery in Crouch End.  The price tag on this box (It was £8.30, though on ‘special offer’ at £4.99) demonstrated that this particular set of pies would not be budget. But pricey is not always synonymous with delicious. What intrigued me more was the presence of a wholemeal pastry pie amongst the selection. This seemed almost too healthy to be true. There was also a puff pastry pie, a thin pie, and a deep pie. With such a wide range of mince pies in this single box I thought that there was easily enough material for a one-manufacturer taste test. Which I did for breakfast on Saturday. However I realised that this is a tad exclusive of the majority of people who may not be able to access Dunn’s bakery. So a second pie from a more mainstream source was in order. I had a luxury booze-soaked mince pie from Marks and Spencer’s. Brandy and port to be specific. Unfortunately the box was at work so I can’t recount the exact wording of its name, and there is no photo. They come in a purple box.

The Dunn's pies came stacked two deep, and without the plastic tray - most pleasing!

Eating the pies for breakfast made me appreciate different aspects of the flavour. To be honest they were in general a little too rich to eat straight after waking up, but I did manage with a little help to eat most of all four different Dunn’s pies. The first one I tried was the puff-pastry pie. This was in my opinion just an Eccles cake. Though I suppose that really all Eccles cakes are just puff-pastry mince pies. It was a little greasy, in the way that puff-pastry always is, but not unpleasantly so. My glamorous guest-taster proclaimed it to be her favourite pie, but she also didn’t know what an Eccles cake is.

Next the thin pie. This had a high pastry to filling ratio, which is something I like – provided the pastry is good. And it was good: crunchy and very short, though the whole pie fell apart when I bit into it owing to the lid not being attached to the base. The filling was very hot, probably because I had left them in the oven whilst I had a shower. It had a particularly fruity orangey taste. This was nice in small doses.

Moving on to the deep filled pie. This was hard to eat because the large quantity of filling spilled out when my teeth puncture the pastry. There was too much filling really, but this was to be expected given it was deep filled. I also thought that it was too sweet and too orangey. At this stage it was pointed out to me that all the pies had the same filling.

Finally, the wholemeal pie. This was the same format as the standard deep pie. I quite like wholemeal, and was excited by the prospect of this one. But too much sugar had been put on top, with the result that the wholemeal pastry tasted like very chewy normal pastry. As my guest-taster eloquently put it, “it tastes wrong”.

I think that it is appropriate to name a winner from the different Dunn’s, to go forward to challenge other manufacturers. It has to be the thin pie, which benefited from not having too much orangey sweet filling. It also had normal, shortcrust pastry. Puff and wholemeal was not quite right in my opinion, although I have noticed that several supermarkets stock puff varieties, and so a dedicated puff round may be in order.

The tasting of the boozy M&S pie occurred the following day. Which probably means that it is not a fair comparison, but this isn’t meant to be fair, it’s meant to be up to me. In a token gesture to keeping other variables constant, I chose the same drink to accompany both Dunn’s and M&S, namely a cup of tea (preferable to red wine, especially for breakfast).

Note the attractive snow flake motif on top

M&S luxury pie was deep filled, with similar pastry to the standard offering. The filling was indeed boozy tasting. To be honest, I don’t think that this added much to the flavour. Also it was on the whole a little stodgy.

So in the showdown between Dunn’s and M&S we have orange pitted against booze. Neither variation of mincemeat really made me salivate, so the contest comes down to pastry (as so often it has in this evaluation). And in this analysis it is Dunn’s that comes out on top. You really can tell the difference between factory made and bakery made pastry.

I promise to include more readily available pies next time!