Nice Pie Partridge in a Pear Pie Review

You can probably imagine my surprise when, having joked to Nice Pie on twitter “I don’t suppose you do a ‘partridge in a pear tree’ pie for Christmas, do you?” that the answer was yes – yes they do! But perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised! After all, Nice Pie have provided us with a whole menagerie of exotic pies that have rated very well on the 7 Cs of pie rating!

Nice Pie Partridge Pie Review

Of course the Partridge in a Pear Tree is famed as the first and most repeated line in the Christmas tune “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. The partridge in a pear tree was in fact the kick start to what the true love gave over those 12 days of Christmas. But surely what your true love would really want for Christmas is a pie – rather than a tree with a bird in?! The question is… could the partridge in a pear pie be that ideal pie? Could the novelty flavour work in a pie? Is this what we’ve been missing from the Christmas table the last few years?




The partridge in a pear pie contained – as you might have guessed – large pieces of partridge within a pear and pear cider filling. The pieces of meat were spread through the pie, surrounded by what was like a pear puree with some small crisp pieces of pear. The pastry was crisp and lightly golden, holding well considering how packed to the capacity the pie was with content. There were a few crumbly bits but on the whole held together well and could be picked up too.

Nice Pie Partridge Pie Review

There were some very big pieces of partridge in the pie, which could have been cut a little smaller and distributed across the pie to spread the flavour a little more, but you certainly couldn’t miss the meaty content of this pie! The partridge itself was a dark meat, a bit chewier than your typical chicken or turkey meat, though it reminded me more of the latter. It was just a little dry in places, probably due to the filling of the pie being more of a moist, pear filling than a gravy-style consistency.

The content was certainly weighted more towards the meat, which I for one wasn’t complaining about! The pear had quite a sweet tang to it, which is a bit more of an acquired taste and not something I had really sampled in much cooking, let alone a savoury dish! It infiltrated the meat and pastry, flavouring the whole pie. While making it quite a sweet dish as a result, this pie certainly lived up to its billing as partridge in a pear pie!

I’d certainly sum this pie up as a novelty pie, rather than one I would regularly want to eat (but then this is very much a Christmas pie!) The sweetness of the pie was a little too much for me to have a large portion, but it would be a real talking point on the Christmas dinner table! To be honest, I still can't believe this pie actually exists! And for such a large meat-filled pie, containing partridge, this was very impressive and unique for just £6.50. For fans of the ‘meat and sweet’ combo I’d certainly recommend giving it a try, however I would also be intrigued by a partridge and gravy pie. Still, that wouldn’t make such a good line in a song…

Nice Pie Partridge in a Pear Pie
Score: 4.64/7
[Colour 5.5, Capacity 6, Consistency 3.5, Condition 5, Chewiness 4, Cheapness 5, Content 3.5, Total: 4.64/7]
RAS

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Nice Pie - Crocodile Leek & Potato Pie Review

I had heard great things about Nice Pie from my Pierateer colleagues. We have reviewed many of their exotic pie flavours with most of them achieving ‘Pierate Recommended’ or ‘Pierate Highly Recommended’ status. This is pretty impressive when they are taking such a unusual meat as squirrel, bison, camel, zebra etc and making them into a pie. On the pierate ship we have tried making some exotic meat pies ourselves but the question always is, what flavours do you add to the meat?! We had some success with our Zebra pie, however, our Python pie for British Pie Week was revolting!



So on the first day of British Pie Week I was very pleased to be able to include a Nice Pie, Crocodile, Leek & Potato, as part of my #pie4everymeal challenge. I was a bit apprehensive. Would leek and potato really go with crocodile meat? You associate leeks, potatoes and pie as very British things and Crocodile is about as British as the Great Wall of China.

I had the pie for dinner but there was another aspect that made me a little apprehensive, as part of the challenge I had to eat the whole pie. This was certainly not an individual sized pie coming in at around 1200 calories. Have a look at the video from 8:00 minutes to see what I thought.




Well hopefully you got the idea that I liked it! But I will now reveal how I scored it! This pie was great, not just for an exotic meat pie but even compared to more regular pie flavours. I would most closely compare it to a chicken pie, indeed chicken would have worked in place of the crocodile in the filling. However, the texture of the crocodile made it much more interesting than a normal chicken version and it was not dry at all like chicken can be. It was flaky, almost like fish, it didn't have much flavour that I could detect but took on the flavour of the sauce. The sauce was creamy and delicious. The balance of flavours was perfect and the contrast in texture throughout the pie kept me wanting more. I know that it was truly a pie which should gain ‘Highly Recommended’ status because even after eating so much of it I still thought it tasted amazing. The presentation was also wonderful with firm pastry which meant this pie stayed in one piece despite having been transported quite far in my back pack (and in Pierateer RAS’s suitcase before that). The pastry tasted nice but perhaps it was a little too thick in places, this perhaps was a trade off to get such sturdiness to the pastry. However it wasn’t hard or dry in any way. The Capacity was large, as with many of these Nice Pies. This would have happily served two or three people. There isn't much they could do to make the pie score even higher. Overall, the highest score we have yet given to a Nice Pie and the highest scoring 'exotic meat' pie in our overall pie rankings!

This pie was very similar in size and shape to the Bison and Camel pies we have reviewed recently and at £5.50 they are excellent value for pies of this size, plus they contain 'exotic meat' which is normally more expensive. Nice work guys!

Crocodile, Leek & Potato (Nice Pie)
6.39/7

SJL

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Nice Pie Bison and Beer Pie Review

I cannot tell you how nice it was to wake up on Wednesday morning and not have to eat an apple pie! Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing wrong with apple pie for breakfast (I’ve done it many a time!) but for Day Two of British Pie Week, I had made a #PiePledge to only eat sweet pies for a day. Therefore after 2,580 kcal (just over my daily recommended calorie intake of 2,500 kcal) of nothing but sweet apple pie, my taste buds needed a change!

Nice Pie's Bison and Beer Pie

Up stepped the meaty Bison Pie we’d been given from Nice Pie. And quite a whopper it was! Certainly a sharing pie, at £5.50 this is good value for a pie for two and I ate half for my lunch and then the other half for my supper. Good flavour, lovely tender Bison meat and a very good pastry somehow holding all this meaty content in!

It was great to see that the pie makers at Nice Pie had improved their pastry recipe to make it less crumbly and more delicious. The pastry tasted a bit more buttery and held together a lot better than the pastry on the previous zebra and squirrel pie I had eaten. It was strong enough to encase the lovely meat but with so much meat inside it was bound to struggle slightly to hold the weight of all the content! All in all, I’d much rather have delicious pastry like this than something that holds the pie together but is so thick and dry as to make the pastry:filling ratio all wrong! Piefection, of course, it perfectly blending the two!

Nice Pie's Bison and Beer Pie

The Bison meat tasted lovely and tender, clearly having been slow cooked for a long time to improve the taste. I have to admit to my untrained pallet the meat didn’t have a noticeably different flavour to a good, tender beef steak filling - but that’s not a bad thing as a good beef steak filling is always very enjoyable! After all, it’s a nice meaty flavour. My only slight query is whether I’d consider paying more for Bison meat over a nice beef steak, but I guess that is up to the consumer! The accompaniment to the Bison meat was Old Dalby Pale Ale from Belvoir Brewery, which made a nice gravy which complemented the meat well. This didn’t provide a lot of variety in flavour from the meat and ale, though this isn’t really a problem for a meat loving Pierateer!

Having eaten hundreds of pies I feel I have had nicer ale gravy before, and preferred the steak in red wine gravy pie I reviewed from Nice Pie, however it was still a very nice flavour. With so much delicious meat I would certainly recommend this pie, though my main concern for the poor old bison is that it may not be “quirky” enough for the pie purchaser that was looking for a very unusual pie flavour to wow the dinner guests with. In that case, I would recommend checking out the rest of the Nice Pie exotic pie range, such as the zebra pie, squirrel pie, wild boar pork pie, kangaroo pie or crocodile pie.

Nice Pie Bison and Beer Pie
Score: 5.93/7
[Colour 6/7; Consistency 6/7; Cheapness 5/7; Chewiness 6.25/7; Condition 6.5/7; Content 5.5/7; Capacity 6.25/7; Total: 5.93/7]
RAS

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Nice Pie Camel Pie Review

Coming out of the oven, you can see the pie has taken on a lovely golden brown colour. I am also a big fan of the camel stencil on the pastry, and love how there's no scrimping with the crimping round the edge - this pie is in great condition.

Opening up the pie, the pastry is nearly packed to capacity - although you can see a definite air gap there.

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Nice Pie Kangaroo Pie Review

You may recall that yesterday Pierateer RAS went nuts for a squirrel pie from Nice Pie. But you’d be hopping mad not to try this kangaroo pie from Nice Pie too!

Seriously though, this pie contains kangaroo meat. Are Nice Pie courting disaster with this one? Do they need to buck up their ideas?


Wow, look at that pastry! I really wallaby eating this pie right now. It would be rood not to try it! The pastry is a little crumbly round the edges, but that’s more my fault than anything. I’m sure if I wasn’t so clumsy then the Condition of this pie would be excellent. I especially like the added touch of the pastry kangaroo silhouette on the lid - just in case you forgot you were about to eat kangaroo.
At £3.50, this is really quite the bargain for quite a sizeable pie that contains quite an exotic meat. It’s not like these guys popped down to the wholesalers and bought some cheap beef. Skippy the Bush Kangaroo is quite hard to catch.
But £3.50 becomes even more of a bargain when you open up the pie and view the cross-section:

Pure, unadulterated meat. They’re certainly not joeyking around here. There’s minimal airgap in this pie. The pie has good Capacity and they’re filled it to the pastry with Content. But how does the Content taste? I’ve never eaten kangaroo before, and after eating it it’s quite hard to describe. It’s a bit like venison. It has a nice flavour, and was very tender although a little dry in the mouth.
Nice Pie certainly give you copious amounts of meat, which is brilliant. I would have personally preferred a bit more gravy, as the kangaroo seemed naturally quite dry.
The pastry was very tasty and obviously of very high quality, although perhaps a little short and the lid was quite crumbly. I do like a lid that you can break, but I think it should have been able to hold itself together a little better than it did.

So with a bounce in my step, it’s time for the final score. Plus points were the condition of the pie (especially the kangaroo cut-out), the tasty pastry, the inventiveness of the content, the cost and the fact that the pie was filled to capacity. For me, this pie was slightly let down by the fact that there wasn’t enough gravy to compensate for the natural dryness of the kangaroo.


Nice Pie Kangaroo Pie Review
Score: 5.8/7
TJP

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