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Vietnam is a place that is full of contradictions and difficult to understand. The population is still fed a heavy diet of communist propaganda, yet it in reality it is hardly even socialist. Capitalism is king and the gears of power are greased by the flow of money. All well and good I hear you say but how does this affect the pie market in Vietnam? Good question. One of the good things is that the new consumerism in Vietnam means that if pies are demanded then someone will supply pies to the market. The downside is that now people would have to pay for their pies. I would argue that pies are an unassailable human right, however this still seems like a distant dream.

I was quite prepared to part with some Vietnamese Dong if only I could get hold of a pie. Fortunately in the border town of Chau Doc near the Mekong river I came across someone selling desserts from a trolley by the side of the street. There was something that looked just like a lattice pie being sold for about 10p each. Unfortunately due to the proprietor of the establishment not speaking English this made it difficult to know what the product actually was. I had to take the risk. Upon biting into the product the cross-section revealed that this was indeed a pie. However the flavour was about as confusing as the politics of Vietnam. It looked like coconut but actually tasted like a crystallised sugar but wasn't overly sweet. It had a kinda starchy taste which reminded me of rice. I wonder if it might have had coconut sugar in it. So what did I think? The pastry was nice and flaky, however there perhaps was a lack of pastry due to the lattice top. The filling was weird, especially as I didn't really know what it was but tasted nice enough. I don't think this can be an official review as I don't know the flavour and would struggle to tell you where to go to get another one. However I have included a score in case you ever come across a similar looking product, it's worth a try!


3.46/7
SJL

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Here at Pierate we love a good, pun-heavy and banterous article title, even if it does come at the expense of actual accuracy for the pie it relates to. And this is no different, for I am not in any way promoting the eating of a Leak filled pie, or even a pie with any Leak in, but instead bigging up the very delicious Chicken and Bacon pie I had a while ago at my good friend Mr Leak’s house. It was a well crafted pie packed with Chicken and Bacon goodness, harking back to the good old days of meatilicious meals when we lived together.


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19 Gales Farmhouse Foods Crusty Steak Pie Review

So another British Pie week draws to a close, but we couldn’t say goodbye without one final pie that was bought in British Pie Week (even though I didn’t quite get round to eating it until today!) And while the weather’s certainly picked up in the last few days, there was more than a strong breeze hitting the farmers market near my workplace last week! For the “19 Gales Farmhouse Foods” steak pie was on sale near where I work and, of course, being British Pie week how could I possibly refuse? The lure of another ‘fresh from the farmhouse’ pie sounded too good to be true, on sale just a stone’s throw from my office window! GIA (Geography in Action) – the pies were coming to me! So you can imagine my disappointment when I heard the words “Yes, it is just a top crust...”

Gutted!

But being the persevering Pierateer that I am, and because there were only more and more top crust pies as an alternative, I felt a sense of duty to still purchase and consume the pie anyways. After all, I’ve had many a top crust pie before, and was bound to have one again. But you could sense the disappointment and lower score it was going to get, even as I was reassured that the meat was really tender and would be delicious.

19 Gales Farmhouse Steak Pie

19 Gales Farmhouse Steak Pie Cut-through

So the pie itself... the lid was golden brown. Slightly too thick a shortbread pastry lid at points – presumably over doing the fact that there was a pastry shortage elsewhere around the pie! However the steak was really tender and delicious and the gravy was lush too. One down point to only being a top crust was that the gravy had already started leaking out. Highly disappointing, and shouldn’t happen in a real pie. But while disappointing not to have a proper pie with full casing of pastry, it did taste nice and not badly priced at £2.39. And the great thing about 19 Gales farmhouse is that they "specialise in making high quality fruit and savoury pies".

I have no idea where the name of the farmhouse comes from, but if you’re sweeping by and feel blown over into getting a pastry snack, you shouldn’t be (gale) forced into buying one of these, even if it is “just a top crust”!

Score: 4.9/7
RAS

Pierate is a pie review website charting a course to find the ultimate pie. For all the pies we have reviewed have a look at our Pie Rankings or find pies of a particular flavour under Pies: Categorised. Make sure you Follow @pierateers and let us know your thoughts!

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Here at Pierate we had an inkling that the Australians might be a little crazy about pies, simply because there is an Australian shop called Jumbucks (review 1,2,3) in Shepherds Bush, London, devoted entirely to selling pies. So, in the recent spirit of foreign pie sampling, we really we had to visit Australia to confirm this phenomenon, and the results came as no surprise...
What's this? It's Pieface! This photo is of just one of many Pieface shops in Sydney. This chain of shops seems to be substantial indeed, as the Pierateers sometimes spotted multiple Piefaces on some high streets in Sydney (rather akin to the urban coffee shop chain culture in the UK). It seems that Pieface's unique selling point is drawing weird faces on their pies. The faces don't look particularly happy to me (perhaps that's because they know they are destined to be eaten), but the pies certainly taste fantastic. I had a minced beef and tomato chutney pie.

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I know this is British Pie Week but one of the great things about pies is that they are loved by many people all around the world, as we have already shown by some of our reviews of pies in Belgium and New Zealand. However I hadn't quite realised how extensively this love of pie spreads until a recent trip to Hong Kong. As a former British Colony there seems to be a special love of pies in what is dubbed Asia's World City. I was only there a day and had made no special effort to find an establishment selling our favourite pastry based product but I happened to stumble across Pie and Tart Specialists on Chatham South Road near the Hong Kong Museum of History. I have now found out they have quite a big chain of shops in Hong Kong, great to know they share our love of pies!

This was a take-away only type establishment with a street side counter with a long selection of pie and pseudo-pie products. What a great selection of pies they had too, all the typical pies you might expect such as chicken, mushroom and apple with some more unusual ones thrown in such a curry beef, blueberry and ostrich. I knew that I could only eat two pies while they were warm and before I was full (I didn't want to bias the test by being too full and therefore not enjoying the pie, we're professionals here y'know!). Thus I decided to get one 'normal' pie for comparison to its Western counterparts and another more outlandish pie. I settled on killing two bird with one stone by getting a Chicken Pie and an Ostrich Pie. I started with the Ostrich Pie which I was most excited about. This arrived in good condition and if there was a score for artistic presentation of the pie this would score highly. It had a nice crinkled edge and was sprinkled with sesame seeds. The pastry was more of the Chinese style except baked rather than fried or steamed as you would normally expect from Chinese pastry products. This worked well with a nice, thin, flaky texture to the pastry. The filling was a fantastic mixture of flavours. Not knowing the ingredients I tried to guess and what I picked up were green beans, potato, mushroom, onion, ostrich (not that I would know if it wasn't) and plenty of pepper along with some other spices that made it quite hot. There was just the right amount of gravy to make this a good portable snack whilst not being in the least dry. The ostrich itself tasted great, like a cross between beef and chicken. It was slightly chewy but not enough to significantly affect its score.
After this effort I was expecting great things from the chicken pie. However, it did look quite different and upon digging into the crumbly pastry I was to discover that the pastry was in fact sweet! This was despite the fact that the contents was a normal chicken pie. A bit of a culture shock for me, I overcame the weirdness by eating the filling first and then the pastry. I have to say that the filling was nice and gooey, it reminded me of a chicken pie from a fish and chip shop back home. However the pastry did ruin it for me. It might be nice if you are used to it but I can only judge things using my own tasted buds so this has affected the score. Never before have I had such different pies from one place.

These were cheap pies at 10.50 Hong Kong Dollars which weighs in at less than a pound. For the price this was a great value experience, even with the sweet chicken pie. Whilst I might not say it is worth a trip all the way to Hong Kong to get one, if you are changing flights it is very easy to pop and get one at Tung Chung which is a short bus ride from the airport. Hong Kong is also well worth seeing, with rugged mountains and some tranquil countryside. It isn't all skyscrapers as I was expecting.


Ostrich Pie - 6.26

Chicken Pie - 2.71

SJL

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Lamb and Rosemary Pie Review from Urban Pie

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So it comes to that all important first full week in March again, and the week all Pierateers savour the most. For it is, once again, British Pie Week! (5^th – 11^th March 2012)

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The popular evening BBC television show The One Show is on the hunt for the Nations Favourite Savoury Pie:  The One Show: Home Page. However, the competition to submit your favourite savoury pie recipes has now closed!

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Chatsworth Farm House Steak Pie Review

On quite a cold Sheffield afternoon, the lads turned up in full voice (well, I should clarify, the away fans were in full voice...) for a big League One clash followed by the main event - a pie tasting experience as recommended by one of our blog followers!

Having travelled up from various parts of the West Midlands and London, the gallant Wycombe Wanderers fans were in Sheffield, united by their love of pies and support of the League One Chairboys (which, I may add, are the only team to have reached at least the semi finals of every major professional and amateur cup competition). And while the result didn't quite go Wycombe's way (cue small graphic),
the main thing was the after match pie, and whether it would live up to its high billing. Remember, this pie was recommended as a 6/7 level pie. So let's dig in...

As a reminder, these pies were picked up from Chatsworth Farm Shop on the day of eating, just to ensure their freshness and provide the fullest flavour possible. Cooked until golden brown, the two Pierateers present, along with fellow football fans and our lovely Sheffield host family were all raring to go and delve into the meaty-licous content of the All Steak and Steak and Ale pies on offer. And as you can see, they were 4 large, steak filled beauties! Straight from the farm house and served up with a bit of mash and veg. The shortcrust pastry was golden and tasted nice, and the meat was absolutely top notch quality, however the pierateers did end up feel slightly let down by the lack of gravy oozing from the pie. For, as we all know, the North of England is well known for its infamous floods of gravy - and yet that was one of the major drawbacks of this Chatsworth pie! For while the content wasn't dry, and the steak was not chewy in the slightest, there was a severe lack of gravy in the pie. Mixed in combo with the drier shortbread pastry, this left a slight sense of disappointment.

However all things considered, this did not detract too heavily as the quality and quantity of the meat was spot on! The filling to pastry ratio was ideal and it certainly hit the back of the net. And you couldn't find a nicer host family in Sheffield to recommend and provide the pies for us, so a big thank you to the "A Senior" posse. And to our non-Pierateer Blues fans (Mark and Steve) who made the whole trip even more random and more enjoyable!

Remember, if you want to Suggest A Pie, and thus potentially have the Pierateers turn up on your doorstep demanding a piece of your pie, leave a comment on the Suggest A Pie page!


Chatsworth Farm House Steak Pie
Score: 5.8/7
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New Zealand Pie Review - Gold Star Bakery

Here at Pierate we heard a claim that a small pie shop in a small town in a small country was delivering some top quality pies that could beat anything we've ever tried before. It's a claim we hear often, and obviously we're always willing to do what it takes to put the claims to the test. Even if it means travelling to a small pie shop in a small town in the small country of New Zealand...

 The Gold Star Bakery in Rotorua, on the North Island of New Zealand, boasts victory at the Supreme Pie Awards in 2003, 2004 and 2009. As we all well know, the Supreme Pie Awards are a pretty big deal, with many international Pierateers keeping a keen eye on the results each year. It was certainly a great privilege to have been given this opportunity by Pierate.co.uk to sample one of their pies firsthand.
 The Gold Star Bakery is very proud of its awards. Incidentally, Rotorua is a town built in a geothermally active area. Let's hope the pie doesn't smell of sulphur like the rest of the town does.
I buy a Chicken and Vegetable pie, which was awarded a Silver Medal at the 2009 NZ Supreme Pie Awards. The packaging informs me of the Gold Star's additional awards of NZ Pie Award Winner 2005, 2006 and 2007. I am very excited!
The pie contains genuine bits of chicken contained in a crispy crunchy delicious golden pastry package, along with some of the smoothest gravy known to the man. The consistency of the gravy is an absolute delight. Too many times I've had a pie that's fallen apart in my hands, but the texture of this pie holds it together perfectly. No fork needed! As you can see the pie is filled to the brim with delicious content. I'm not surprised it's an award winner! The cost was about NZ$4.00, which is about £2.00, not bad for a winning pie. While I would say that the pie is worth travelling to New Zealand for, it's not the best pie I've ever had. It's drawback? When you've had the likes of a Venison and Prune pie, the ingredients in this offering are just not really that inventive.


Score: 6.41/7
TJP

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So, less than 16 hours remain until the big match up that they've all been waiting for - and I'm not just talking about the football between Sheffield United and Wycombe!

For this weekend marks the first opportunity for the Pierateers to trial a pie that has been recommended to them by a reader of the blog, even if it is not from the recommended "Suggest A Pie" option on pierate.co.uk! (For those not aware, there is the option to Suggest A Pie to the lads, which they will hopefully (in the fullness of time) be able to go and rate themselves.)

Some of you will remember the article I am referring to, where there were two comments regarding the article on "good things coming to those who wait". In these comments, the kind commenter suggested coming up to Sheffield to taste the delights of a Chatsworth Farmshop pie. Well, ladies and gentlemen, this weekend sees the opportunity for that dream to come true! And with it, a goosy gander at the big League One clash between Sheffield United and Wycombe. So, keep your eyes peeled in the next few days for a review of the pie, and if the result is not too demoralising on Wycombe, maybe a reference to the footie result too!

p.s. Did you know...

Who ate all the pies? – the chant was first sung in 1984 by Sheffield United fans- aimed at goalkeeper William 'Fatty' Foulke – who weighed over 300lb.

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