Ginsters pie is not the tonic

Ginsters Steak Pie Review

Ginsters may be more famous for their slices and pasties, but this Cornish-based company also produces pies. We’ve reviewed the large Ginsters chicken pie once before in a rather inventive post (the title of which, incidentally, also plays on the same pun as this post, but I’m not changing it), but how does the steak pie rate?

It’s a solid start. I don’t like to see corners cut on pies, unless it’s a square pie, of course.

Goodness, look at that! The pie is puffed up so well that it’s bursting out of the packaging! Either that or they just made the foil tin smaller to give it that effect..

Here’s the pie after 25 minutes in the oven. It’s a nice golden brown on the puff pastry lid. There’s not much to look at with this pie, however. The puff of the pastry on the top is quite impressive, but there’s no added little details.

On cutting the pie open, its problems really start to show. The flimsiness of the pie is apparent as it is crushed simply by me cutting into it. Now it looks a bit more like a sandwich than a pie. The filling doesn’t exactly scream “eat me, I’m delicious” either. While this view does show that there’s minimal airgap, this is actually a false “minimal airgap”, since the air was forced out as I crushed the pie trying to cut it open.

Okay, so I scraped all of the filling out of the pie, which made this rather small, unappetising grey-brown mound. The chunks of “steak” are in fact very small pieces of chewy meat swimming around in a gloopy, unpleasant sauce. The pastry also didn’t taste very nice, although the lid had a great crispiness to it. I was really struggling to find something wholesome or authentic about this pie, but really it did just seem to me to be a gloopy, chewy concoction of indiscernible ingredients encased within a tasteless pastry shell. And not even that cheap - £1.98 from Tesco’s.

Ginsters Steak Pie Review
2.32/7
TJP