Reach for the pie
Traditional British dishes such as steak and kidney pie may lack glamour but they remain firm favourites in many restaurants.
The latest Caterer & Hotelkeeper taste test found wide variations in both eating quality and nutritional value for six different steak and kidney pies.
Minimum meat content varied enormously, from 25% to 48%, although there was no clear correlation between this figure and eating quality.
There were also big differences in fat content of the pies, from 7.3g per 100g to 17.4g per 100g. But here there was a marked effect on taste, with more fat equating to lower perceived quality among the tasters.
All Caterer tastings are carried out "blind", with tasters being given information about products only after the marking.
Despite that, all the tasters spotted the higher fat content of some products and there was close agreement between the tasters on the relative merits of the pies.
Overall, three products performed very well, two were acceptable and one was felt to be in need of improvement. The tasters were asked to assess the products for visual impression, pastry quality, flavour of filling, meat quality and meat content.
Most of the products performed reasonably well on appearance and pastry quality, but there were wide differences when it came to meat quality and content. Some of the meat quality marks were among the lowest recorded for any of Caterer's taste tests in the past 18 months.
The amount of meat in products had little effect on marks because this factor was far less significant than the quality of the meat. But the higher-scoring pies tended to have tender, lean meat and small pieces of kidney.
Six caterers attended the tasting, held at the Briar Court Hotel, near Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. They were: Lucy Horner, operations manager with contract caterer BET; Neil Houghton, food and beverage manager at the Holiday Inn Midland, Manchester; Lisa Cameron, retail business manager with Bass Catering; Martin Walton, client account executive with Gardner Merchant East Pennines Division; Gordon Cross, meat buyer for Compass Services UK; and Isobel Kaye, hotel services manager at the Briar Court Hotel.
