Chambers Meat Services

Off to Barnham Broom with pies from Chambers Meat Services of Beccles for the first pie tasting of September. The Weather Wizard could find no dry location for the pie tasting warm up. We set off from the church of St. Peter & St. Paul, in light rain on a four church walk. The rain soon eased and by the second All Saints church, it had completely stopped. Lunch was taken in the forth and final church of St. Michael, Coston, yielding our only scratch dial. Even though the weather was cool, Giada made good use of the puddles! From the church we returned to the cars via the Bell in Barnham Broom – the Green King IPA had just gone off, so we made do with a half of frothy John Smiths Smooth. Thankfully, King Canape had provided Panamanian King Prawns with a Marie Rose sauce to get the taste buds back into shape, before we sampled what were claimed to be “The best pork pies in Beccles”. The pies had a good appearance, with a dark meat filling and a little jelly. The pastry was rather bland and the filling very meaty, some questioned if it was 100% pork. The flavour was OK and enhanced with a little mustard. Not a bad pie, coming in with a score of 6.875, but leaves you wondering if this was really the best Beccles can do. The standard deviation was quite high at 0.99103. So a normalized sore of 7 for Chambers Meat Services. On the way home we stopped to have a half of a decent beer, Elgoods Cambridge and Adnams Bitter, at the Marlingford Bell.

Tesco's Crispy Bake Pork Pies

Another wet start to the pre-pie walk, our weather wizard took us west to Hempton, just south-west of Fakenham. The walk took in two churches, none with scratch dials, and by the time we’d reached the first, the weather had cleared up. We had lunch in the second, then Giada had a swim in a nearby pond. We then only had about two and a quarter miles to go to the Bell in Hempton for a pleasant pint. Returning to the cars for mini poppadoms & potato squares to dip into a mixed olive & tomato and a Jalapeño Houmous. Next a new pie: Tesco's new Medium Crispy Bake Pork Pies – these appeared to be hand made, not being of a uniform shape. Slicing revealed a nice pink filling with a small amount of jelly, but it’s the munching that counts. Sadly these pies disappointed, the crust was OK, the little jelly nice, but the filling lacking any intensity of flavour and having no aroma. The pies scored a spot on 4.7, but opinions were very mixed, individual scores ranging from 2 to 7.5, resulting in a massive standard deviation of 1.81353 – the highest we’ve recorded. So a normalised 4.5 for Tesco Crispy Bake Pork Pies.