Cumpstey’s small pies

The second tasting session had us working up our pie appetites on a 3.5 church and 0.1 dog walk from North Burlingham, via Hemblington to South Walsham and back. Visiting all three’s churches and half a church at South Walsham (the old church ruin) yielded two scratch dials – a very interesting one at South Walsham was protected by Perspex! We then visited The Ship to enjoy beer from Oulton Broad, without dogs – Giada did not come with us and Keith took Coffee home shortly after starting the walk. The pies this week were small pork pies with a good appearance from Cumpstey’s the butcher in Acle – we’ve had their large pies before, but we would be experiencing a new crust to filling ratio. A good pie scoring a respectable, spot on 8 with a standard deviation of 0.774597, so that’s a normalised 8 for Cumpstey’s smalls! Following the pie munching, Ricky produced an almond cake cooked by Keith, after a few tentative tasters, we soon made short work of it – well done Keith!

Scratch dial at South Walsham

Trafalgar day - Archers (Est. 1929)

Trafalgar day saw us taking the train from Reedham Railway station to Berney Arms and walking back to the Railway Station. We called in for a pint at the Ship – unfortunately, the Lord Nelson wasn’t on the route. The good news was that we did have enough pie munchers to form a quorum and we had two medium pork pies from Archers the butchers (since 1929) recent winners of the best Norfolk Banger competition for the second time in a row. The pies had a good external appearance and released a lovely bouquet when cut. The piecrust was very good, perhaps due to the fact it was fresh – pies were still slightly warm when purchased on Saturday. The filling lacked oomph… and it wasn’t helped as the mustard had disappeared! I think mustard would have helped this pie achieve a higher score than the 7.1 on this occasion; the standard deviation was high at 0.89443. So quite an average normalised score of 7 for Archers