Six Regulars, Four Pies, One Verdict: The Great Pork Pie Blind Taste-Off in Our Snug

There are certain things a village pub simply has to get right. A decent pint. A fire that actually works in February. And, in our opinion at least, a pork pie that doesn't embarrass itself on the bar snack board.

So we decided to settle the matter properly. Four pork pies — ours, plus three anonymous supermarket versions picked up on a Tuesday run to Scunthorpe — were trimmed of their labels, cut into identical wedges, and presented to six regulars who had volunteered their taste buds with suspicious enthusiasm.

The rules were simple. No peeking, no cheating, no swapping notes with the person next to you. Each pie was scored out of ten in three categories: the pastry, the filling, and what we officially termed the 'worth bringing home to mum' factor.

The Panel of Experts (Self-Appointed)

Our six judges were a cross-section of Barrow upon Humber as it comes: two farmers, a retired schoolteacher, the woman who runs the post office counter on a Thursday, one of our darts players, and young Danny from the boatyard who claimed he'd 'eaten a lot of pies in his time' as if it were a credential worth listing on a CV.

They took their seats in the snug, scorecards in hand, with the solemnity of a magistrates' bench. The retired schoolteacher brought her own reading glasses. The farmers brought opinions.

Round One: The Pastry

The first wedge went round and the room went quiet, which in this pub is genuinely remarkable. Then the notes started.

'Good crunch, slightly dry.' 'Proper hand-raised feel to it.' 'Tastes like the pastry my nan made, and I mean that as a compliment.'

One judge — we won't say which farmer — wrote simply: ' pastry: 11.' We disallowed it. The scoring is out of ten, Gerald.

Round Two: The Filling and the Jelly Question

If there's one thing guaranteed to divide a room faster than the offside rule, it's the question of how much jelly a pork pie ought to contain. Our panel split roughly down the middle: three judges wanted a generous wobble, three considered excessive jelly 'a filling scam'.

The filling scores were closer than we expected. Two of the supermarket offerings put in genuinely respectable performances, and at one point young Danny muttered 'hang on' and re-tasted a wedge three times, apparently unwilling to believe his own mouth.

The Verdict

We tallied the scores, double-checked the arithmetic, and announced the results to a room holding its breath and its pint in equal measure.

Ours came out on top — by a single point.

Not the landslide we'd hoped for, if we're honest. One of the supermarket 'premium' pies scored so well on pastry that two judges demanded to know its identity before the results were read out, convinced it was ours. When the reveal came, there was a silence, then a low chorus of 'well I never' from the snug.

But the top score in the 'worth bringing home to mum' category went firmly to our pie, with the schoolteacher noting that it 'actually tastes of pig, which these days is saying something'. From a woman who has taught half the village to read, we'll take that as the review of the year.

The Arguments, Naturally

No proper taste test ends without a row, and this one delivered. The jelly faction reconvened at the bar and carried on for another hour. Gerald maintained that his eleven should have counted. Danny has asked, twice now, whether we can run the same test with pork scratchings.

The upshot is this: we're quietly chuffed, the kitchen is insufferably smug, and the losing supermarket pies didn't go to waste — they were finished off with a jar of pickle by the darts team, who declared themselves 'not fussy, me'.

The moral of the story? Come and judge for yourself. The pies are on the bar snack menu, the pickle is free, and if you can beat Gerald's scorecard, we'll buy you the pint to wash it down.