How to make a cheese and onion pasty

Our secret to making a delicious cheese and onion pasty (or any pasty for that matter) is to use top-notch ingredients and follow a simple recipe. You'll find no nasty additives or processing in the Chunk kitchen!

To make the perfect shortcrust pastry, you’ll need lots of butter! Butter results in that beautiful flaky texture we all want when we take a bite of a pasty. We also stipulate the use of brilliant strong flour that hails from Shipton Mill, along with a dash of salt. Roll your dough out to the ideal thickness and cut into a circle shape. We have some help in the Chunk kitchen of a handy machine that rolls the pastry so that it's spot on every time!

Now it's time to stuff it with the sumptuous cheese and onion mix! Lightly baked potato, onion and oodles of mature cheddar are combined to make up the filling of this tasty lunchtime treat. All seasoned perfectly, of course! Once mixed well, our kitchen hunks scoop the filling and place it on the circle of pastry, slightly over to one side as you can see here. In our kitchen these whiz by on belts so we can fill lots in one go and make the quantity needed.

Our master crimpers then work their magic (it's not all that easy to get a beautiful crimp!) and the pasties are popped on the tray for glazing and baking. At home, you'd use egg to glaze the outside of the pastry, necessary for achieving that lovely sheen and cracking texture but we use a special pea glaze on all our bakes (making them egg free for those with allergies!).

We’ve always had such great feedback about this Cheddar and Onion pasty so we didn’t want to change the recipe too much but one of Simon’s favourite sayings is “better never stops”, and as part of our regular tasting sessions we’re always looking for ways we can make our products even tastier!

Therefore, the decision was made to up the cheese factor ever so slightly! We've whacked in a bit more mature cheddar and they blew us away at the last tasting session. There's around an extra kilo of cheese per batch! Cheesier and even more delicious 🧀🧀🧀 These beauties are great hot or cold, and make an ideal lunch with a handful of chips and a dollop of coleslaw.