Kitchen Sneak Peek
There are lots of elements to a great pie. Here at Chunk, we believe creating wonderful pies and pasties, happens by developing finely-tuned recipes and sourcing high-quality local ingredients (where we can!), then blending, shaping and baking with care. We couldn’t do it without our super-skilled hunks in the kitchen.
MD and co founder, Simon is a real foodie and he dreams up all of our recipes. The poor old team have to taste various creations of each pie and pasty (someone's got to do it 😝), then Simon tweaks the marinade or ingredient ratios until we achieve pie-fection. Once the recipe is ready, the team downstairs brings it to life!
Here’s a little sneak peek into the kitchen so you can see how some of your favourite dinners are made from scratch 👀
This is the seasoning station where fillings are seasoned with precision 👌 look at all those lovely herbs and spices (the smell is pretty great too!).
The meat and veggies are marinated in sauce and seasoning and simmer away to achieve the desired texture and quantities of gravy (aiming for melt-in-the-mouth and moist for most pies and pasties). Here's every mushroom lover's dream - a bubbling vat of mushroom and tarragon mixture for the Chicken and Mushroom pies.
Pastry of Dreams
Geoff, our resident pastry guru, is responsible for pastry perfection. Real butter and lard for us (we never use marge - it's work of the devil!) is mixed with fabulous flour from Shipton Mill, then it's rolled out by a clever machine and passed onto the crimping team where the pasties start to take shape. And what a shape it is! I spy some cheddar and onion pasties on the belt ready for crimping.
Handmade for a Rustic Look
The all-important crimping process is second nature to our crimping queens who on average can crimp 3 pasties per minute, but some of the real pros can manage 6 a minute. If you’ve never tried to crimp before, then let me tell you, it’s not as easy as it looks! (Rumour has it that Simon can crimp with both hands at once!)
Our pork pies are hand shaped too, and these experts do it effortlessly.
Once they’re looking lovely, off they pop into the oven to be baked and they’re ready to be packed and sent to customers all over the country. For more behind-the-scenes glimpses make sure you follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
