Tesco Slow Cooked Steak Short Crust PIe

Description: Tesco slow cooked steak short crust pie.

Cost: 2 for £3.50.

Cooking: 35 minutes on number 6 from chilled.

Verdict: First impressions? Well this looked like a nice pie. They put quite a lot of blurb on the packaging. Firstly they mention "20% more steak" and looking that ingredients they state 44% steak, so that already sounds quite promising.

They also have a detailed description on the back of the packaging which I copy below:

"we pride ourselves on making brilliant deep fill pies, created by master bakers with years of experience. First there’s the pastry. Our short crust melts in the mouth while our puff is light and flaky - as good as anything you could make at home. 

Then there’s the filling, We`ve put 20% more meat in each pie, so every bite is packed with delicious, flavoursome good stuff. We use only British steak, carefully slow cooking it to ensure it stays beautifully tender and succulent. It’s all topped off with a rich glossy gravy that’s full of flavour.

Finally our skilled bakers are on hand to make sure every pie is cooked to crisp golden perfection - a treat for the whole family."

So all in all, its sounding good!

In the oven it goes whilst I prepare some lovely new potatoes off my garden along with the usual peas.

The pie was ready on time as per the cooking instructions. I cut into it and it had a lovely crust on it. The base was also just right, not too stodgy at all - so if you’re after a more stodgy pie this wouldn’t be for you. The contents looked good, nice chunks of beef, not 100% tender as id expect from slow cooked beef, but not too bad. There also was a nice amount of gravy which looked good but is where this pie failed desperately. Whilst it looked like nice gravy it simply tasted just like water. I couldn’t believe it. No taste at all. The meat was nice and had a good flavour to it - without any lumps of gristle or fat, but the gravy was shocking. It really ruined the whole pie.

I don’t understand how they could ruin the gravy. I made a lovely homemade steak & ale pie last week and after slow cooking the steak for about 3 hours on the stove, the juices and flavours all went into my gravy and tasted just amazing. I didn’t even need to add anything other than an oxo cube to it. It’s not rocket science.

All in all, I wouldn’t buy this buy again. In my opinion it wasn’t as tasty as their value ones.

Calorie count is 473 calories per 1/3rd of the pie.

Rating?   3 out of 10.

UPDATE: Tried this pie again tonight and this time the gravy was much better, so maybe the previous poor gravy was a one off. This time the gravy was very thick, quite tasty and complimented the steak quite nicely. The pie had a good amount of nice sized chunky lumps of steak - which was tender and quite nice. No grisle. This time around though both Mrs Pieman & myself felt the pastry wasnt as good as it could have been. There was quite a bit of crust around the outside of the pie.

However, due to the improved gravy experience this time around, id now rate this pie as a 6 out of 10 and certainly one to try if you fancy a nice steak pie. I would also point out that if you are reasonably hungry you`ll easily eat half this pie, like I did.