Who doesn’t love a Pork Pie? Especially an award-winning one. Nick gets his laughing gear around a Pork Farms Pork Pie.

I admit I do have a bit of a pork pie habit. I always pick one up when doing the Saturday supermarket shop and make sure it’s the last thing I put on the conveyor belt at the checkout. This means it gets packed last and is on top of the bag.

This means that once all the bags are in the car I can easily take it out, get in the driver’s seat and commence eating. Usually while stationary, but not always.

You think drivers on mobile phones are bad? Try seeing me maneuvering out the superstore car park with a half-eaten pork pie clutched in my steering hand.

It’s the pastry, the jelly and the porkiness I love and hearing there was a pork pie that had won the equivalent of a food oscar, I had to try it.

Pork Farms entered the Great Taste Awards and won an award in the traditional pork pie category for their Pork Farms Medium Melton Mowbray Pie.

And they aren’t some artisan producing three pies a year and an’interesting’ back story, they are in fact the UK’s best selling pork pie brand in the UK and they dominate the pork pie market with a 40% market share of the branded market.*

So what is it like? I picked one up and, forcing myself to behave, got it home without incident. There I unwrapped it and instead of biting into it instead cut it up genteelly, got some salad (my body’s a temple,after all) and dug out a jar of Branston’s Pickle. Some people will insist a pork pie needs mustard, I won’t say some people are wrong. But they are.

I always like the jelly layer, but some pies also include a lot of air between crust and pork too. A good pie shouldn’t have its crust come off when you cut it into quarters.

Pork Farms pie has meat all the way to the properly thin jelly layer so it slices neatly and holds together. Actually it’s so dense with meat it takes a fair bit of effort to cut, I had to use two hands on the chopper.

The pastry is light, friable and the meat well-seasoned and slightly peppery. A whole pie is enough for two we found, although I could have happily eaten an extra quarter. It’s slightly too big, overall, for successful car park consumption though.

A pork pie is a marvellous thing, something the UK can be proud to call its own. In a just world it would be famous across the globe and eaten by gourmets.

For details on the Pork Farms product range, and Melton Mowbray pies in particular, visit the Pork Farms Website