A bit about the Cheese and Onion Pasty
We’ve been making our Cheese and Onion pasty for 15 years. 🤪 Since we started, this has always been a best seller for us and, like all our recipes, it's an award winner.
A real simple recipe and probably a bit of an underdog when it comes to people shouting about NEW fancy recipes. You'll find a Cheese and Onion pasty in everyone deli/butcher/supermarket. But they really do vary in taste.
It's not been a straightforward run for us with this pasty.
We have always taste tested our pasties and pies each week, not all of them in one go ! A small selection. 👍🏼 Wednesday is always a good day to be in Chunk HQ… you’ll get served a smorgasbord of savouriness! 🥟 🥧...all you have to do is pass a comment on what we serve. Easy !
Our Cheese and Onion pasty was doing just great and people loved it. But then a few years back, in one of the tastings we found our wonderful Cheese and Onion pasty had lost its mojo - something had happened to this tasty pasty. 😳
The team got on it.
Checking the recipe, making sure the fills were being correctly weighed out, cooking times were spot on, baking times too.
A mystery...our cheese and onion pasty was not winning us over. We are super fussy here at Chunk...if something doesn't taste right or have enough real flavour we are on a mission to sort it!
We dug deeper. Checking the potato, onions, butter, seasoning...then the cheese... This is where it got interesting.
The cheese didn’t taste right. The texture was wrong and the cheese had just no flavour, so we took the next step of contacting our Cheese supplier (not going to mention any names here 🤭 ).
The cheese was supplied to us ready-grated and in large bags. Which was super handy for us ..you wouldn't want to be grating that amount of cheese each day!
However - Our supplier was rather vague when questioned, why our mature cheddar was not tasting as it should. This did not go down well with Claire, our Technical Manager. She doggedly pestered them, asking all the quality and specification questions a food techie needs to, and over a couple of weeks got the answer we all in our hearts knew.
That wasn’t Cheddar they were giving us…! Not sure what it was, we reckoned a random mix of grated cheese they produced and not the cheddar we had specified.
We lost faith in these guys and started looking for another supplier. Thinking it would be an easy fix - but no.
We tasted many cheeses from many cheese producers, opting for varying strengths of cheddar. Some of them tasted deliciously cheesy, but when actually cooked into the pasty, the flavour was lost.
A lot of other cheese pasties are made with fake flavours and this is not the Chunk way. Tasty, Special, Natural is our mantra. No fake flavours, and unnecessary artificial ingredients.
(Top Tip:-read the ingredients on the back of the packs… this goes for any food, not just pies and pasties - Avoid MSG!!)
🙌🏻 Eventually ..and it did take some time, we found a really great mature cheddar cheese that did the job beautifully and from a supplier with great credentials and robust production controls (made everyone very pleased, especially Claire).😁
We continue to use these guys today as they have continued to provide us with a great consistent quality of cheese so that we can make a simply awesome Cheese and Onion Pasty.
Winner of several awards - Taste of the West, Food Drink Devon and British Pie Awards. We can genuinely say it's a WINNER! and we are proud of this humble pasty recipe - the simple Cheese and Onion pasty.
If you’ve decided that you prefer a Vegan diet...no worries. Check out our Cheatin’ Cheeze Pasty. Created earlier this year and already a fixture on our menu.
Wrapped in a light vegan puff pastry, it is just as tasty, we've just replaced the cheese with a dairy free alternative and we reckon you wouldn't know the difference!
Go on - take a Chunk!
