Steak and Stilton Pasty
Take a chunk of our Pasty of the Week - the Steak & Stilton Pasty, and you’ll have a taste sensation!
Whoever came up with the idea of mixing cheese in with a meat pie...or in this case pasty was a genius! 🙌🏻
Here at Chunk we’ve taken our already awesome steak pasty and added in some delicious blue Stilton cheese, from our cheesey suppliers, Hawkridge Dairy, which is crumbled, so it blends with the whole mix - making each bite as packed with flavour as the next!
Wrapped in a traditional shortcrust pastry and each crimped by hand, means every pasty is unique 😋
These pasties do come with a warning….”you have to like Stilton!” with a good whack of this blue cheese - you’ll smell it as soon as you cut the pasty open!
Now, if you like a little bit of food history, here's something to enlighten you.
Stilton, a small village just to the south of Peterborough is where the story of this cheese goes back to, as far back as 1723 when a recipe by Richard Bradley was published. You would think that the name says it all...and the village was the home of this fabulously tasty cheese.. think again
There were many notes made in the 19th & 20th century reporting Stilton was never actually made in the village, and the name was just acquired, as the cheese was sold to travellers on their way to and from London along The Great North Road when passing through Stilton.
Outrage! - not happy - Stilton fans wanted to dig deeper.
Among the several people who decided to investigate the origins of Stilton was a good pie loving friend of ours, Matthew O'Callaghan from Melton Mowbray - home of the British Pie Awards!
In 2009 after extensive research, Matthew and the others found that to find these notes were untrue.
Scandalous!😲
They discovered evidence that Cream cheese was being made and sold in and around the village of Stilton, possibly in the late C17th and certainly in the early C18th, and this was known as Stilton Cheese.
Highly unlikely we’d recognise the C17th Stilton with the beautiful creamy blue veined chunk we see in delis today. The veining back then could have been achieved through frequent brushing of the maturing cheese, or whether the ageing cheeses simply cracked, allowing some to go blue and others not. It could well have been a hit or miss affair!
But the cheese was supremely popular and demand grew. This, like so many things, meant that all and sundry were making a form of this blue cheese...and of course quality varied pretty dramatically.
Nowadays, Stilton - 👑 The King of Cheeses 👑 is only allowed to be made in three counties - Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire, as in 1996 it was awarded European Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status, or PDO. Which means these producers have to follow traditional recipes that have been around for years.
Because of this PDO, the weird thing is….that the village of Stilton itself is not allowed to make the unique blue cheese. They challenged this in 2011 but sadly weren’t successful.
Seems a great pity...but who are we to bash on about PDO’s or PGI’s…(Protected Geographic Indication). We’ll leave that for another Chat….!
Just going to say...the Cornish pasty has PGI...but is it as good as a Chunk pasty?…. You tell us!
Taste a box of these Steak and Stilton Pasties, or as we refer to them Steak & Blue, Winner of Taste of the West Award, Food Drink Devon Award and British Pie Award.
Just a great tasting pasty!
