In the Kitchen with Powells Pies #Blog

Lisa Edwards
7th February 2017

For the first in our series ‘In the Kitchen’ Briony and I spent a day with Andrew and Marie (AKA Powells Pies) at their ‘Pie Shed’ kitchen in Whitchurch. The series involves the Taste Cheshire Team spending ‘a day in the life of’ one of our Members so that we can get a better feel for what goes on behind the scenes and share our experience with you. We couldn’t wait to get started.

We arrived at the ‘Pie Shed’ not knowing quite what to expect, but soon got into the swing of things. Both Andrew and Marie are just full of fun, so the giggling started as soon as we arrived and continued all afternoon!

So, we donned our hair nets and aprons and got stuck in. Firstly, I made a batch of the famous pastry under Andrews close guidance. Everything Andrew and Marie do to make the Pies is handmade, so I got my hands sticky whilst mixing the ingredients together to form the pastry dough.  I then had to weigh (very precisely I may add) the dough into the correct weight dependent upon which size pie it would make. After weighing, I kneaded the amount into a smooth ball and this was put aside to cool down before the next stage of preparation.

Whilst I was up to my elbows in dough, Briony was injecting jelly into already made and cooked pies. We won’t go in to detail as to how the jelly is made but rest assured Mr and Mrs Powell make everything from scratch.

Once the balls had cooled we then set out to hand raise the pastry.  This is done by using a wooden dolly to raise the pastry ball to the correct height of the pie. We always believed this to be the hardest part of the process, but I must admit we both picked up the talent of raising the pastry pretty quickly, saying that we are certainly no competition for Marie or Andrew who have the finesse and speed down to a T! Once set, we then used a knife to slide down the dolly which (in most cases!) released the pastry, sounds simple right? No! Or at least not for us. This was the most challenging part hence Briony’s very attractive pastry bracelet, creating a few ‘bottomless pies’ – we just wanted to get into the new bottomless food craze!

On to prepare the filling, the meat is collected pre-prepared, in the olden days (well not that long ago), the Powell’s used to butcher their own meat but with the scale up of production they now get the butchers to sort this for them. The company philosophy is to only put in a pie what you would want on your plate so they only use belly and shoulder, they then mince the pork and season. This is then weighed once again into balls ready to put in to the pastry casing.

Once the pies were filled we moved on to cutting out the lids and hand crimping each pie top. Again, it may appear easy but to get every pie to the same standard is not an easy task. We had to weigh out the correct amount of pastry to top the pies and then using a cutter (one of the only pieces of equipment in this whole process) to cut out the round. The round lid is then placed inside of the pastry casing on top of the meat, trimming away the excess and using our fingers we pinched and squished to crimp the lid and finish off the pie ready for cooking. Briony and her infamous nails struggled somewhat with this and ended up creating a mess, good job Marie made us practise using Cherry pie filling first as Briony’s Sprung a Leak.

The pies are cooked for 20 minutes on high to set the pastry, then egg washed to create their signature shine and placed back in the oven to cook for a further heat on a lower temperature. Once cooked the pies rest and get jellied 3 times whilst cooling, until filled. Then off to market they go!

What a fab day we had ‘In the Kitchen’ with Marie and Andrew, Thank you for having us, we will happily come back anytime, if you’ll have us!