Ginsters Cornish Pasty

Given the option this would be him one's choice for a lunchtime snack. I say snack advisedly, since weighing in at a hefty 227g,: that's half a pound in old money.

In 1969 Geoffrey Ginster began producing his own Cornish pasties from a site in Callington, Cornwall just two years after starting a van sales business buying and selling fresh pasties to local retailers in Cornwall. The business quickly began to grow and distribution channels were opened up throughout the south of England. By 1977 Samworth Brothers had acquired Ginsters and it remains within this group today.

This group is behind many of the cooked and chilled foods we are familiar with in supermarkets, high street retailers, convenience stores and garage forecourts.

Ginsters Original Cornish Pasty is claimed to be the nation's biggest selling product in the Chilled Savouries market and the Ginster brand offers food across sandwiches, wraps, quiches, hot pies, cold pies and ready to eat meals. Typically these seem to retail around £1 for a single pasty but cheaper multipacks are available.

So is it a pasty or is it a pastie??

The Cornish Pasty is thought to have started life as the working lunch for tin miners to take underground with them. The pasty was easy to carry, could be eaten with dirty fingers, was nourishing, and could even be savoury at one end and sweet at the other.
An underground miner would not return to the surface or be able to clean his hands when he paused for a lunch break. Arsenic was often found with tin, so could be on the hands. presenting a further danger. Legend has that he miner could hold the folded crust, eat the filling, then throw away the dirty pastry. Another tradition believes that it is bad luck for fishermen to take pasties to sea.
The Cornish pasty's dense, folded pastry stayed hot until lunchtime. Traditional bakers in former mining towns, until fairly recently, would bake pasties with fillings to order, marking the customer's initials with raised pastry. This was originally done because the miners used to eat one half of their pasty for breakfast and leave the remaining half for lunch, meaning that a way to identify their pasties, from the other miners', was needed.

My conclusion is that it's actually a pasty in the singular and pasties in the plural.

So how does the modern Ginster's variety stack up? Well it contains:

Fresh British beef, with fresh potato, onion & swede, wrapped in light puff pastry.

Ingredients
Potato (27%), Wheatflour, British Beef (14%), Vegetable Oil, Water, Onion (6%), Swede (5%), Beef Fat, Glaze, Salt, Cornflour, Pepper, Flavouring, Vegetable Bouillon, Mustard Seeds, Coriander.
(Glaze contains: Vegetable Oil, Milk Proteins, Glucose, Water)
(Vegetable Bouillon contains: Dried Onions, Leek, Salt, Sugar, Vegetable Oil)
Turmeric and Black Pepper

Each pasty typically contains:
Energy 549 kCal
Protein 12.1g
Carbohydrate 52.7g
(of which sugars) 3.2g
Fat 32.2g
(of which saturates) 14.8g
Fibre 7.1g
Sodium 1.08g
Salt 2.77g

The pastry is attractively crimped around the edges and relatively light in texture, but although the filling ingredients look and sound wholesome, they are not very attractive. Thin machined square slices of vegetables and morsels of meat do not give the impression of a hearty traditional pasty. However I have to admit it still tastes pretty good, tasty and slightly savoury, and yes they are a filling and satisfying lunch.

I have discovered that oven warming the pasty still on its cardboard packaging (naturally having removed it from the outer sleeve) actually absorbs some of the fat and makes the pastry even nicer. A plea though, never be tempted to microwave these pasties, its well worth the wait for the oven and the smell from the cooking gives you added anticipation and pleasure. ………..Enjoy

This review is published under the same name on Dooyoo and Ciao