Eating with Beer 2

A few months ago on the BeerCast, we started a new category of post – involving the wonders of beer used as an ingredient rather than a beverage. Predictably called ‘Eating with Beer’, it featured the rather odd onion and ale soup produced by the Yorkshire Provender. Just the other day another suitable mealstuff presented itself, in the form of Waitrose’s Steak & Murphy’s Topcrust Pie. It’s probably been ten years since my last pint of Murphy’s, but in a pie…too good to pass up.

Well, actually it’s not. Described on the box as “tender chunks of braised British steak and button mushrooms in a rich & flavoursome Irish stout gravy, topped with buttery puff pastry” it falls apart totally into a gloopy mess. Why? – it’s not a pie! ‘Topcrust’ it may be, but call me old-fashioned in thinking a pie should also have a bottom and four sides? The puff pastry crumbled into pencil shavings, as puff pastry always does, leaving the stouty gravy to do the talking.

Actually, this is the best part – the steak is nice, although there’s hardly any of it, and the dark gravy really does taste of stout. It contains 12% of the (other) black stuff, and in tremendous legalese the packet says “Murphy’s stout brewed under licence by Inbev on behalf of Heineken, Waitrose is an authorised user thereof”. I’d certainly draw the line at a steak and Heineken pie, that’s for sure.

Anyhow, at 539 calories it’ll put hairs on your chest, just take my advice and fling the lid out of the window and call the thing a stew. It is nice, but it’s not a pie (and I’m from Lancashire, so know what I’m talking about on that subject).