Pukka means high quality, genuine or authentic so when you have such a well known UK brand called Pukka you can only assume the products match the name.

Here’s the thing about Pukka pies, they are a weird staple in a lot of fish and chip shops. Or at least they certainly used to be. If you see a pie on a fish and chip menu still, especially in a takeaway, it’s almost certainly one of these. But, as you can imagine, I never had one from a fish and chip shop because if I’m going in there I’m having… fish and chips.

And after a lot of pondering I’m not sure I had ever had an actual Pukka pie until I grabbed two of these in the reduced to 50p section of Iceland. At full price one of these is usually around £2 and I know that there are cheaper alternatives or ones of a similar price with actual beef chunks in instead of minced beef so I just never gravitate towards them.

If you do find yourself getting one of these and compare it to the image on the box you might actually be pretty surprised that the ratio of puff pastry on the top was accurate and in fact the internal ratio of filling to the pastry matched up fairly well too.

The filling itself had a pretty rich sort of gravy in there, I do wonder if it was more an onion gravy as I couldn’t identify any onion otherwise, and a reasonable amount of minced beef in there that did give the filling a bit of texture.

These are by far a vast improvement vs the own brand Iceland minced beef and onion slices and when you compare the two it certainly solidifies that something like this you might get a bit more what you pay for but the brand name does add a few additional pennies on. If this Pukka pie was £1.50 at full price I might feel a bit differently to them overall. For 50p they are outstanding value but that was just due to them needing to get rid of maybe ten of them last minute because of the date on them. This in itself suggests nobody else wants to pay full price for them either or at least not the people shopping for mix and match freezer bargains in an Iceland store.

I’ll happily eat the other one I got, that’s currently in the freezer, at some point in time and if I encounter others that are on a discount I might try them but at full price I just simply could never do it.