Anatomy of the original

Why look at a pie part by part?

A chicken pie is easy to eat and hard to make well, because every part depends on the others. A crust that is too thin tears. A gravy that is too loose soaks the base. A filling cut too small turns to paste. Looking at the original Don pie one part at a time is the clearest way to explain what we are protecting when we say we do not change the recipe for fashion. The recipe is the one our co-founder, Chef Don Lim, created in 1983, and this page describes DonChef’s Original Chicken Pie as it leaves our ovens now.

This is not a recipe. We do not publish our quantities or our spice blend. It is a description of what you will find, and why it is there. For the same exercise applied to chicken pies in general, from lid to base, donchickenpie.com has a fuller chicken pie anatomy.

What is the crust of the original Don pie like?

The crust of the original Don pie is golden and flaky. That is our own description, and it is deliberately plain. We make the pastry dough in-house at 39 Tyrwhitt Road and roll it out on a dough sheeter, so the thickness is even from pie to pie.

Food writers do not agree on what to call our crust. One called it buttery and flaky, another puffy and old-school, a third balanced between fluffy and crumbly, and a pie review site called it thicker and more biscuit-like than a French-style pastry. We find that disagreement rather charming. It is a crust with its own character, and we would rather you taste it than read a label. More in our craft note on the golden, flaky crust.

What does the crimp do?

The crimp seals the lid to the base. A firm, even seal stops the gravy from bubbling out in the oven and keeps the filling moist on the way home. It also gives the pie its silhouette: the ridged edge that tells you, from across a counter, that this is a pie with a proper lid and not a tart.

What is inside the filling?

The filling of the Original Chicken Pie is tender chunks of chicken, potato and vegetables in our own spice blend. Food writers have described boneless chicken leg meat, peas and carrots in the mix. The pieces are cut large enough to recognise. If you cannot tell potato from chicken when you cut the pie open, something has gone wrong.

Chunks matter for texture and for honesty. A minced filling can hide a lot. A chunky one cannot. Our craft note on chunky chicken explains why.

Why is there half an egg in the pie?

There is half a hard-boiled egg in the original Don pie because there always has been. Blog posts about Chef Don Lim’s pies from 2006 and 2008 mention the egg, and reviewers still do. It is part of the old-school, Hainanese-style chicken pie many Singaporeans remember, a style an international reference now files under the Singapore Hainanese chicken pie. The yolk enriches the filling around it and the white gives a firm, clean bite against the gravy. Read more in the half egg.

What should the gravy be like?

The gravy should be creamy and thick enough to hold the filling together, so a slice of a whole pie keeps its shape. It carries most of the seasoning. Too thin, and it soaks the base and runs across the plate. Too thick, and the filling turns stodgy. Food writers have called ours rich and creamy, which is what we aim for.

How is the pie finished?

The pie is finished in the oven: baked in small batches in deck ovens at our Tyrwhitt Road kitchen. A deck oven bakes from a heated deck under the tray as well as from the air around it, which helps the base of the pie cook through rather than stay pale.

Then comes the rule that matters most to us. We keep a strict zero overnight pies policy: a pie is sold on the day it is baked. Our full reasoning is in zero overnight pies.

The six parts at a glance

How do I use this to check a pie?

Use the six parts as a checklist when you cut a pie open. Then add the one thing you cannot see: where it was bought. Our seven signs of the original put all of it into a tick list you can use at the table, and the three tests behind them are set out in what “original” means to us.