About this chicken pie lab

What is donchickenpie.com?

donchickenpie.com is a chicken-pie lab blog built around the Don chicken pie: DonChef's Original Chicken Pie, baked today at Chicken Pie Kitchen & Don Signature Crab in Singapore. The recipe is the one Chef Don Lim, the founder of Don Pie and a co-founder of the kitchen, created in 1983; today the kitchen bakes it under the DonChef name. Chef Don Lim still appears at the kitchen's events. The kitchen's flagship is at 39 Tyrwhitt Road in Jalan Besar, with takeaway kiosks at AMK Hub, Wisma Atria, White Sands and Tiong Bahru Plaza.

This site covers chicken pie as a food: what is inside it, how to store and reheat it, how it compares with other pies and with the curry puff, what to eat and drink with it, and how to bake something in the same spirit at home. For outlets and ordering, we keep one page, where to buy a Don chicken pie, which links to the official site. The history of the recipe, from 1983 to Tyrwhitt Road, is told best by the kitchen itself at originaldon.com, so we leave the story to them and stick to the pie.

Who writes it?

A small crew of home cooks in Singapore who treat chicken pie like a research subject. We write as "we" because the site is a group effort: one of us is obsessed with pastry, one with air fryers, and one keeps insisting that chilli sauce is a food group. We are not chefs, nutritionists or food scientists, and we do not pretend to be.

How do we run our experiments?

Each kitchen experiment asks one question and changes one thing at a time: the appliance, the starting temperature, the wrapping, the sauce. We start from the kitchen's own advice where it exists (eat within 4 hours; chill up to 3 days; air fryer at 150C for 5 minutes then 200C for 5 minutes) and label anything beyond it as our adaptation or general kitchen practice.

We record what a cook can observe: crisp or soft, steaming or lukewarm, even or patchy. We do not publish instrument readings, scores or sample sizes. Every temperature and time on the site is a setting you can copy, chosen to follow standard food-safety practice: reheat until piping hot, 75C at the centre if you have a probe thermometer, and never leave a cooked pie out for more than 2 hours.

How are the recipes written?

Our recipes are home recipes in grams and Celsius, written with standard, food-safe technique for small Singapore kitchens: chicken cooked to 75C, fillings cooled before they meet pastry, extra chilling for butter pastry in humid weather. Our Don-style pie is a home recreation built from tasting and public descriptions, not the kitchen's recipe, which is not public.

Where do our facts come from?

Facts about the Don chicken pie (the filling, sizes, prices, outlets and the maker's storage advice) come from the kitchen's own published menu and pages, checked in October 2026, and from independent food blogs, which we link where we use them. Where sources disagree, we say so. For dated business facts such as the menu, outlet hours and the timeline, we cross-check against donpies.com, a reference guide to Don Pie. Food-safety guidance draws on public sources such as the Singapore Food Agency and the USDA. Prices and hours change, so every page that mentions them asks you to check the official site.

What about the photos?

The photographs on this site are illustrative studio images of chicken pies and kitchen kit, made for this site. They are not photos of the kitchen's own products, outlets or packaging. For what the real pies look like, visit an outlet or the official site.