[Sca-cooks] OP - Australian veggie and meat pies

[James Prescott]

At 10:32 PM +1100 1/24/11, Margaret Rendell wrote:

>  However, "The" Aussie meat pie is meat. In theory it's beef but 
> it's kind of a slurry and you probably don't want to investigate it 
> at all closely. Tomato sauce on top for most people. (In Adelaide, 
> it's served floating in pea soup, but Adelaide is like that.) 
> Occasionally you'll get ones billed as "steak and onion" or "steak 
> and mushroom" but as far as you can tell it's the same 
> semi-indistinguishable slurry. They're for sale pretty much 
> everywhere, and feature heavily at convenience stores, service 
> stations, bakeries, school canteens and sports grounds.


I agree with the general description.  However:

On numerous visits to Australia I have found that very good meat pies are
occasionally obtainable in scattered, sometimes unlikely, places such as
out-of-the-way country bakeries.  That is, meat pies with quite recognizable
chunks of the advertised ingredients (no slurries), properly cooked and
flavoured and pastried and entirely worthy of attention from a someone
looking for a respectable fast food.  Not on the same scale as a proper
freshly prepared restaurant pot pie, of course, but for fast food worth
driving a few extra kilometers.

The best of the Australian ones I've found are several grades better than
the best meat pies obtainable from butchers here in Calgary.

Also worthy of mention are the occasional quite edible vegetable Cornish
pasties in Australia, more or less as good as my mother made.

The pie floater (Adelaide) is indeed not one of the culinary highlights,
but the one I had didn't kill me.


Thorvald