Australia Day has come to a close, and my project is complete. I present to you an, “Aussie Meat Pie.” A beef, onion and black pepper puff pastry pie, in the shape of a stylised Map of Australia.
For a long time, I’ve been wanting to do a pie like this. On Australia Day, some copper metal banding that I bought online arrived, so I soldered it together, and then hand folded it into the shape of Australia. In hindsight I probably should have shaped it first before soldering it. However, job done. It certainly took me far less time than trying to get various, “Text to Image” AI-bots to draw a photo-realistic facsimile (I spent days on it and got nowhere fast.)
Now, this is a fiddly pie. The pastry was rolled and placed into the form and pressed carefully into the edges and put back into the freezer several times to keep it all together. I made the filling, chilled the filling, and then filled the pie. As there is no rim on the top, I have to rethink the crimping design. Pressing with a fork, whilst it did work, is not optimal, and I didn’t leave enough pastry hanging over to do a propper finger crimp.
After a 40 minute bake, I gingerly removed the copper ring, and put it back in for another 10 minutes. I then cut Tasmania off from the mainland (but didn’t forget it, like they did in a past Commonwealth Games,😜 😜 😜 ) and used some tomato sauce to create a rough outline of Lake Eyre: Australia’s fabled, and mythical, inland sea. Did you know that Lake Eyre, at it’s deepest point is 15m below sea level? Neither did I.
Now, here it is, my take on a real, Aussie Black Pepper Beef Pie. Now that’s one… “Great Australian Bite!”
