The Australian meat pie in Sydney: how to order a good one

Overview

The meat pie is not Sydney’s own — it belongs to the whole country, eaten from Perth to the coast and claimed across the Tasman as well — but it is so woven into everyday life here that a visitor who leaves without one has missed something ordinary and real. It is a hand-sized pastry, meant to be held in a paper bag and eaten standing up: a shortcrust base holding minced or diced beef in a thick, dark gravy, sealed under a lid of puff pastry that goes golden and shatters at the first bite.

What matters is the ratio and the gravy. A good pie is mostly filling — soft beef and a gravy thick enough to hold together rather than run down your wrist — with just enough pastry to carry it. It is not refined food and does not pretend to be. Its natural homes are the corner bakery, the petrol-station warmer and the football ground, and it is as likely to be breakfast as lunch.

The one ritual worth knowing is the sauce. Tomato sauce — the local ketchup, milder and thinner than the American kind — goes on top or is squeezed inside through a hole poked in the lid, and it is not optional so much as expected. At a counter it is usually self-serve and free, in a bottle by the till.

What to order

Ask for a plain pie — meaning plain beef — and you have the baseline against which everything else is judged. From there the common variants are worth knowing:

• Steak or chunky — diced steak rather than mince, a heartier, coarser filling.
• Steak and mushroom, steak and cheese, curry — the standard flavoured pies at any decent bakery, all built on the same gravy.
• Party pies — miniature versions, two or three bites each, the fixture of every barbecue and children’s party.

Its close cousin, the sausage roll — seasoned sausage meat rolled in the same puff pastry — sits beside it on every counter and is ordered the same way, with sauce.

If you find yourself further south, the pie floater is a genuine oddity worth trying: a meat pie upended in a bowl of thick green pea soup, doused in sauce. It is a specialty of Adelaide, not Sydney, but it is the same pie in strange and excellent company.

What to avoid

The failures here are all failures of freshness and turnover, and a good bakery gives itself away by being busy.

A pie that has sat too long in a warmer is the thing to dodge — the pastry goes soft and greasy instead of crisp, the gravy dries to paste, and the whole thing is lukewarm rather than mouth-scaldingly hot. A petrol-station cabinet with three sad pies under a heat lamp at three in the afternoon is exactly this; a bakery selling out by mid-morning is the opposite.

All pastry and no filling is the second fault: a hollow pie with a spoonful of grey mince rattling around inside. You cannot always see it before you bite, but a heavy pie in the hand is a good sign and a light one is a warning.

And a good pie is genuinely, dangerously hot in the centre — the gravy holds heat long after the pastry has cooled, and burning the roof of your mouth on the first bite is such a common rite that there is a nickname for the resulting sore patch. Let it sit a minute; that is not a fault, it is the pie working as intended.

Practicalities

A meat pie runs roughly $5 to $8 at a bakery, a little more for a gourmet version with a fancier filling, a little less from a supermarket or a servo. A number well below that usually buys a frozen pie reheated without care; the pie’s virtue is cheapness with quality, and a good one is not expensive.

Buy it where the turnover is fastest — a busy suburban bakery at mid-morning, a stand at the football, a market stall — rather than from a warmer that has been on since dawn. It is eaten any time of day, by hand, from the bag, with the sauce, and it does not travel or keep: a pie is at its best in the ten minutes after it leaves the oven and a sadder object cold. Cards work everywhere, as the city guide notes, and the sauce is free.