Cnr Masonite Rd & Pacific Hwy, Heatherbrae, NSW 2324
www.heatherbraespies.com.au
Heatherbrae Pies is located a couple of hours north of Sydney, and is an ideal place to stop off for lunch or a snack on a road trip up the NSW coast. Ever since starting this food review blog, I’ve anticipated coming here to do a review. The opportunity arrived, I checked their website, and yes, they do indeed sell Sausage Rolls and Vanilla slices!
Arriving here, I had just finished playing 18 holes of golf, and I was really hungry. I order the items, and first course is this:
“What is this? A sausage roll for ants?”. I had to put a coin on the plate to illustrate the scale of my disappointment. (For those unfamilar with our archaic Australian currency, the 20 cent coin is a little bit bigger than a U.S. quarter). The roll was light to pick up, wrapped in very smoothly egg-glazed pastry, and slightly browned. A somewhat utilitarian sausage roll, offering nothing more than the absolute basics. Pastry is that kind that sheds a few flakes but then is like dough underneath. The meat wasn’t very meaty, and was pale and bland and homogenous – no evidence of any other ingredients like onion or herbs. As is often the case for places that are famous for one category of food (pies, here), if you stray from that strength you get something that the place is NOT famous for. I heartily recommend you pass on the sausage rolls and instead get one of the many varieties of pies here – they are excellent.
I take the vanilla slice from the white paper bag it was served in, and immediately have trouble figuring out which way is up. I arbitrarily choose the side that has evidence of once having icing sugar on it as the top. The slice is fairly generous in size, a single thick layer of custard sandwiched between two pastry sheets. In fact, that’s what this is – a custard sandwich! The pastry layers are the thin biscuitty type, and are alarmingly white, in a white-bread sort of way. The custard tastes pleasantly zingy and fresh, offering lovely vanilla and citrus notes, and it’s airy and whipped and not goopy or gelatinous at all.
Sausage Roll: 3/10
Vanilla Slice: 6/10