Search
Brazil
Argentina
Bolivia
Chile
Colombia
Ecuador
Guyana
French Guiana
Falkland Islands (Malvinas)
Paraguay
Peru
Suriname
Uruguay
Venezuela
Germany
Austria
Belgium
Croatia
Denmark
Spain
Finland
France
Greece
the Netherlands
Hungary
Ireland
Iceland
Italy
Luxembourg
Norway
Poland
Portugal
the United Kingdom
the Czech Republic
Sweden
Switzerland
Turkey
Canada
the United States
Mexico
the Dominican RepublicTurkey
South AfricaAustralia
Fiji
New Zealand
Papua New GuineaFlavors · Australia
Individual baked pastry filled with minced or diced beef in a thick sauce, eaten with the hands and almost always topped with tomato sauce. It’s sold in bakeries, corner shops and stadiums across the country.
Traditional dish from Australia
Also known as: Aussie meat pie, pie, torta de carne australiana
Illustrative images. The pictures in this guide are illustrations based on the real place, not photographs, and may differ from it.
Click a photo to enlarge it.
Meat pie — Australia
The meat pie is a long-standing fast food in Australia. It’s a hand-sized pie with a shortcrust base and a puff pastry top, filled with minced or diced meat cooked in a dark, thick gravy. Meat pies arrived with British settlers and, adapted to local tastes, became common in bakeries, corner shops, roadhouses and stadium canteens nationwide.
The dish even has a legal definition. The Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code specifies that a product sold as a meat pie must contain at least 25% meat.
Mass production helped make the pie a national staple. The Australian Dictionary of Biography records that Four’N Twenty meat pies began being made in Bendigo, Victoria, in 1947 and were later produced in factories in Melbourne. The brand became associated with Australian rules football games, but there are bakeries with their own recipes in every region, and annual competitions pick the country’s best pies.
You eat them with your hands while they’re still hot, with a drizzle of tomato sauce on top. There are versions with onion, mushrooms, cheese or curry, and some towns have created their own serving styles.
Australia
The individual meat pie is sold in bakeries, shops and stadiums throughout Australia, without a single city of origin.
Shortcrust pastry base and puff pastry top; filling of minced or diced beef, onion, stock, seasonings and a thickener. Tomato sauce for serving.
With the hands, hot, with tomato sauce on top. It’s a counter, road or stadium snack.
All year, at any time; closely linked to Australian rules football matches and winter, from June to August.
Your questions
A shortcrust base and a puff pastry top, filled with minced or diced beef in a thick gravy.
With tomato sauce on top, with your hands, while still hot.
Yes. The Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code requires at least 25% meat in a product sold as a meat pie.
Flavors of Australia
Oat biscuits made with oats, coconut, flour, butter and golden syrup, linked to the memory of Australian and New Zealand soldiers from the First World War. They are made across the country, especially for Anzac Day, and commercial use of the name Anzac is protected by law.
Large meringue disk, crisp on the outside and soft inside, topped with whipped cream and fruit. It is named after the dancer Anna Pavlova, and Australia and New Zealand both claim its origin. In Australia, it’s the dessert served at summer Christmas.
Meat pie served in a deep plate of thick pea soup, usually turned upside down and topped with tomato sauce. It was the dish of the food carts that sold late‑night food in central Adelaide since the 19th century.
Sweet yeasted dough, fried, split on the side and filled with raspberry or strawberry jam and whipped cream, with sugar on the outside. In South Australia it was called a Berliner until World War I, when it acquired the name of the British marshal Lord Kitchener.
Cube of sponge cake dipped in a thin chocolate coating and then in dry shredded coconut. It is named after Lord Lamington, governor of Queensland, and the most accepted version places its creation at the governor’s official residence in Brisbane around 1900.
Spicy noodle soup with coconut and spices, a legacy of Peranakan cuisine. Darwin has adopted it as a city dish: it’s the weekend breakfast at the markets and it even has its own festival.
Chinese-Australian dumpling with a thick wrapper, filled with pork and vegetables, steamed or fried. It originated as an adaptation of the Cantonese siu mai made in Melbourne’s Chinatown in the 1940s and spread through the country’s fish-and-chips shops.
Espresso coffee with steamed milk and a thin layer of foam, stronger in coffee than a latte. The best-known menu record is from a café in Sydney in 1985; New Zealand contests the drink’s origin.
Individual puff pastry pie with scallops and a creamy curry sauce, sold in bakeries, cafés and markets across Tasmania and presented as a specialty of the island.
