Pantry Story, Stanmore/Annandale

bakery, city, sausage roll

336 Parramatta Road, Stanmore, New South Wales 2048
instagram.com/pantrystory_sydney
Stall at: Market Studio, 131 Booth St, Annandale, New South Wales 2038
airrmade.com/market-studio

On a warm early summer Sunday just before Christmas, Mrs Snot Block & Roll suggested we trek across the harbour to a small hand-made ceramics market that she had run across. Market Studio is a small building in the heart of the sinner city suburb of Annandale, full of ceramics by a handful of different artists, spilling out into stalls on the adjacent footpath.

Market Studio, Annandale

Also there were a coffee stall, a place selling cakes, and another selling focaccias and hot snacks. The latter turned out to be a stall run by a place called Pantry Story, with its main premises a suburb away in Stanmore. It’s an Asian-inspired bakery, with a dizzying array of Asian fusion pastries and breads. And here at Market Studio today they had a pie warmer with a selection of treats: beef rendang pie, green curry pork sausage rolls, and prawn and chicken sausage rolls!

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Flour Shop, Turramurra

bakery, city, nsw, sausage roll

16 Princes St, Turramurra, New South Wales 2074
cookaborough.com/flour-shop/menus

A few weeks ago we had occasion to drop someone off near Turramurra around lunch time. A perfect opportunity to find a new bakery and try it out! A bit of searching located the cleverly named Flour Shop, nestled in a tiny cluster of local shops in a residential area.

Flour Shop, Turramurra

Entering showed mostly racks of delicious looking bread, including one (currently empty) space allocated for loaves declared to be SUPER SEEDY. There were also a small number of other treats such as chocolate cherry cookies and ginger nuts, and a savoury croissant filled with pastrami, pickles, and cheese.

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Berkelo, Mosman

bakery, city, nsw, sausage roll

2/577 Military Road, Mosman, New South Wales 2088
berkelo.com.au

I did a sweep of Internet searches looking for interesting bakeries I hadn’t been to yet, and found Berkelo, which has four locations in Sydney. I headed over to the one at Mosman to check it out.

Berkelo, Mosman

It’s not a big place, and they specialise in bread loaves and sandwiches ready to eat, but they also have croissants and a few sweets and savouries. The savouries included, when I visited, a choice of chicken or pumpkin pies, various quiches, a kale and feta roll, and a sausage roll.

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Biga Artisan Bakery, East Lindfield

bakery, city, nsw, vanilla slice

9 Hughes Pl, East Lindfield

It’s been a long time between vanilla slices, due to a combination of the COVID pandemic, and me being busy with new work. But today I took a short drive with Mrs Snot Block & Roll and Canine Snot Block & Roll for some afternoon tea to a new bakery that we hadn’t visited before.

Biga Artisan Bakery

I was wondering if they would have some vanilla slices, and lo! They did!

Biga Artisan Bakery

It’s an interesting bakery, with a small counter displaying just a few sweet treats, with a view behind to the working area with racks and machinery for baking bread. There didn’t appear to be a lot of bread available, probably because it was getting close to closing time. But they did have an interesting Lego version of the very shop I was standing in on the counter.

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Cornucopia Bakery, Naremburn

bakery, cafe, city, nsw, sausage roll, vanilla slice,

Shop 2/296-298 Willoughby Rd, Naremburn
facebook.com/CornucopiaBakerySydney

One of the earliest reviews I did on this blog was Delicia in Naremburn. As it’s within a (solid) walking distance from home, it was a bakery that I visited fairly frequently. Unfortunately, when I went there one time a year or two ago, I discovered that it had closed down. This left a fairly big hole in the local area, since the closure of St Malo a bit earlier wiped out the best bakery in the region.

The vacated Delicia premises remained empty for many months, until recently I took a walk that led me past… and I saw that it was now occupied. And by a new bakery!

Cornucopia Bakery, Naremburn

The fitout has changed, with the coffee machine on the left, and a single straight counter instead of the L-shaped one that Delicia had. They have a nicer looking selection of pies (although Delicia’s sausage rolls were good, their pies were average):

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High Street Bakery, Northbridge

bakery, city, nsw, sausage roll, vanilla slice,

142 Sailors Bay Rd, Northbridge, New South Wales

Just a day after making a special expedition to Newtown for Miss Lilly’s, I had an appointment for my first COVID vaccination in the suburb of Northbridge. Since it was at lunch time, I took the opportunity to stroll around the Northbridge shops after my 15-minute safety rest, and found the High Street Bakery.

High Street Bakery

This is a bog standard suburban high street bakery, with the usual array of freshly baked loaves, a selection of small cakes and tarts and other sweets, and a pie warmer counter full of pies and sausage rolls.

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Miss Lilly’s, Newtown

bakery, cafe, city, nsw, sausage roll

571 King St, Newtown, NSW
misslillys.com.au

I received a recommendation recently via the subreddit /r/sydney saying that I had to try the sausage rolls at Miss Lilly’s in Newtown. I must admit that I haven’t tried any places in Newtown apart from The Pie Tin, because it’s so good there and I am in the area seldom enough that all I ever want to do is go back there. But, if someone is going to go out of their way to specifically recommend an establishment to me, I have to try it!

I made a special expedition over to Newtown just for this. I messed up a bit reading Google Maps and ended up at the wrong end of Newtown, wondering why I couldn’t find it. Consulting my phone, I realised my error, and walked along the entire eclectic university-student-filled shopping strip to the far end. This was fortunate as it helped build an appetite!

Miss Lilly's Bakery Cafe

I found Miss Lilly’s behind a humble shopfront on busy King Street. It bills itself as a “bakery cafe”, but there isn’t much room inside for the two tables, and there are two tables out on the footpath. The unassuming counter contains a small selection of slightly rustic, home-made style cakes, tarts, and slices. This is not a high-end patisserie – it looks like a typical small business cafe that someone just started to make a living. Unfortunately there isn’t a vanilla slice, but then that would have been a bonus since I really came here for the sausage rolls.

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K’pané Artisan Bakery, Coffs Harbour

bakery, city, nsw, sausage roll

Jetty Village Shopping Centre, 361 Harbour Drive, Coffs Harbour NSW 2450
www.facebook.com/kpaneartisanbakery

Continuing my vacation trip, I got as far north as Coffs Harbour, on a day sojourn out of my accommodation in Port Macquarie. So I was here at lunch time, and keen to find something delicious to eat. A local pointed me towards the Jetty district of the city, where I found a small shopping centre, and K’pané Artisan Bakery. I neglected to take a photo of the exterior or interior, but it basically looked like a generic anonymous small shopping centre bakery, with nothing to distinguish it in any way.

Inside, the savoury menu featured some interesting pies, with a Penang pork tickling my fancy, as well as a pork and fennel sausage roll. There was alas no vanilla slice on offer, so I contented myself with the pie and sausage roll choice. I snuck a seat at a table belonging to the adjacent fish & chip shop and regarded my lunch.

Sausage roll: K'pané Artisan Bakery

The sausage roll (here displayed sitting atop the pie, as it was the only guaranteed clean surface elevated above the interior of the cardboard tray they came in) looks promising. It has a richly browned pastry crust, flaking into pieces as I manoeuvre it around for a photo, generously topped with poppy seeds. The pastry looks fairly thick, moist, and buttery. The end bits of the meat filling are crusty from baking, and display similarly generous amounts of shredded carrot. It looks enticing.

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Heatherbrae’s Pies, Heatherbrae

bakery, country, nsw, sausage roll, vanilla slice,

Corner of Pacific Hwy and Masonite Rd, Heatherbrae NSW 2324
www.heatherbraespies.com.au

Note: This is a new review of a place visited in 2015 by my co-contributor.

I recently took a long overdue holiday trip – not overseas because of COVID, but rather a road trip up the coast north of Sydney. Driving north along the highway, there are various towns and rest stops along the way. One of them, about 170 km (or two hours driving) north of Sydney, is renowned for its pies and sausage rolls. Although I’ve passed this way a few times, I’ve never stopped here before: Heatherbrae’s Pies.

Heatherbrae's Pies

The place is right beside the highway, accessed by a roundabout intersection. It’s hard to miss, as there are multiple roadside billboards announcing its presence, starting from about 10 km away. We arrived in the middle of the lunch rush, about 12:30, and it was clear that this place is very popular. We had trouble finding a spot in the car park, and then there was a queue of about 25 people in front of us to order pies.

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Joel’s Home Made (guest review)

overseas, sausage roll, special

I discovered the Snot Block & Roll by clicking the link at the bottom of the Darths & Droids website. It said ‘food reviews’ and I thought, cool I like food. I then discovered that this was an entire blog dedicated to the review of two foods: vanilla slices and sausage rolls.

I loved this concept, and I vicariously sampled my way through what felt like half the bakeries in Australia. With every post my appreciation for these simple culinary delights grew, and apace grew the unfortunate realization I was probably never going to get the chance to try them in person. See, I live in the US of A, specifically inside the not-so-cosmopolitan state of Wisconsin. While I have seen pasty imitations of the vanilla slice crop up in the bakeries and buffets of the Fox Valley, I have never laid eyes on an honest-to-goodness sausage roll.

Faced with two alternatives, buy a plane ticket to Australia, or find a decent recipe; I opted for door number three and I created my own recipe for the Aussie Style Sausage Roll. (Credit where credit is due, I based my recipe off one I found in Bourke Street Bakery’s cookbook.)

Now for my self-aggrandizing review…

The roll looks amazing; lightly browned from the egg wash and speckled with whole fennel seeds to inform the customer just what kind of sausage roll they will be getting.

Home made sausage roll

The bottom of the roll is edged in a rich brown glaze where the meat drippings oozed out onto the pan during baking. (I am super glad I chose to bake these on the pizza stone.)

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