650 Pittwater Rd, Brookvale, New South Wales
www.thebrookypie.com

The Brooky Pie is a small family-run business with a single pie shop on the busy Pittwater Road just north of the vast Warringah Mall shopping centre. The pies are lovingly hand made in a traditional fashion, and they also have a vegetable pastie and a sausage roll. There are a handful of sweets on the menu, including an apple pie, custard tart, and caramel slice, but alas no vanilla slice.

Nevertheless, being in the area at lunchtime one day I ventured in to sample the savoury wares. I selected a pie and one of the sausage rolls.

The external appearance of the roll is … interesting – a word which usually does not bode particularly well. It has a thick, firm pastry, rolled generously around what looks like a shrunken meat filling, as the pastry curls inwards at the ends to meet the smaller roll of meat within. The pastry has a nice rich golden colour, and the top is sprinkled with small grains which looks like semolina. On biting, the pastry is very crunchy, but not very flaky. In fact, it’s almost more like a shortcrust pastry than the expected puff pastry.

The filling is a spiced sausage of pork meat, which is moist and tasty, although after a couple of bites it starts to feel like an excessive amount of salt has been added. It shows no evidence of freshly shopped herbs, onions, carrots, or anything else substantial having been mixed in. The other problem is that the filling is very small compared to the size of the ensconcing pastry, resulting in a huge air pocket inside the pastry – where probably twice as much filling could have been stuffed.

I wanted to like this sausage roll, as The Brooky Pie looks like a lovely little establishment of the sort that should be supported by locals, but unfortunately it was let down on all fronts.

Sausage roll: 3/10