7 Ramsay Rd, Pennant Hills, New South Wales
facebook.com/andrewspatisserie/

Continuing to clear the backlog of previously unposted reviews, today we return to an expedition to Pennant Hills to visit some friends. After spending a late morning visit, I was heading home and getting peckish around lunchtime. So I stopped at Pennant Hills Marketplace, and old fashioned and somewhat run-down shopping centre, with 1960s era buildings on two sides of an open car park. One of the shops here is the nondescript Andrew’s Patisserie.

I search for a vanilla slice, but alas they don’t seem to have any. Oh well, better settle for a sausage roll. They look all right in the warmer.

Taking my acquisition out of the plain white paper bag, it looks pretty good.

Well-cooked pastry, with perhaps a little too much browning near the ends, topped with a crunchy sprinkle of breadcrumbs. It promises to deliver some flaky crunch. The meat visible at the ends is obviously well done, and a huge chunk of onion pokes out, caramelised almost to charcoal.

That pastry is very nice! Just ever so slightly overbaked, but crisp, light, flaky, without a hint of sogginess. And that’s good, because the meat inside is very moist, so avoiding the sogginess in the pastry is a good achievement and provides a texture contrast. The filling tastes great, with big chunks of onions and visible chopped green herbs, seasoned to a nicely savoury flavour without being too salty. The negative side is the mouth-feel, which is decidedly average – minced meat mixed with some bulking agent, making it a bit too smooth and pasty, rather than meaty. But I’ve had a lot worse, and the flavour is really quite good. It’s not amazing by any means, but solidly above average for a random suburban mall patisserie.

Sausage roll: 7/10