Pies

Coming from New Zealand (as she does) F reckons that New Zealand has the best pies in the world - especially meat pies.

Borrowed photo

Well of course she would.  Your expectation of what a pie should be will be based on the comparison you make with all the pies you ever had before.

I like pies - chicken 'pie' without pastry, beef mince 'pie' also without pastry.  F makes them in a tray of little divots that she also uses to bake little cakes in.  My pies go into the freezer.... and come out again one at a time for my lunches (every day if Mr B is at home, less often if F is in control of my food intake).

Greeks make a lot of pies.  We showed you one pie-maker in a video we shot during the summer (linked here).  While the most popular pie ingredient in NZ is apparently meat (steak in one form or another), Greek pies appear to revolve, for main part, around varieties of cheese.  They also do a good line (according to my humans) in pies filled with green stuff - like spinach, or greens called 'horta' - and cheese (of course).

Greek pies are made with pastry that comes in pages - called phyllo (leaves).  There is 'thick leaves' and 'thin leaves'.  Aunty Panagiota uses the thick leaves when she makes spinach pie at our place.  Thin leaves are for baklava - which I understand are sweet pies dripping with sugar syrup or honey.  Kiwis don't make pies dripping with syrup or honey.

Kiwi pies are made with flakey pastry.  Flakey pastry might be a Kiwi invention - who knows? In England pies (apart from pork pies with their hot-water crust) are either short pastry or puff pastry.  Flakey pastry seems to be somewhere in between, and if well done results in a pie that is as crisp as the outside of a Greek phyllo encased pie, as flakey as a Greek phyllo encased pie, and deliciously soft and buttery where it is in contact with all the meat and gravy that it holds together.  Gravy makes Greek phyllo pastry into an unhappy mess.

 Borrowed pic

You can eat a good Kiwi pie out of a paper bag, and the contents shouldn't run down your jumper (or your chest fur) - but little flakes of pastry might stick there.  Pies are good snacks to eat at rugby matches - for example.

Another borrowed pic

We have been surveying Greek pies.  One of F's colleagues asserts that the best pies in Greece are to be had in Metsovo.  We visited Metsovo.  My humans ate pies.  F still maintains that even Metsovo pies don't rival a good Kiwi steak and cheese pie.  

See? Even the Kiwis put cheese in their pies!