The Great Aussie Meat Pie – Paleo Style
Australians love their meat pies, apparently 260 million a year are eaten here. For a county with a population of just over 21 million, that’s a lot of pies!
A meat pie just wouldn’t be the same without some sort of pastry. So I thought it was time to give the Paleo treatment to the Aussie Meat Pie.
The Great Aussie Meat Pie – Paleo Style
Recipe type: Beef
Cuisine: Australian
Prep time:
Cook time:
Total time:
Ingredients
- For the Crust:
- 400g Almond Meal
- 4 Eggs (free range, organic, obviously)
- 1 Tablespoon Coconut Oil
- Pinch of salt, onion powder, garlic powder & any other herbs you fancy
- For the Filling:
- 500g minced beef (I always try to get grass fed)
- Approx 500ml Beef Stock (I made this a few weeks ago with lots of bones, and froze lots of batches)
- 1 red onion (only because I’d run out of brown onions), diced
- Half a sweet potato, diced
- 1 carrot, diced
- 4 mushrooms
- Pinch of garlic powder, salt, oregano & any other herbs you select
Instructions
- Mix the crust ingredients together to form a big ball of dough
- Roll the "pastry" out and form into paper cupcake cases, reserving about a third of the dough mixture for the lids. You should be able to make about eight individual pie cases, more if you roll it out a bit thinner.
- Cook these for ten minutes at 200 until they became hard, but not golden.
- Ssauté the onion in a spoonful of coconut oil, and add the minced beef after a couple of minutes. Once browned off, add the sweet potatoes and carrots and let that cook for a few minutes.
- Add the stock, mushrooms, seasoning and herbs and let it simmer for 15 minutes or so, until it had a good “pie” consistency.
- Take the filling off the heat and spooned it into the pie cases.
- Once filled to the top, roll out the remaining dough and cut it into lid shapes to match the cases.
- Put lids on all of the pies, forming a seal around the edges.
- Return the pies to the oven for another ten minutes, until they started to turn golden.
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I then took the meat pies along to a picnic in the sunshine this afternoon. I didn't even need to tell my non-paleo friends I hadn't used conventional ingredients – they got fantastic reviews, despite having only good ingredients!
Have you given the Paleo treatment to any Australian or New Zealand dishes?
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These look awesome! I’m in the U.S. and I live in Michigan where we are famous for having pasties, which are essentially meat pies (the filling has rutabaga though which I’d probably use instead of sweet potatoes). I’m SUPER excited to be able to make a paleo version, so thank you so much! 😀
Thanks April! Would love to hear how your paleo pasties go!
Thanks, I’ll be trying this. Now i’m thing about so many others I could make too. This will be great to make ahead and take for lunch or beakfast, or a snack. Hee Hee!
Thanks Gale, I hope you enjoy!
Hey this recipe looks awesome! I have only just started tweaking and experimenting with using coconut oil, almond meal etc etc, and Im really embracing this lifestyle its all so new to me, wow theres alot of information on this site. hopefully it gains more followers. I have been fructose free properly for about a month now and want to make food from scratch and not eat crap anymore. well done! I look forward to reading more posts! 🙂 heres a question though, where do you buy your meat? I live south of sydney so I dont know of any organic butchers, some supermarkets have organic meats but I dont recall seeing organic mince, unless I mince my own steaks then that means getting out the food processor and learning how to use it 🙂
Thanks Elissa! I normally go to an organic butcher in Neutral Bay, but I plan to start using farmers markets more.
Hi Suz! I found a butcher at Ramsgate organic foodies markets that do free range beef, pork, lamb which I am happy with for the time being and when I see reduced organic meats at coles I buy what I need and freeze for future use.
AND I made your meat pies today! Ill post some pics up on your paleo network FB wall Im really pleased with them its my first “pastry” type meal I have cooked from scratch which is paleo. I did make some changes though which you might be interested in 🙂
I didnt have huge muffin tins so I used the smaller ones but no mini sized, I made about 12 medium sized pies and the leftover mince I had for lunch, cut up some avocado, tomato, some spinach and put some cajun spices on top and squeezed on some lemon juice, cajun style feed without the taco was delicious!
for the pies I used 500gm organic mince, a small sweet potato which i grated finely, grated carrot, grated 2 organic squash, finely diced the onion i also threw in a few dollops of organic tomato paste, thyme, coconut oil and mixed herbs. finely grating it helped i thought and i simmered it until it was quite thick so maybe half an hour on low-med temp.
when rolling out the pastry I found the mixture kept sticking to the table/rolling pin so I sprayed the rolling pin with olive oil and I rolled the pastry on top of baking paper which helped. I then used a large mug to “cut” out the perfect circles which I needed for my pie cases and tops. I also threw in a handful of shredded organic coconut into the pastry with the almond meal and eggs.
I took a few pictures of the process and I am thrilled with the end result they look cute and rustic (im a very messy cook!) am surprized they cooked great and my husband who isnt following paleo but is my food tester said they tasted great and he had 2 for a snack, the rest Ill freeze for future dinners and have with salad. so glad to have a grain free alternative for pies, this would be great to have maybe using a different base maybe organic free range chicken in coconut milk and spices YUM!!!! the possibilities are endless!
Leftover pastry also makes great crackers!
I found my pastry quite sticky (maybe a combination of the size of my eggs and a warm kitchen), so instead of rolling them out I used my beef pattie press mould lined with muffin liners. And used an egg ring for the tops. I too used a standard sized muffin tin and got 12. Great size for lunch boxes!
I can’t wait to try this with different fillings such as smoked fish or mussels.
I was wondering how these might work in a pie maker?
My husband bought me one when I went gluten free and have been using gluten free pastry but I am keen to become more Paleo orientated.
I’ve never tried Sue, if you give it a go I’d be interested to hear how you get on.
My family and I are not strictly paleo but we are gluten free and in order not to merely substitute in the gf versions of all the foods we were eating a month back we are trying to avoid the gf flours, pastas and breads, hence, when I received a gift of 2 rabbits which we simmered up for stock I wanted to use the meat to make a gf rabbit pie. I tripped across 2 similar recipes for pastry but yours sounded the better (extra eggs) and I’m glad I went with it as it was AWESOME! So awesome that I would love, with FULL credit to you, to republish it on my blog if I may. It added a delicious, slightly sweet and lovely nutty flavour to the pie.
I eagerly await your reply. 🙂
Location: Millbrae, CA
Wanted to give these a go for tonight’s dinner but am running into trouble with the dough. I’m not getting it to a dough like consistency. Instead it’s taken on more of a paste consistency so I can’t really roll it out or anything like that. My though was that I would make 2 med sized ramekins worth of delicious pie but as you can see things just aren’t working out for me. This paste just oozes to the bottom of the ramekin.
I tried adding more almond flour but I’m worried I’ll muck things up if I add too much. What’s the secret? How can I get this to come out correctly?
Hi Jennifer, that doesn’t sound good – almond flour does tend to vary a lot, so I wonder if the batch you have is oiler?
This is the best pie recipe. The dough is super easy to make & works perfectly when rolled between two sheets of baking paper. The pie filling is super tasty! I’m having one problem though- I’m struggling to get a nice hick consistency with the filling. It always ends up too liquid & my pie becomes more like soup ? would you suggest adding a thickener?
Sorry very late response I know, I just found this recipe recently and made it last night – the pie (I just made one big one) turned out great, the filling was awesome (added a bit of arrowroot flour as thickener, not sure if that’s the best to use but it seemed to work). The only problem was the crust is rather hard to swallow on its own – too dry and “solid” I suppose. My family all left some of the crust due to this. Do you have any idea how it could be improved, so is this just a characteristic of using almond meal that isn’t really fixable?