Hungover Down Under? Have a ‘pie floater’

A pie floater, the Australian cure for hangovers.

The pie floater, an Australian cure for hangovers.

We already gave you some tips and tricks to get rid of your hangover. But every country has its own traditional dishes to make the process go faster. We like to give you a taste of the international anti-hangover cuisine. In this episode we are going Down Under with a dish called the pie floater. This peas soup with a meat pie on top is especially popular in the Australian city Adelaide. So next time you wake up and feel like a dozen of Aussies are playing didgeridoo in your head, please try the following recipe.

Australians in general love drinking. Not so weird if you know that the native people, the Aboriginals, are a high risk group to catch alcoholism and the earliest settlers from Europe in the late 18th century were British prisoners. Australia became a melting pot of adventurers and tough guys, a wild west-scene where only the strong ones survived. Now, generations later the progeny of these hardened men and women didn’t lose their ancestors’ drinking skills. A real Aussies idea of a good time is to get absolutely hammered. You may remember we mentioned the reputation Australian cyclists have in the peloton and also quoted Australian comic Jim Jeffries. The government is taking all kinds of measures to disencourage people to drink. Alcohol is heavily taxed and only available in the so called bottle shops. A bit after the system in many Scandinavian countries. However drinking in restaurants is relatively cheap since many places have the BYO-concept. This stands for ‘Bring Your Own’, what means you can take your own booze with you and consume it in the restaurant.
And where there is heavy drinking, there will be massive hangovers. In Adelaise they have a well-known cure known as the pie floater. A thick peas soup with a meat pie floating on top. Quite something else than the dishes we discussed so far in the hangover cures dossier. We will give you the recipe to make everything from scratch, but if you feel really hungover we understand if you just buy the meat pies instead.

Ingredients Soup:
500 gram blue boiler peas
10 gram salt
10 gram cooking soda
Water
4 meat pies
Tomato sauce
Worcestershire sauce

Ingredients Meat Pie:
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion
1 tablespoon cornflour
500 gram lean beef mince
200 mililiter beef stock
200 mililiter tomato sauce
2 tablespoons worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon barbecue sauce
1 teaspoon vegemite
Sheets of frozen, ready-rolled shortcrust pastry (enough to cut out 4 circles with a diameter of 15 cm)
Sheets of frozen puff pastry (again enough to cut out 4 circles with a diameter of 15 cm)
1 beaten egg

Preparation:
Get a pan of water to boil and put the peas in. Now turn off the heat and let them soak overnight. The next day we start with the preparation of the meat pies. If you don’t want to make them from scratch you can skip this part and go on to the part under the blank line, where we start making the soup.
Heat up the olive oil in a saucepan and throw in the finely chopped onion. Cook them for 3 minutes and add the mince. Now cook this for another four minutes, while stirring.
Now mix the cornflour with a tablespoon of the beef stock, until you get a sort of paste. Now add this paste, the stock, sauces and vegemite to the saucepan. Bring this mix to a boil and then reduce the heat. Let it simmer for about 8 minutes. Then turn off the heat completely and let it cool down. If you want you can season with salt and pepper.
Now preheat the oven at 220 degrees Celsius. Now grease a bake tray and cut out the ready-rolled shortcrust pastry in circles with a 15 centimeter diameter. Devide the meat over the four circles, now cut 4 circles of the same size from the puff pastry and place them over the meat. Press them to seal and brush the pies with beaten egg. Now place the bake tray in the oven and in 20 to 25 minutes your meat pies will be ready.

Back to the soup then. Bring the peas in water from the day before to a boil again. Then add the salt and soda and reduce the heat to a simmer. When the skins of the peas start to floating, skim them. Let the rest simmer until it becomes a thick mushy consistency. When this is the case serve in soup bowls with a meat pie upside down on top. On top (so on the bottom of the pie) you can put Tomato or worcestershire sauce or vinegar.
Quite an easy dish if you don’t make the meat pies yourself. But that’s probably for the best if you have a real Australian hangover.

Micky Bumbar

Check out more tasty hangover cures from around the world

Advertisements

6 thoughts on “Hungover Down Under? Have a ‘pie floater’

  1. You can also just drink that can of VB which is in the photo as well!. If you don’t have time to make the pie, just go to a local bakery and buy a ready-made pie!.

    LikeLike

    Reply
    • Yeah you are right! The best cure for a hangover is always to knock back a few beers. But for the long run it’s also good to get some food inside besides ‘liquid bread’! 😉

      LikeLike

      Reply
  2. As an Australian from Melbourne not Adelaide, I must say that the pie floater totally sucks. It’s a waste of a perfectly good meat pie!

    LikeLike

    Reply
    • Hahahaha I can imagine it’s not for everyone… However it is something totally different than tripe or chicken soup like served in most countries! 🙂

      LikeLike

      Reply
  3. Just in case you give the impression that we eat pies made from small rodents in these parts, I’m almost sure the bit where you say “Heat up the olive oil in a saucepan and throw in the finely chopped onion. Cook them for 3 minutes and add the mice”, should read mince. Maybe.

    LikeLike

    Reply
    • Hahahaha indeed indeed. The best typo I ever made though! Who knows, maybe some people tried mice when hungover and it worked great. Wouldn’t be the first cure discovered by accident! 😉
      But I’ll change it now. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Cheers,
      Micky

      LikeLike

      Reply

Leave a Reply