Thursday, November 3, 2011

French Hot Bread, Port Augusta, South Australia

Traveling around Australia, searching for some ubiquitous variety of cuisine that can be found in every country town, like gozleme in Turkey or Fried Kuay Teow in Malaysia, one is left with few options other than the humble bakery and its stalwarts the pie and sausage roll.  Of course there are pub meals, but since the 1990s both city and outback pubs seem to have suddenly forgotten that they serve essentially working class drinkers, there being more profit in the fallacious idea of pubs being 'bourgeois' venues charging $22 for a chicken parma or $30 for a poorly cooked steak (no, rare does not mean cooked until the blood is gone).
During my last trip around Australia 4 years ago, i met with many a fine sausage roll and pie.  It is, for anyone who has cooked the things themselves, very difficult to make a bad sausage roll.  Yet, on my previous circumnavigation of Terra Australis, I soon discovered that both city and country bakeries had a knack for baking from cheap meat and a general lack of ingredients, unexciting pies and sausage rolls.  Almost all the fine, memorable specimens I met were of the 'home-made' variety found at remote roadhouses.  Ah, the memories of some of those hungry encounters in the outback!  One of the few bakery-exceptions was the French Hot Bread bakery in Port Augusta.
Having been colonised by the French, the Vietnamese soon adopted the French talent for baking crunchy bread rolls, butter rich croissants and delicate, fluffy puff pastry.  How I miss Footscrays delectable Pork Rolls and Pork Puffs!
Although it is not a Prado of the Art of Baking, with the pies being on the runny side and the sausage rolls mushy, French Hot Bread in Port Augusta is certainly a step up for the palate when compared to the present status quo of Australian bakery fare.  The pastry is all of the usual, quality Vietnamese standard.  The prices are so low that, for under $10, you can get two pies from their wide selection as well a delicious bee-sting for a sticky desert.  Obviously some thought goes into the large variety of baked goods, for it seems that the owners follow the archaic adage that putting care into their product, rather than skimping on quality and over-charging, will stir customers to return and increase profits. And it seems to be working for them, thankfully: at lunch hour in Port Augusta, there is no where busier. 
French Hot Bread Bakery may be no great vanguard of a traditional meat pie and sausage roll, but in a millieu where the Art of the Australian Bakery becomes something of an unpalatable, homogeneous Fordist nightmare, this intermingling of French-Vietnamese pastry with Australian/British baking offers something of a small beacon as one enters the Stuart Hwy.

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