Mum's Bakehouse, Gympie Rd, Kedron

It’s cricket season again, and when anyone thinks of cricket, they naturally think of beer and pies shortly after. These pies showed all the promise in the world – but much like Virender Sehwag, completely failed to deliver when the pressure was on.

It was a Tuesday lunchtime, and Rimmer made the trip to Mum’s Bakehouse, just past the roadworks on Gympie Road at Kedron. He declared that it was doing a roaring trade thanks to the hordes of hungry road workers that had descended upon it like an army of high-vis fire ants tearing the place apart. 

He also said that perhaps the shop should have been called Mama-san’s Bakehouse, which filled us both with anticipation. I must admit I’ve got a thing for Asian-owned bakeries; usually their curry pies are napalm-hot and their pastry is second to none. But there is an exception to every rule, except for the rule that states that there is an exception to every rule….and Mum’s is the exception to the Asian bakery rule.

I had the curry beef (a Keens type 1) and a Ned Kelly, after seeing how awesome Pedro the barrister’s Ned Kelly was at the Banana Cabana a few weeks earlier. The pies were about $4.20 each, which is pretty cheap.

Mum's Curry Beef

First, the curry beef. The colour of the lid was great – baked to perfection, with that slight elliptical shape that gives the pie a hand-made look of authenticity….but unfortunately everything after that was ordinary. Once out of the foil nest, it wobbled around like Tubby Taylor’s belly and had to be eaten at a great rate of knots before it collapsed – which was easy to do because the pie was lukewarm and fairly timid curry-wise. You’re not eating this one in the car. It was like Sehwag chopping a wide one on to the stumps in the third over of the day – simply poor technique, poorly executed. A sad day indeed for the Pieologist. Rimmer was similarly unimpressed. We discussed a score, and he talked me down from what would have been an over-generous 6 to a fair 5/10.

Mum's Ned Kelly

Still, the Ned Kelly looked good as you can see here from the picture, so I still had hope that we could salvage a decent innings from a poor start. It had a reasonable amount of cheese and bacon, the egg was a whole unscrambled egg that had been cracked raw straight onto the mince before baking (nice touch). 

Surprisingly, the pastry was great – managing to hold the lidless pie together with ease, making me wonder why the hell it hadn’t been deployed for the curry pie. Sidenote: it was actually a different shaped base in a different nest from the curry pie. The Neddie was shaped like a Four N Twenty with squareish side walls and corners; whereas the curry beef base was shaped like a flying saucer in a shallower foil base. The result was that Ned Kelly stayed together perfectly. Strange.

Anyway, (to continue the cricket analogy) much like Liz Hurley, good looks was where the Ned Kelly ended. The bacon was ordinary, the cheese not particularly sharp, and the mince was watery, lukewarm, and devoid of flavour including seasoning. I’m giving it a 5/10 for the base, whole egg, and looks alone. 

I understand that the store had been owned for years by an Italian family, and an Asian family bought it just before the roadworks began - trading under the same name after the sale. I never had the opportunity to try one of the original owners' pies, but have anecdotally heard good reports. I have also heard that the new owners are in dispute with the state government over business interruption due to the roadworks. Whether this is true or not I don't know; but you'd had to have been living under a rock not to know that a major upgrade was going to happen. But that's by the bye.

Unlike most of you, I've been hard at it over the holidays. Not working, obviously, but working for you, good readers. Scouring the country for the good, the bad and the ugly so that you may make informed pie choices no matter where you are. At this very moment I have one of my foreign correspondents overseas in Tasmania, hunting for the famed Tassie scallop pie. In fact, this morning he sent word of a Blue Eye Cod & Korma pie in Hobart. Sounds terriffic. More on that later. Suffice it to say that I have several reviews padded up and ready to take strike over the next month or so, so brace yourselves and start exercising...there are a few out there that you really need to try for yourselves.


Until then, take care.


The Pieologist.