Miami Bakehouse is well known for its award-winning baking, with more than 900 awards won by the Miami team so far. Never ones to rest on their laurels, the team was on the lookout for its next challenge.
The Miami team loves to innovate. It routinely turns to its customers and current food trends for inspiration. One of these is the trend towards low carbohydrate food and diets.
Miami’s beautiful handmade pastry and its well-crafted recipes have been perfected during the last 17 years of the bakery business. The delicate puff pastry and shortcrust base wrapped around their unique savoury pies are well-loved. Could it be possible to create a lower carbohydrate pastry?
This set the baking team on a path to explore a low carb option it could develop in the traditional bakery setting.
And so a secret project was set up many months ago to see if they could create a workable low carb pastry.
They had some insider experience and urging from Miami’s co-owner, David Palmer, who has a preference for a lower carb intake. So, the pursuit of great tasting low carb pastry alternatives began.
As many who have looked for low carb alternatives have experienced, home recipes and even commercially available options generally taste less than exciting and often could be compared to ‘bird seed’!
The old joke about ‘Polly wants a cracker’, took on a whole new meaning when Mr Palmer tried various already available low carb options, they just didn’t make it to the finishing line.
During the last 18 months, Miami’s secret project has taken shape with recipes being researched and developed over and over again.
There are loads of recipes for low carb pastry but these do not adapt well to larger scale pastry work. They are hard to work with, crumble easily when you eat them and often have a very nutty or linseed flavour which takes away from the delicious taste of the pie filling.
With each trial, there were elements of recipes modified, some pursued and many discarded. Try a recipe – scratch that, try another – scratch that, and so the process continued.
It was important to trial all sorts of recipes and ingredients to get a good flavour and a pastry that is workable. So many versions were trialled and thrown out in the pursuit of the best flavours. This is pastry not as you know it……it’s different but good different.
We are really proud of the results. We have a great flavour and it works well with our pie filling recipes. We are showcasing this on two of our pie recipes:
Miami’s Classic Angus Steak pie made with West Australian Stirling Ranges beef and the spicy Peri Peri Vegetable pie prepared with fresh vegetables and peri peri seasonings.
Working with food and flavours every day is a great joy and a very enjoyable career. Of course, there’s hard work behind the scenes in every aspect of the Miami team’s workday but the end results are very rewarding. This pastry project has been another opportunity for the Miami Bakehouse team to test its innovative ability.
So if you’re watching your health, your figure or you just want a flavour change you will be able to try Miami’s Low Carb pies from Wednesday 10th March 2021.
It seems you can now have your pie and eat it too!
