One truly beautiful thing about our world is the number of cultures that have a delicious, handheld pastry treat of some sort. You’ve got your empanadas in regions like Southern Europe, North Africa, and Latin America. Samosas are popular in India and South Asia, but also Africa and the Middle East. The English have the pasty.
“We like proteins wrapped in carbs, that’s just, like, human nature,” chuckles Jin Kim of Two Kangaroo, and ain’t that the truth? Australians are no different, as Kim learned after she met her husband, who grew up in Queensland—though they mainly opt for the simple, elegant terminology “meat pie.” For the last several months, Two Kangaroo has been bringing Aussie tucker to the Twin Cities in the form of frozen, ready-to-cook meat pies you can order online.
Kim and her husband met while the two were living in D.C.; they ended up in Minnesota kind of on a whim, partly drawn in by its sneaky-wonderful food scene. But their life here, while mostly great, left a little to be desired. Kim was burnt out at work (she remembers looking at her watch at the end of one particularly grueling workday and seeing that her step count was only around 300), and her husband was homesick. Specifically, he was craving his homeland’s traditional meat pies.
“Honestly, they’ve got meat pies and sausage rolls kind of everywhere,” Kim says of Australia. “Anywhere from your corner store in the neighborhood to a high-end bakery that does gourmet things, they will always have pies.”
But that’s not the case in Minnesota. Though there have been other local meat pie makers—Jamo’s New Zealand Pie Co., for example, and Bub's Aussie Pies in Lake Elmo—both closed in recent years. Kim tried to make meat pies on her own, using store-bought pastry and other ingredients, but the results weren’t up to her standards.
Desperate, meat-pie-less times call for desperate measures, and last January, Kim quit her job and booked a flight to Queensland. “I went on a mission to try to find a teacher,” she says, during which she basically showed up at bakeries and asked, “Hello, I’m from America, will you teach me how to make meat pies?”
She eventually found an Australian-American couple willing to teach her, bunked with her mother-in-law, and came back ready to… well, to do some more retooling and recipe tweaking. Ingredients like flour and butter are just slightly different in the land down under, and Kim wanted the pies to be perfect. She reworked her recipes yet again after moving from her home kitchen to a commercial kitchen, and took Two Kangaroo live in October.
I love having locally produced, ready-to-make foods in the freezer (see also: La Loma Tamales), and Two Kangaroo meat pies have become a staple in my household in recent months (I think my partner and I have recommended Kim’s pies to a combined 40+ people).
Unlike a pasty or a samosa, Aussie meat pies have gravy inside, which means you need two kinds of dough: a denser, sturdier short crust slab on the bottom and a flaky, airy laminated puff pastry on the top. The result is a meat pie with a golden-brown, delicate layered crown on its top that’s also hearty, rich, and never dry. They’re the ultimate comfort food; all the convenience of a Marie Callender's pot pie, with inventive flavor combinations, local veggies, and organic chicken or beef from Robbinsdale’s excellent Hackenmueller Meats.
“That’s why we started this—it is a comfort food,” Kim says. “It’s like your go-to stew, in the form of a portable bread bowl.”
Kim says the two meat pies that are closest to being authentic are the curry beef, which uses a mellow, balanced Australian curry powder called Keen's, and the beef bacon and cheese, which is what it sounds like and so much more. Think of it like the world’s most perfect sloppy joe, if it was also a cheeseburger, and also blessed with a bit of garlic and onion. (And also served inside a pastry so buttery you know better than to ask about the fat content.)
Though it may not be “authentically” Australian, the Korean chicken might be my favorite Two Kangaroo pie, with juicy bites of chicken that have been marinated in a mix of gochujang, honey, ginger, and soy sauce. It’s a nod to Kim’s Korean heritage, and it rocks. There’s also a chunky steak variety with potatoes, celery, carrots, onion, and garlic swimming alongside those hunks of Hackenmueller beef. There’s something very midwestern about this one; it might remind you of your grandma’s beef stew.
You’ll also find sausage rolls, another Australian classic, among Two Kangaroo’s offerings; Kim recommends dunking them in ketchup for an experience that’s “ kind of like a bougie hot dog.”
And as for Kim’s homesick husband? She says her husband taste-tests everything—even though by now she’s made hundreds of batches of meat pies.
“He gets his Aussie meat pies out of this, at the end of the day,” she laughs. “He’s happy.”
Two Kangaroo
Address: 208 29th Ave. N., Minneapolis (Dots Gray Kitchen)
Ordering and pick-up: Order online any time; pick up Monday to Thursday between 3:30-5:30 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
