Nothing is too wild for pie lady
It’s well past lunchtime and my stomach is empty, which is absolutely the wrong time to talk to Emily Lucas.
‘‘I actually just ate a pie,’’ boasts Westport’s pie lady, as she’s nicknamed in the Buller town. Lucas bakes thousands of them each week using hunted wild game, which are then shipped to hungry punters around the country.
Yesterday, Lucas trialled a new recipe with wild highland beef slow-cooked in Cassels milk stout with tripe, onions and black pepper, then baked between sheets of hand-made pastry made using locally produced butter.
She refused to eat it out of a paper bag, or smother it in tomato sauce. Instead, Lucas placed her lunch on a dinner plate and ate it slowly using a knife and fork. ‘‘I like to . . . really enjoy it,’’ she says. The result? ‘‘It’s pretty tasty’’.
No sauce? Is she crazy? Nope, just a firm believer that everything a pie consumer needs should be included in the product. Lucas sees the lunch staple as something that deserves to be elevated beyond a $3-at-the-dairy-with-a-squirt-ofWatties experience.
‘‘I think they’re this amazing little package that you can put anything inside of,’’ she says. ‘‘It’s time the pie got elevated into a premium product for people to enjoy.’’
So that’s what she’s doing. For the past two years, Lucas has been concocting all kinds of wild and wonderful flavour combinations from her Westport business West Coast Pie Co. You won’t find steakand-cheese or bacon-and-egg pies on Lucas’s menu, because that’s not what she does.
Her pies are different, full of meaty fillings made out of hunted South Island wild game.
‘‘Apart from our venison range, probably our biggest seller is our honey and mānuka-smoked wild pork,’’ she says. To make it, pork belly is slow cooked then mixed with pork shoulder that’s smoked over a charcoal fire for eight hours. ‘‘That’s a complex, really tasty little pie,’’ she says.
That’s not all. She mixes wild nanny goat with 12 secret herbs and spices.
‘‘We went one up on The [KFC] Colonel,’’ she jokes. Hare is seared with mushroom and mustard, and rabbit with leak and cider. Right now, her biggest seller is a pāua pie using seafood from the Chatham Islands and flavoured with lemon, parsley and cream. Soon, she’ll add a pie using meat from tahr, a mountain goat-like animal that threatens native alpine ecosystems at the bottom of the South Island, to her range.
But there’s one pie that’s elusive, a flavour combination she can’t quite nail. ‘‘We’re going to try a wallaby pie soon,’’ she says about the Australian native pest, which breeds in the wild in some parts of Aotearoa.
What does it taste like? ‘‘I can’t describe it,’’ she says, but it’s her and her eight-strong team’s winter mission to make it work. ‘‘We thought we’d get that done for rugby season.’’
Lucas has always had a thing for pies. ‘‘I’ve always been a little bit obsessed with them,’’ she says. When Covid arrived and lockdowns began, the former wedding caterer went all in, sourcing meat from Blenheim’s Premium Game, which has hunters stationed around the South Island. Using their products, she got creative.