I enlisted my best friend, Steph, to help me dream up these patties when I needed to create an entry for a baking competition. I felt a little chicken. I can’t remember why I felt pressure to enter a prize-less competition at all but I recall wanting to share the work, fear and any subsequent misery. And Steph was easy to convince, she could never turn down a little healthy competition. The only recipe I could successfully bake at the time was a short-crust, or puff, pastry. My mom and aunt gave their recipe to me and it’s fool-proof. I’m the fool who proves it. I promise you, I put it to that test on more than one occasion. Now I just needed to think up what the pastry would puff itself onto or around. I’m stronger in the savoury category by far, and this dough is the one my aunt and mother use to make their “short-eats” which is a term used to describe Sri Lankan snacks. Their minced potato and meat filling came to mind and so did Steph’s family’s delicious attempts to create patties like they’d eaten growing up in Jamaica. So Sri-maican patties it would be. But guess what?
“Fusion” is actually hard! Scoff at this passe food trend as you may, combining a bunch of flavours can require a little thought and effort. Who knew. How to narrow down which Jamaican flavours we needed? Fresh thyme, scotch bonnet peppers…and Sri Lankan? Fresh curry leaves, green chilies? And then those ingredients were all so bold, it took many tests to balance them. You might not see it when you look at this seemingly obvious list, and we don’t remember every time we make these now, but it took a lot to make these winners.
And then we lost.
I think “bacon blondies” won, or “mango curry snow crescents” and I’m not saying it’s sweetism but SURPRISE, a sweet thing won the baking competition. Guess which got an honourable mention though? Guess which stand sold out of their requisite 50-only samples outside of the judges samples before any other? OUR RECIPE.
This story and the recipe that goes with it can be found in “STUFFED”, ISSUE 016 of Le Sauce Magazine! Please get it here: http://www.lesauce.com/app