If you eat at Cajun and Creole restaurants often, you know the feeling: Eyeballing the meat pies on the menu, wondering if you’re gonna get suckered. What you want is a real meat pie, something that appears to be hand-made with a flaky crust and a spicy meat filling. Perhaps you have unrealistic expectations of meat pies like those you’d get at a church fundraiser or at your aunt’s Thanksgivings. More often than not, what you are going to get is a mass-produced, commercial-grade meat pie.
That’s why I was delighted to see that Herby-K’s, one of Shreveport’s best-known eateries, recently started serving meat pies created by local Creole chef and personality, Chef Panderina Soumas (we recently blogged about Chef Pansou’s line of packaged food items). These meat pies are the rustic, hand-made version that you’ve been looking for, and they’re produced using ground pork sourced from Shady Grove Ranch in nearby Jefferson, Texas. Seasoned with Soumas’ proprietary Creole Explosion Seasoning Mix, they’re sort of the complete opposite of the boring little meat pies that you may recognize from your grocer’s freezer. An order of three is $9.99 and is served with three dipping sauces.
Soumas prepares the meat pies herself on-site at Herby-K’s, where she has been working part time in the kitchen. Herby-K’s also currently serves her recipe for bread pudding. If you’re stopping by the restaurant sometime soon for a goblet of beer or a Shrimp Buster, maybe give these new, local meat pies a try – with locally sourced pork, a locally produced spice mixture and local hands producing each pie, they’re about as far from mass-produced as it gets.
If you’re a fan of local restaurants, download the third edition of Eat Here: A Food Lover’s Guide to Shreveport-Bossier.
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