Kyneton’s Country Cob Bakery on winning Australia’s best pie twice
This country bakery is in the upper crust of pie makers, winning Australia’s best pie competition twice. How are preparations going for a potential hattrick?
THE next Australia’s Best Pie Competition is still more than a month away, but at Country Cob Bakery, preparations are well under way.
The bakery has claimed the mantle of Australia’s best pie not once, but the past two years, causing a surge in visitors to Kyneton to try for themselves the best of one of this country’s favourite foods.
Brothers Ryan and Chan Khun tapped into their Cambodian heritage, and other Asian flavour influences, to create their winning satay seafood and caramelised pork and pepper pies.
And Ryan (pictured) says more Asian influences for pie fillings are being road-tested and toyed with now ahead of this year’s competition.
“You want to win again, but you never know. It’s quite big pressure, because everyone wants to win too and from year to year the entries are getting more and more,” says Ryan, who manages the bakery at Kyneton, while Chan now manages their bakery at Boronia.
“It’s a competition and win or loss it’s not really a big deal — it’s just, you work hard enough, you bring all your best, that should be the thing. Since last month we have created a lot of flavours already — we do brainstorming, so we have, I think, another 10 so far that we’ve come up with at this stage, so we’re trialling, tasting, trialling and tasting.”
When Ryan joined his brother and parents in Australia from Cambodia in 2012, Chan had just opened a bakery in Balwyn. Ryan’s background was working as a computer technician, so in joining his brother’s new business he described his career change as a “360-degree turn”.
They sold the business in 2015. After a break of a couple of months, they started looking for another bakery business opportunity.
“We didn’t plan to come here,” Ryan said of Kyneton.
“We kept looking in the suburbs — we didn’t think we wanted to come to a regional area.
“We had gone through quite a few bakeries listed online and then this one, in Kyneton, they had just put it up for sale.
“I had a bit of discussion with my brother, if we can’t really find a good one in the suburbs, why don’t we try something a bit different?”
They ended up looking at a few regional bakeries, but Kyneton was the one that took their hearts. It was a very different business to the one they had before, which had been predominantly bread-focussed.
“Making bread, we have to wake up very early — midnight, one o’clock — to get everything ready, but pies we can start about five o’clock in the morning,” Ryan said.
The brothers allowed themselves time to settle into the business before entering the pie competition for the first time in 2017 — and took out the plain mince beef pie and gourmet pie categories.
They hit gold in 2018, winning the vegetarian pastie, plain mince beef pie, beef flavoured pie, vegetarian pie, seafood pie and apprentice plain mince beef pie categories. And they took out the overall best pie prize with their satay seafood pie.
That win saw demand skyrocket — Ryan says for the next two months they doubled normal production.
At last year’s awards, Country Cob won the seafood pie and gourmet pie categories. Their champion pie of show in 2019 was caramelised pork and pepper.
“We come from Asian background, so we love Asian food — we love satays, curries,” Ryan says.
“We thought we need to do something different, we cannot just go for the plain pie, pepper pie, mushroom. We are not going to win with those pies, because everyone has the same pie.
“The caramelised pork and pepper, that one comes from our traditional Cambodian food … back home we eat a lot of caramelised pork, and we thought there is something very interesting there if we can turn a home-cooked food into a pie filling that people can try, and something that would be nice. That one took 3-4 months to get it balanced to become a pie filling.”
Pies are not the only bakery staple they experiment with — they recently debuted a choc-coconut-durian slice, a twist on the vanilla slice. Ryan says it is “not for everyone”.
The Baking Association of Australia’s best pie and best pastie competitions, which were postponed from May, are now scheduled for August 25-27.
The Kyneton bakery, which normally serves locals during the week before an influx of visitors on weekends, has felt the effects of the virus. “(March and April) were our worst months ever, sales went down a lot, pretty much 60-70 per cent like everyone else. But we can’t close, we have a lot of staff who need to work so we just keep going on,” Ryan says. “It has come back to some sort of normality. It’s not like before, but it’s getting better.”
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