Australia’s Best Pie is NZ-Made and Vegan

New Zealand-born Adrian Apswoude and Doug Meijer’s Melbourne bakery Ka Pies Bakehouse have been awarded Australia’s Best Pie for their Thai vegetable curry vegan pie.

Apswoude and Meijer launched Ka Pies in 2014. The pair had no baking experience.

It is the first time in the history of the Baking Association of Australia’s competition that a meat-free pie has won.

Apswoude said he was working in IT with Victoria Police when Meijer, then a manager at Bunnings, heard about an old man selling a bakery.

“Dougie went, ‘Let’s make New Zealand pies’, and I was like, ‘No way’,” Apswoude said. “And then we made some and we tasted them and they tasted great and I was like, let’s give it a crack.”

The Thai vegetable curry pie was originally vegetarian before the pair realised that with a small alteration they could market it to a wider audience.

“We realised that our pastry had 10 per cent butter and we’re like, if we just eliminate that 10 per cent butter, it becomes a vegan pie and that’s another point of sale,” Apswoude said.

The pair’s winning pie was selected from 1700 entries.

The bakery’s pies are now distributed all over Melbourne, to New South Wales, Queensland and New Zealand.

Original article by Goya Dmytryshchak, Star Weekly, June 3, 2016.

Photo by Damjan Janevski.