Showcasing NZ An Essential Ingredient For Café Boutique Pie Entries

Entries are about to close in the 25th Bakels NZ Supreme Pie Awards with a strong number of cafes lining up their delectable pies for judging on July 27 in the Café Boutique category. We talk to three café bakers about what they’re working on for the Awards.

The selection of smoked seafood is what makes Blackbeard’s Smokehouse the ‘go to’ place in Kopu at the entrance to the Coromandel Peninsula, and just recently the business expanded its product range to include seafood pies. Baked on the premises with the freshest kai moana ingredients, customers can pick them up piping hot from the pie warmer or chilled/frozen to take home. For seafood fans it’s incredibly hard to choose which pie with smoked mussel, smoked snapper or smoked salmon and feta, all of which are smoked onsite and then baked fresh into pies. But then last week they introduced a scallop and bacon pie and they’ve proved hugely popular with hundreds going out the door until they sell out.

All of which is making it difficult for Jessica Jones of Blackbeard’s Smokehouse to decide what pie they’ll submit as their first time entry in the Café Boutique category of the Bakels NZ Supreme Pie Awards. “We’re a tiny, kind of factory outlet of fresh mussels, smoked seafood, fresh oysters, but the pies have been going really well. We’re reasonably new; we’ve only been operating the retail outlet for six months but we’ve been a wholesaler for many years. With our entry we want to showcase some of our smoked products and promote the goodness of food produced in the waters of the Coromandel.”

At Clocktower Café 201 in Hokitika Darren Campbell is chasing a Café Boutique category win in the Bakels NZ Supreme Pie Awards after placing ninth in the top ten with his last entry, a chicken and vegetable pie. He’s been told that his pie was probably only about two points away from the gold award which makes it realistically within his reach. “To be in the top ten is an achievement and knowing how close it was to the win makes me feel a bit better because the standard of pies is so high now.”

Darren says quality ingredients like beautiful chunks of beef or chicken make his pies standout and where possible he sources local ingredients. “Mince and cheese, steak and cheese, and chicken and vegetable are still our best-selling pies out of 14 different flavours.”

“This year I’m going to do something a little bit different and go back to basics, to be honest. Some of the bakers who have won the Supreme in recent times have won it with a basic pie, and you still can’t beat a good old fashioned mince or mince and cheese. So that’s a hint that we’re going to go back to the basics with a bit of a pump up. I’m working on the cheese and thinking of making it a cheese sauce. I’ll give it a go and see what it comes out like. It’s still got to look right. So we’ll see how it goes. My theory is ‘do it once, do it right’.”

At Tokomaru Bay’s Café 35, Peter Cunningham has had the odds stacked against him and his partner Sue in recent months with cyclone damage to the region and persistent rain. He knows though that when the sun comes out pie sales rocket and are the biggest part of the business, especially in the summer holidays. When they bought the business two years ago it came with three pie recipes including the legendary paua pie. Since then they’ve developed three new recipes to add to the menu.

“We take all our pies very seriously and the paua pie has had all the attention, so we thought it might be nice to shed some light on another pie for our first time entry because you can only enter one pie. We’ve just started up a new brunch time menu to add another string to our bow. Paua is our biggest selling pie and to that we’ve added a pulled pork belly pie; mince and cheese, but not your standard style, we’ve tweaked it and added some secret ingredients; mushroom, blue cheese and spinach, our vegetarian option; smoked fish; and steak, stout and mushroom.”

The steak, stout and mushroom recipe is an old Irish recipe, again with a few tweaks. “It’s a three-hour cook and we put a lot of care and love into all our pie recipes. The stout’s a tenderizing agent as well as the flavour and then we add in a few little things which shall not be disclosed…it’s a rich, dark filling with more than one mushroom in it.”

Peter says: “We get people from Bluff to Kaitaia already and visitors have sent some pies to San Francisco and lots of people take them to Australia. So it would be absolutely wonderful to do well in the Pie Awards and bring in more people.”

Entries for the Bakels NZ Supreme Pie Awards close, today, June 23 at 5pm. Enter at: pieawards.nz

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