Bushfoods, Laksa and Gin: Try These Spins on Australia’s Favourite Pastry With Ballarat’s Best Pie Trail

For a seriously good pie, you’d better leave the city. Regional Victoria is home to countless bakeries displaying their competition medals and claiming pastry greatness, and nowhere is this more obvious than Ballarat. The city has become a food destination, and this August its restaurants, pubs, wine bars, breweries, distilleries and cafes are putting their culinary energy into celebrating that Aussie road-trip staple: the pie.

Ballarat’s Best Pie is a month-long city-wide takeover that will see 28 sweet and savoury pies duking it out for the crown in 2024. The winners will be announced on Saturday August 3, but if you’re up for it, the competing venues are serving their inventive entries throughout August. Here are a few on our list.

Mum’s Curry Laksa Pie by Flying Chillies

If you think Malaysian and Indonesian street food don’t mix with the Aussie pie, you haven’t been to Flying Chillies. Lilly Wright’s diner is known locally for classics like nasi lemak and char kway teow, but she’s also mastered the art of pie-ifying those flavours – she won the inaugural Best Pie in 2023 with her Babi Pongteh pie (braised pork and fermented soybean).

This year, the defending champ is turning to a winter warmer for her pie inspiration: “I think curry laksa is always very comforting,” she says.

The pie – complete with vermicelli noodles, fish cakes, prawns, shredded chicken and tofu puff – is a sentimental, too. “It’s my mum’s recipe,” Wright says. “My mum is in Malaysia so we want to bring her closer here.” The spicy, umami Mum’s Curry Laksa pie is (according to Wright) best accompanied by a hot sambal – another of Mum’s recipes.

Pork Adobo Pithivier by Hotel Canberra

Hotel Canberra is part of a recent wave of Ballarat eateries proving what locals have known for a while – there’s a serious food scene in town. Led by former Rockpool chef Jigs Liwanag, the renovated 19th-century hotel celebrates its home state serving all-Victorian produce at Vesta x Jigs and Bobby’s wine bar. The Stables cafe also has a local focus.

This year, Liwanag is blending his fine-dining class with Filipino home cooking for his Best Pie entrant, the Pork Adobo Pithivier. “It's our own style of Filipino cooking,” Liwanag says of adobo. “We marinate the pork in nice aromatics like bay leaf, garlic, onions, soy sauce and cane vinegar.” Like Lilly Wright’s curry laksa, Liwanag’s version of the sweet-and-sour dish takes a family recipe as its starting point. “My twist on the adobo is basically my grandma's recipe, passed on through generations,” he says. “My grandma usually cooked it for lunch every Sunday.” For some Hotel Canberra style, Liwanag tweaks tradition and adds smoky pork bones, fried garlic and fried potatoes, all served in French pithivier puff pastry.

Eat the Bush by Saltbush Kitchen

Brigid Corcoran at Saltbush Kitchen creates sensory experiences. She highlights native ingredients in small-batch spice blends, rubs, salts and condiments that she packs in her store – a bright, textural art space inspired by local landscapes and wildlife. For Ballarat’s Best Pie, Corcoran is bringing that same philosophy to her entry, Eat the Bush.

A collaboration with Beaufort-based baker Sara Kittelty, Eat the Bush is a sweet pie with lemon-myrtle pastry and wattleseed crumble, filled with natives like muntries and quandongs. “Our whole thing is about showcasing how delicious natives are,” Corcoran says. “People are progressing and starting to use more native foods in their kitchen, but sometimes the fruits people aren't as familiar with.” Quandongs, Corcoran says, have a rhubarb-like tartness, while muntries are, “Like apple and cinnamon”. You can snap up one of the fruit crumble pies at Saltbush Kitchen throughout August, alongside a bushfood hot chocolate.

Oh Deer by Kilderkin Distillery

Like Saltbush Kitchen, Kilderkin Distillery is big on native ingredients; it incorporates Australian flavours into its craft gins. Once the gins are distilled, Kilderkin co-founders Rebecca Mathews and Chris Pratt send the spent botanicals to Federation University baking teacher – and national pie comp judge – Brendan Carter to use in his classes. Having won the sweet pie category with their 2023 collab, Carter and Kilderkin are entering a new gin-braised creation this year.

“We’re using the spent botanicals in the pastry,” Carter says, “blitzing them in a spice grinder and incorporating that into the pastry so we get a fleck of colour as well as a different type of flavour.” The filling includes other natives like Davidson’s plum, but the star of the show is Western District venison, braised with the juniper-heavy Lola gin (named for gold rush femme fatale Lola Montez). Pop down to Kilderkin Distillery to try the Oh Deer pie and a matched drink. “We recommend pairing it with a Lola gin and tonic, or our Lola Classic Negroni,” says Mathews.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Visit Ballarat. Check out all 28 pies competing to be Ballarat’s Best Pie at the city’s best restaurants and cafes, from August 1–31. Plan your visit with the full pie list online, or download the pie trail map to create your own personal pie-tinerary. You can also win a weekend in Ballarat by sharing a photo of a pie from a participating venue on Instagram with the hashtags #BallaratsBestPie and #VisitBallarat.