The car my partner and I share is basically ornamental. It serves three purposes: for emergencies, late-night shifts and to transport trays of frozen pastizzi from The Original Maltese Pastizzi Co in Sunshine North to our apartment. Taking the train won’t do as we can’t fit enough in our backpacks. We need the boot – and a lot of freezer space.

The production capacity within the Suffolk Road store is remarkable, with owners Melissa and Oscar Wassilieff utilising every square inch of the bright-red shopfront, kitchen and storage space to make the crispy, flaky, deliciously buttery pastries.

Though pastizzi are traditionally filled with ricotta or curried peas, there are more than 20 flavours on offer at The Original Maltese Pastizzi Co – including savoury, sweet and vegan options – with the range ever-evolving and expanding.

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Making each pastizz is an intricate, multi-day process, and the highly skilled baking team of 12 – many of whom have Maltese heritage – has mastered the art, with decades of accumulated experience, and each with specialised tasks.

They first make the pastry, mixing 150 kilos of flour with water and salt before leaving it to rest. It’s transformed into puff pastry via a buttering and rolling process, performed by hand to ensure the pastizzi are perfectly flaky. The rolled pastry is also rested for several hours before it’s stretched to long lengths, cut into different pieces, and opened and filled to make the individual pastizzi. They’re then frozen and readied for shipping to dozens of different stockists all over Australia. “Puff pastry loves to be in a hot oven from frozen,” Melissa tells Broadsheet.

But the shop also sells warm pastizzi for $2 a piece; they’re best enjoyed with a latte, a Lion Brand Maltese tea or a Kinnie (a bitter orange Maltese soft drink).

Beyond handmaking around 3600 pastizzi a day, the team also makes ravioli once or twice a week; qassatat, open-top shortcrust pastry filled with ricotta, curried peas and more; plus biscuits and sweets. There’s also a range of grocery items and Maltese staples.

And while customers from all kinds of backgrounds typically come for the pastizzi, Melissa says the shop is an important meeting spot for the Maltese diaspora.

“We see reunions inside the shop,” she says, “and customers who look at an imported item which takes them back to their childhood, and they cry because it brings back so many memories.

“You can find so many different grocery lines from [across the world in Melbourne], but there aren’t a lot of Maltese goods. Years ago, when we took over the business, we said we would aim to bring in as many Maltese goods as possible.”

Although Melissa is a banker by trade, her background and upbringing provided the ideal training to run The Original Maltese Pastizzi Co. She grew up working with her dad and siblings at Pasticceria Padova in the northern suburb of Fawkner – which has been in operation since 1969 – and returned to the family business later in life. With her partner Oscar, she left Padova around 10 years ago in search of their own manufacturing business (though they still collaborate, with the businesses trading cannoli for pastizzi).

Initially started by Charlie and Jane Portelli under the same name in 2005, the pastizzi shop stuck with Melissa and Oscar ever since their first visit. And in 2014, they took it over, changing a few things. “We added coffees, hot pastizzi and the Maltese grocery line – basically, everything I could possibly get my hands on – and did a few renos.”

But one thing was set in stone: the original pastizzi recipe. “It goes back five generations [and has] no preservatives or additives,” Melissa says. “It’s fresh ingredients that we prepare every day, and the only chemical used here is to clean the floors.”

“The traditional [ricotta and curried-pea pastizzi] will always be most important in this shop but the diversity of flavours is good, as we can accommodate the different cultures and generations. Even Malta is doing it now – I’ve heard of chocolate and apple pastizzi being sold there – which would’ve been unheard of in the past.”

The Original Maltese Pastizzi Co
19b Suffolk Road, Sunshine North

Hours:
Mon to Fri 7am–4pm
Sat 7am–2pm

originalmaltesepastizzi.com.au

This is a new edition of Broadsheet’s Local Knowledge series, where we explore the eateries at the heart of Melbourne’s different cultural communities. Read more here.