When Ryan Khun first arrived in Australia from Cambodia in 2012, aged 27, he had never tasted a pie.
That is, until his older brother Chan took him to a servo for a meat pie: flaky pastry on the outside, a molten mince slurry in the middle. His first meal in Australia, unfamiliar tastes in a new land.
Remembering how he felt after those first few bites, Khun says: “There is something I don’t really like.”
Pies were not something he grew up eating in Phnom Penh, but today a metal trophy sits in his office at Country Cob bakery in Springvale in south-east Melbourne. It reads “2026 Australian Best Pie Competition Official Overall Winner”, and it’s so big, he could hide behind it.
It’s the fifth time in eight years the bakery has taken home the coveted award from the Baking Association of Australia (BAA), and Country Cob’s winning entry this year was a Malaysian-style prawn curry pie, where golden pastry encases a filling of coconut-poached prawns doused with galangal, lemongrass, chilli and ginger.
Khun’s journey from pie beginner to prize winner started with a decision to move to Australia for “a better life and a better education for the kids”, he says. Despite studying and working in IT in Cambodia, he couldn’t get local work in that field. Instead, he decided to join Chan at his bakery in Kyneton in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges.
“I never thought I would be baking,” says Khun, who remembers starting work at midnight, rolling out of their home upstairs to the bakery downstairs. For many years the two brothers only baked bread, with the shop’s pies provided by a third-party supplier. They only ever sold a handful every week and they weren’t up to Khun’s standard or taste: “They were too dry, too salty.”
After a few years they decided to try making their own pies and cakes, enrolling in a baking trade school while still working baker’s hours.
While they inherited plenty of traditional pie recipes from the bakery’s previous owner, their first original recipe was a garlic prawn pie that remains on their menu to this day.
By 2018, they’d moved to another shopfront in Kyneton, and their hard work paid off when they clinched the coveted BAA’s best overall pie award for the first time with a satay fish entry, which one judge described at the time as “unbelievable – well created with that smooth satay flavour and seafood cooked to perfection”. They would go on to win again in 2019 with a caramelised pork and pepper pie, which riffs on the Cambodian dish of kaw sach chrouk, a hearty braise of pork belly, eggs, coconut and fish sauce; their 2023 winner had a fish amok filling.
“We never thought this was going to work,” says Khun. The bakery’s mostly white customer base was initially apprehensive about the less traditional fillings, but Khun says they’ve been tweaked to suit local tastes – the fillings are slightly sweeter and not as spicy. There’s a small, multicultural team at Country Cob who sit down together and deliberate on new pie flavour before they go into production: the Malaysian prawn pie took three months to perfect.
Not all flavours have been a hit, according to Khun, listing kung pao chicken, kimchi pork and beef bulgolgi among the failed experiments. Singapore chilli crab and “super cheese” are on the R&D list.
And Country Cob has expanded. Alongside their original Kyneton store, there are branches in Boronia and Springvale and a production kitchen in Dandenong South. There, staff bake more than 10,000 pies a week, and the homely aroma of freshly baked pastry drifts over the suburb’s warehouse and factory precinct.
“I love baking,” says Khun. “I enjoy making pies and making everyone happy when they enjoy the pie.”
Over at their Springvale store, Malaysian Australian retiree Yvonne Au has travelled with her friend to seek out the award-winning prawn pie. She disagreed it was Malaysian in flavour, but concedes “it’s quite tasty”.
“It’s the way to a man’s heart,” says Bob Reggio, who drove from Sydney to Melbourne as part of a Mustang driver’s club – a club member is a local customer. “Absolutely delicious … it brings a tear to my eye.”
“We’re not a boring country”,” says customer Teresa Nguyen. She’s come today for the prawn pie, but is a big fan of Country Cob’s range of adventurous flavours. “We’re not monoculture.”
