Gold pie honours dad’s 40 year-old recipe

“It’s Dad’s recipe but we modified it a little bit for the competition. Its Dad’s from about 40 years ago when the family started baking. Dad loved bacon and egg pies. He ate one almost every day. That was his thing in the morning a cup of tea or coffee and a bacon and egg pie. That’s my fondest memory of Dad when I was growing up, says Sean.

“The only thing I did different from Dad’s recipe was I separated the yolk from the egg white. I left the yolk in the pie and I just made a really nice mix that Dad used to make with a little bit of nutmeg and salt and pepper which gave it a lot of flavour. Cream was the essential ingredient, and we use a really good smoky bacon for it. That’s what Dad always told us, ‘don’t put in anything else, no onion, no tomato, just a little bit of cheese but not too much’.”

Sean says his dad always said, ‘make sure when a customer buys something they get what they paid for’. “We always copied Dad’s ethos of making things that put the value in it, and ‘make sure what you said is what you give the customer’.”

Wise words indeed, from a South Vietnamese immigrant escaping the increase in communist control, who brought his wife and six children to New Zealand. They found themselves initially on a Waikato dairy farm until about three years later they bought a bakery in White Swan Road, Blockhouse Bay, Auckland, and began using their previous café owner skills from Vietnam to grow a very successful business specialising in English-style baked goods like Chelsea buns, Sally Lunn buns, tank loaves, and fruit loaves etc with pies a big seller. Sean’s mother, Cam Vo, added some Vietnamese flavours to the cooking, while his dad focused on the baking.

“We never had bacon and egg pies in our culture, but French patisserie and baking were in our blood…Once we started baking in New Zealand and seeing what New Zealanders loved and that was pies, we had to change to the environment and the times that we were in.”

Sean, the youngest in the family remembers sleeping in the car outside his parent’s bakery at night while they worked away making the goods for that days’ trading. He’d wake up early, go and have a drink and a pie and then get to work helping his mother with the cabinet food before heading to school. “My brothers and sisters, we were all helping Mum and Dad.”

All bar one of his older sisters, his siblings continued in to work in the baking industry owning businesses, some employing Sean, who clearly had baking in his blood and went on to successfully own cafes.  

Three years ago Sean discovered his parents’ former bakery up for sale and he just had to return to his roots by buying it. He says that while he has transformed it to Levain Artisan Bakery, it still has that sense of when his parents owned it and his own ethos is to honour them in what he does.

“Dad was very passionate about baking but Mum, I think, was the one who gave me the passion for cooking as well. So I’ve blended the two together from watching Mum cook and learning her recipes, fine-tuning my taste buds as well. That’s from Mum, so I have to credit Mum for a lot of that early development in my life. Mum brought her Vietnamese flare with the French cooking side. She marinated the meat and did a lot of Asian fusion with the flavours with the filled rolls and savouries side. It wasn’t like a standard bakery, it was a very busy bakery and we were baking for New World Green Bay as well, so it was a full-on operation.

“When we reopened the bakery three years ago there were still a lot of older people in the community that remembered Mum and Dad and the family that owned the bakery. They were asking how Mum and Dad were and it was lovely to still be remembered in the community.”

Sean, who admits mince and cheese is his favourite pie, started entering the Pie Awards in 2023. “We came 9^th for a chicken pie in the first year, then in the second year we came 8^th for the chicken, 6^th for the vegetarian, and 5^th for the bacon and egg. So every year we’ve improved and this year we got 6^th for the vegetarian, 4^th for the steak and gravy and gold for the bacon and egg.”

Credit must also go to NZ Bakels pastry tutor and advisor, Raymond Clark, says Sean. “I’ve learned a lot from my family and had a lot of help from Bakels as well. Raymond is one of my mentors. I went through one of his pastry classes and I started to put my head down and start thinking about what Raymond said. And then practice day and night to make sure that my pastries and the layers that Raymond had talked about, I could achieve.”

He’s certainly done that! Levain Artisan Bakery now employs 20 staff including three talented chefs and a pastry chef. They regularly introduce new pie flavours, like the Mexican six hours slow-cooked beef birria pie with queso and corn chips. They rotate the most popular flavours while making a staggering 3500-4000 pies a week!     

The bakery has become a destination for out-of-towners and receives great support from the local community.

“I feel very blessed,” says Sean. He will be back entering the next Pie Awards.