Foodies are travelling HOURS to get their hands on a $9 YABBY pie at a roadside shop - filled with creamy crayfish and tasty white wine sauce

  • Australian diners are travelling out of their way to a little-known pastry store 
  • The $9 Yabby Pie has become the star attraction of Samuel Gee Pies & Pastries 
  • The hero ingredient of the hugely popular pastry pies is the yabby, a crayfish
  • The store is selling the yabby pies as part of the nation's annual Pie Time festival

By Cindy Tran for Daily Mail Australia

Published: | Updated:

Diners are travelling hours out of their way to a little-known roadside bakery for a humble yabby pie with a creamy white wine sauce.

The $9 Yabby Pie has become the star attraction of Samuel Gee Pies & Pastries, hidden in the Mittagong Garden Centre in Balaclava, the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. 

The hero ingredient of the sell-out pastry pies is the yabby, a small freshwater crayfish which tastes like lobster - and is a delicacy in Australia.

Owner Nerida Rudolph - who's a seventh-generation baker - revealed exactly how she makes the creamy yabby pies in white wine sauce.

Diners are travelling hours out of their way to a little-known bakery for a humble yabby pie with a creamy white wine sauce. The $9 Yabby Pie has become the star attraction of Samuel Gee Pies & Pastries (picture of the yabby pie, which was taken by owner Nerida Rudolph who got creative with her pictures by placing a plastic toy yabby on top)

Diners are travelling hours out of their way to a little-known bakery for a humble yabby pie with a creamy white wine sauce. The $9 Yabby Pie has become the star attraction of Samuel Gee Pies & Pastries (picture of the yabby pie, which was taken by owner Nerida Rudolph who got creative with her pictures by placing a plastic toy yabby on top)

'From start to finish, we cook the yabbies live in a pot of boiling water for just three minutes. Once cooked, we shell them and use the shells to cook the wine sauce because that's where all the flavours are,' Ms Rudolph told Daily Mail Australia.

'So we make the sauce with the shells, which is a long cooking process. We remove the shells, then we add the meat to the sauce and bake it in its pastry. We have to be really careful with the yabby meat because you don't want to overcook them.'

The store is selling the yabby pies in white wine sauce for the whole month of June as part of the nation's annual Pie Time festival, which takes foodies on a road trip through the Southern Highlands, just two hours south of Sydney.

The hero ingredient of the sell-out pastry pies is the yabby,

The hero ingredient of the sell-out pastry white wine sauce pies is the yabby, a small freshwater crayfish which tastes like lobster - and is a delicacy in Australia

However, Ms Rudolph said the store has been selling out of the yabby pies every day due to high demand, with diners travelling up to three hours just to get their hands on the unique seafood creation.

'We're running out of yabby pies, I don't think we'd make it to the end of the month. We only bought 10 kilos of yabbies,' she said. 

'We're lucky to get 24 pies from one kilo. The pies were meant to be sold on weekends only - that was the original plan but we have had to sell them on weekdays because they have been so popular.'

The store has been selling out of yabby pies every day due to high demand, with diners travelling three hours just to get their hands on the unique seafood creation

The store has been selling out of yabby pies every day due to high demand, with diners travelling three hours just to get their hands on the unique seafood creation

Ms Rudolph - who opened her own pie shop just 18 months ago - said her bakery has no plans to make the yabby pie a permanent menu item.

'We'd love to make them permanent but they are hard to get. There's only two [yabby] suppliers in Australia. We actually ordered them three months in advance just for the Sutherland Highlands pie festival,' she explained.

Speaking about how she came up with the recipe, she said it's a family recipe.

'I used to make them all the time as a kid, my parents were bakers,' she said. 

Those who got their hands on the yabby pies insisted it's worth the trip.

'It's an interesting filling. At $85/kg and having to be carefully baked... I must say, this was delicious. Yabbies are native to Australia and are similar to a lobster. Super yum in a pie too,' one diner wrote.

New South Wales

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