Panaderia Canadiense

I'm heavily into a fresh blend from the Sangay plantations downslope of me at the moment; white and green leaves with a touch of matured oolong and chunks of durazno. It's very tasty. Other than that, it's the old standbys - Horchata, Mate de Coca, and Guayusa.

Do your countries not sell plastic bubble-mailer envelopes for bottles? How sad. I've used those to bring bottles of Pisco, Cachaca, and Reposado back to Canada with absolutely zero issues (and the Pisco bottles were oddly-shaped replicas of Inca potteryworks). Then again, perhaps LatAm and Canadian baggage handlers are gentler than their TSA counterparts?

Exactly! All I was saying is that in baking it's important to measure for consistent disaster-free results (barring the occasional exploding Pyrex pan, that is ). As far as other cooking goes, it should be completely as you're saying - we are actually in agreement!

The only place where I'd disagree with you, Jenni, is in baking. Those are recipes where it is extremely valuable to have accurate weights and measures, and where a bit of a misstep, particularly in the first time through the recipe, can produce an abject disaster.... Otherwise, I'm in complete agreement. In savoury cooking, recipes are guidelines or starting points, and nothing more.

October 31-November 2 in Ambato, Ecuador, for the Day of the Dead and samples of the best Colada Morada and bread babies, and also for the Cuy Festival. Holy Week (Easter) in Quito for Fanesca. Sweet, sweet, bacalaotastic Fanesca.

The funniest one I've ever had wasn't employees (I have none) but a friend who ordered a gift basket from me through another friend, then turned around and gave it back to me at Christmas. I was pretty touched, actually.

Adaptation/amalgam/pastiche/homage. I took the praline base recipe from a handwritten one for white-flour unenriched-dough cinnamon buns that was given to me by a friend, then used a 2-egg brioche recipe from another friend for the dough, and subbed in the pea flour when I ran out of white. The stuffing was a riff on the usual stuff too - I decided that I'd try blendering 2 oz of walnuts with 2 oz of bittersweet chocolate and a bit of panela (raw sugar) and cinnamon, and used that in place of the usual brown-sugar/cinnamon filling. All in all, it was quite successful; I'd probably make the dough a bit less slack in the future.

Cinnamon buns. I'm very pleased at the substitution of 1 C of golden pea flour (sweet) into the brioche dough recipe, and the praline stuff that I spatched out of the pan when I turned them out and goonked onto the center bun, hardened into a very tasty crispy top, so much so that I'll be making extra next time and probably putting pecans on top of the buns as well.

^^^ Ha! Neat. As far as I know, this trick has been in my family since at least the 1800s; I got it from my great-aunt Roslind, who made absolutely amazing pies that I still aspire to.

If you find a sealed jar, there are people who will buy it on eBay for $100-200. I wonder if I could use ground, roasted chicory. I have a pound I ordered on a whim a while back. You could try it, although I think that what makes my coffee substitute work is the combo of malt and mollasses.

Rotary-pusher sieve?

Bruce, do you have a Tamalera (tamale pot) or a Baine Marie with a perforated steamer top? If you do, it greatly simplifies the process of Huevos en Tusa and prevents any form of charring on the husks. With a little practice, they'll come out perfect every single time - it's what the Tamalero is meant to do (apart from steaming Tamales, Humitas, and Quimbolitos, of course!)

That's exactly it. Hot air popping doesn't cut it in this case - hot metal over flame is the way to go. You get a slightly crisper final product and the flavour of the oil enters the kernels ever so slightly, which I find to be very pleasant. I use EVOO for this, because you only really need about 1/2 oz of it and with a bit of sea salt it's just nummy.

Aji peppers are somewhere between your small medium heat and the cayennes. I mean popcorn in the sense of taking kernels and popping them in a heavy-bottomed pot with a bit of oil and then salting the result lightly. The moviegoing stuff isn't popcorn, IMHO. It's an excuse for butterlike topping. Blech. Green plantains, peeled (under flowing water) and then shaved with a veggie peeler into hot shallow oil is the method for good chifles.

What is coffee substitute? Here at least, it's 35% black malt, 30% crystallized mollasses, 20% wheat (of some sort; not specified. I suspect it's toasted whole wheat kernels which are then ground up), and 15% roasted bean flour. That's Kauffe brand instant coffee substitute, which is wickedly hygroscopic stuff. I keep it in a vaccum-lidded jar. ETA - I would never actually drink this stuff, btw. However it does have a very pleasant roasty-bittery-malty smell that I find quite attractive and that works very well with whole-grain breads.

OK, you've almost won me over. But how does this gadget perform on non-Tommy mangoes? About 99% of what I eat are Reina, Julie, Keitt, and Kent, with some Ambassador and Alfonso thrown in for good measure (although those last two are definitely not slicing mangoes). It's a rare day at the end of the season that I even see Tommy Atkins mangoes at the market. This means that I'm often working with less than standard shapes and pit sizes.

I'm in the one-mango-a-day camp, and I had no idea such gadgets even existed, or were necessary for that matter. With a nice sharp knife and a little skill, one can pit a mango in about 2 minutes with very little loss of flesh....

Here are the last two days: "Pizza" - foccaccia crust spread way thinner than usual, with olive oil, chopped sundried tomatoes, honey-cured turkey breast strips, and emmenthaler/javierino (sort of cheddary) cheeses on top. It was way yummy, even if it wasn't technically a pizza. Honey-cured turkey breast and javierino cheese on a ham-n-cheese whole wheat bagel of my own design.

For any flake pastry, and particularly for pie crusts, have all ingredients as cold as they can possibly be. Lard/butter/shortening? Frozen and grated into the flour. Water? As close to 0 C as possible. Flour? Pull it out of the freezer just before working with it. Rolling pin? Freeze it solid. I use a marble one. Sure your hands freeze too, but the crust that comes out of this process will be amazingly flaky and tender. In most white bread recipes, you can substitute up to 1/4 of the recipe in specialty flours without affecting the gluten too badly, but boy do you get a better flavour. (I say most, because this doesn't work so hot for baguette or for brioche. There are specific baguette recipes for bean and pea flours.) If you can't find malt extract, using "coffee substitute" at the rate of 1 tsp (about 1/10 oz) to every 5 lbs of flour will produce almost the same result vis a vis crust browning without bittering the bread too much. Zucchini disappears into chocolate cake and leaves it beautifully moist in a way that you can't acheive with corn syrup alone.

Small cubes, salt the snot out of them and then into the fridge in a marinade of 10-12 limes (juiced), 3-4 aji peppers (diced), a dash of crushed garlic, and one tomato (juiced), until the fish becomes completely opaque. Then pull that out, drain, and put in fresh lime-tomato-aji juice with a finely sliced red onion, two cubed fresh tomatoes, and a single aji pepper (diced.) Fresh cilantro on top. Yum yum tuna ceviche! Serve with fresh popcorn and chifles (green plantain chips). You can do this without the aji peppers for a much milder dish; I however think that to remove them entirely is sacrilege. You can also keep the original "cooking" liquid, but I don't like how fishy it ends up tasting. The whole thing should be done in a nonreactive dish like pyrex or glass; other materials mess with the flavour. On the other hand, larger cubes rolled in panela-soy-tamarind-wasabi mix and then pan-seared is also very tasty. Edit - a good spellar is me! Also, forgot to talk about reactive vs nonreactive ceviche dishes.

I fall into the grey area between planner and free wheeler. There are some things (potatoes, rice, bananas etc.) that I try to keep always in stock in my larder, and other things (fruit, veg) that go onto my weekly shopping list as vague terms like "green veggies" and "some berries not strawberries." Then I let what's actually available at the market determine what ends up on the table that week. For example, although Romanesco is often on my shopping lists, the crop was badly affected by hail and flooding and I haven't found it for the past month or so. It's still on the list, but I've been substituting green beans, achogchas (sort of a mild, stuffable pod veggie) and asparagus for it, since Romanesco is basically the placeholder for whatever tasty steamed veggie.

Achiote seeds, achiote powder, achiote oil, and achiote paste are chalk and cheese when it comes to using them in recipes! As EatNopales points out, the paste also includes vinegar, allspice or clove, garlic, and some sort of Oregano; if it's from South America it may also include a little cumin as well. This will behave, naturally, very differently from oil or powder in your recipe. I'd start with a smallish schmeer and work up, tasting frequently. Achiote oil in SAm is used mainly for colour rather than flavour; the amount of the spice actually present in it is often very very little. As pointed out earlier, the flavour in this case is a deep, earthy base note. Powdered achiote seeds are used in much the same way as paprika powder; the flavour (at least here) is intense, earthy, and slightly spicy. Then again, I have the advantage of a constant supply of fresh seeds since the trees are native to Ecuador. Whole seeds are used to prepare the oil - and this is always a heat process. A tablespoon or so of seeds will infuse nicely into 500 mL of oil in a hot saucepan.

That's it, apart from my kettle. I grind my beans in a mortar and pestle. The Boda itself has no brand name; the beans I buy in bulk from the Loja coffee cooperative at the farmer's market. Nothin' fancy here, folks.

I'm with others that say criteria/guidelines are all but useless. Fat/oil preferences are intensely personal and dependant upon both the use of the oil and the tastes of the cook/eater. This said: EVOO for salad dressings, roasting potatoes (I love the flavour it imparts, especially when used with cinnamon), and with balsamic vinegar and bread. Butter for on bread (margarine is an abomination), in most baking, and to sautee mushrooms. Ghee in all other places. Sunflower oil for frying and as the basic oil in the cast-iron pans I use. Bacon fat for hashbrowns and hamburgers. Chicken fat for biscuits.

I buy Isabela in Sunflower oil, Atún Reál in water, and Van Camps in olive oil. All three are tinned locally; Isabela is hands-down the best of them and also often they throw in a little can of tuna paté with the 4-pack of regular tuna, which is quite tasty.