jimb0

If only the latter was available for $5/12 oz. They're some combination of German and American cookery; I didn't even see them much in the Western part of the states. (ง •̀_•́)ง Joking aside, you might if my biscuits came with. I was vaguely surprised when I got here and McDonalds didn't even have biscuits (let alone sausage gravy like back home). When my sister-in-law was in TN for work, they had her in a hotel for a month with free continental breakfast. She went up and got a bowl of oatmeal only to get back to her table and realize it was a sausage gravy dispenser....

This is obviously too old to help op at this point, but when talking about great Ontario dining I would be remiss not to mention Marc Lepine's Atelier, in Ottawa.

I have a sweet tooth and enjoy avocado in just about any form, so I was thinking about custard. Simple (over-)baked custard; not exactly enthused with the results. The flavour is nice enough, though it could have used another avocado, but the texture is almost a set foam (my fault for blending them in the vitamix; another time I wish I had a vac sealer) like meringues rather than a custard. At least it doesn’t taste bad, but neither do I particularly wish to eat six bowls of it. edit: overnight these collapsed into what is basically avocado mousse in the fridge. they're frankly delicious, cold and creamy. I have changed my opinion on the matter, haha.

I mean industrially, like the tomatoes in Leamington. I buy the strawberries at Valu-Mart and Loblaws. I’m not sure who else is selling them.

I didn't mean to imply that I disbelieved you, I just think it's a crazy amount.

That's wild. Like, if you need 33% pre-tempered chocolate just to temper... I tend to stick to the 1% diy silk stuff that's currently en vogue.

Entirely possible. 😀 At least snickerdoodles tend to go over better than when I start bringing up sausage gravy....

Nice! I like bananas and snickerdoodles (and it seems like the latter are an almost unknown quantity, at least among the Canadians I know) so this is right up my alley.

If I were carbing at the moment, I’d get a good and crunchy toast on it (whole wheat absorbs and holds onto a lot of moisture ime), slather it with butter and some cactus pear jelly, or maybe some pecan butter. Buttered toast is probably my favourite food, hehe.

Thanks! I paid for it with blisters, haha (banged my elbow in two spots on the oven door pulling the lid off the dutch oven):

Speaking of classics, I made a tarte aux fruits for my SO's team meeting a little while back. Crust, almond cream, pastry cream, apricots, raspberries, white and red currants, strawberry jelly, mint: It definitely made the car smell nicer when I dropped it off, haha: I'm not sure if you get them in Ottawa (they're all over sw ont), but Canada is a greenhouse powerhouse these days and they've introduced strawberries as a greenhouse crop. Let me tell you, I have been buying like $10 of strawberries a week since they started selling these under the PC brand back a couple of months ago - the US strawberries aren't worth buying, but these are like little concentrated bursts of summer. They're sweet enough to eat fresh, but I do like adding a bit extra.

Yesterday, I noticed that Bulk Barn now carries (organic, not that I care) sprouted spelt. I milled some this morning and just did a quick pass with a strainer; it only took the largest, most problematic bits of bran. About half a cup, or just over half a percent by weight. The ~800g bread is thus 100% whole spelt. Roughly 80% hydration, 2% salt, less than 1% yeast. Despite knowing better, I cut it open warm so I could see the structure.

Thanks, kay. It kind of depends on the size I'm going for. My standard dough is generally between 500 - 600 grams, roughly 65% hydration, 2% salt. Those are all general guidelines. If I want to use an enriched dough (making them more like buns than rolls) I use the same formula, but add an egg yolk and 10 - 30 grams of buttermilk powder, and sometimes some butter if I'm feeling saucy. If I'm going for more of an "artisan" boule, I'll up the hydration and ferment time. A full batch will make 16 'small stuffs' or 8 'big stuffs'. 16 is a lot for ultimately one person to go through, so I'll make the dough then subdivide it into balls; sometimes that means 4 big stuffs and 8 small stuffs, etc. And it's easy to make 3 or 4 different kinds with each batch. They freeze well once baked, and we typically use a combination of microwave and toaster oven for reheating. I'm a big believer in reformulating leftovers, so that's a big source: I might roast some kind of meat, and that'll be dinner once or twice, soup once or twice, and then baked into stuffs or a casserole or bread if there's any left. That might mean braised beef with mole stuffs, or braised chicken (I braise a ton) with a bunch of various ground/dried chiles. Those generally get a couple of chunks of pizza mozzarella (often a bit less fat, which is better for these), then the dough folded up around. Pizza flavours are a good choice, generally reserved for the big stuffs. I've done potato-chickpea curry stuffs, some lox and cream cheese with dill and capers (okay, but obviously the salmon gets a bit slammed in the oven, don't plan to make again). They also work well with any sweet filling and can serve as a good light snack / tea / dessert. Especially with cream cheese, I'll just blend in fruit, candied or otherwise, or maybe a dollop of one of our jellies). Sometimes they get rolled in nuts or seeds, sometimes not. As a concept I find them endlessly versatile. They'll basically work with whatever flavours you want. Either way, they all tend to get individually bagged and frozen, then all the bags go into a labelled big freezer bag. If you like a crustier roll sort of stuff, you can bake them separated on a sheet; lately I've been baking them inside of a 6-8 qt pot with a lid - that works especially well for the softer / enriched bun sort of stuff: Thanks, bud. Yeah, I originally wondered about this, too, but it works. Consider: at its hottest, your bread isn't going to get above the boiling point of water on the inside (unless you're explicitly drying something out). You might lose some flavour of your addition in the very outermost parts of the crust, but that's a small enough percentage that it isn't worth worrying about. Adding a little bit of honey to the bread dough and lots of lemon zest could work very well with either a sweet filling or with less sweetener in something savoury like a Greek or Moroccan chicken theme. Sure, but if we were all completely satisfied with grocery bread we probably wouldn't make it as much ourselves, right? Better quality fruits and veg will out; if you want to guarantee tasting them, leave them in bigger chunks. If it's not dried or candied, I tend to cook everything first before it goes into a dough, else it'll express a lot of water and lead to cavities and textural issues. For the same reason I generally recommend against using frozen fruits and vegetables. As an aside, in terms of not tasting things in your bread: I use recipes more for flavour ideas than anything else; one of my pet peeves is that a very large percentage of the ones I see online tend to skimp on stuff like spices and lemon zest, so I often add more than what is typically called for (sometimes by two or three times).

Long time listener, first time caller. So much good bread in this thread. I eat very little bread these days, staying away from carbs. But it probably remains my favourite food, so I do a lot of baking and either give it all away or send it to work in my SO's lunch. These past few months I've been on a kick of making stuffed rolls and buns; we have creatively started referring to them 'stuffs'. So far I've filled them with leftovers, meats, cheeses (cream cheese-based ones are easy, too). A couple of small ones makes for a nice lunch focal point. This often gets combined with my love of using non-traditional hydration sources. In one case I was inspired by borscht. Cooked some beets and mashed them into the dough; they were filled with cream cheese, onions, dill, and capers. I was honestly pretty amazed at how well the colour stayed. These are the same dough (I really only ever bake with two doughs and just twist them to fit the circumstance), only made with carrot juice and filled with cream cheese, candied ginger, and something else, then rolled in walnuts (kindly ignore the experimental sausage balls in the background). The carrot juice adds a lovely colour and slight sweetness to an ordinary enriched dough, too, though I could have done a better job on dough development as the texture wasn't really up to snuff: Additionally, has anyone experimented with fermenting bread with brewing yeasts? I've played around with a few and gotten some good results. I've read that using some of the traditional brown ale yeasts can lend an oatmeal-ish flavour to a bread that contains, in fact, no oats; it's something I want to try.