Well, we’ve settled into a bit of a routine. It’s been three weeks of unreal demand that’s slowly starting to taper off. Regular, slow and steady demand has replaced the frantic start, much to our relief! We figured that now would be as good a time as any to put together a quick word about our ingredients. We’ve made a few small changes along the way, that may or may not be visible in our final product, but that certainly make us feel good about what we are doing.
First, our main ingredient is Rogers’ Tillicum flour. This is a high-ash flour, meaning it has more of the germ, bran, and endosperm from the wheat kernel than your typical white flour. It’s an unbleached high-protein flour milled from Canadian Hard Red Spring wheat. And the mill is in very nearby: Armstrong. Keeping it local.
Next, for our eggs, we have recently switched over to Organic eggs – meaning the chickens are not raised in cages / free-range with a vegetarian feed. This one just makes us feel a little better about where we are getting our ingredients. We fully recognise that the organic label is imperfect but we want to make sure that our purchasing power is supporting the idea of better land use.
Alongside the eggs, we have been trying to source non-GMO and organic canola oil. This has proved a challenge. We don’t go through a lot of oil in any given batch, but over the course of a week, we use enough that the little 500ml bottles from specialty markets don’t get us very far. Unfortunately in our post-covid world, it’s been very difficult to get larger quantities of good quality oil. So, we’re on the hunt, and we’ve been in conversation with our supplier to get properly hooked up.
The honey that we use is sourced from Armstrong, and beyond that we’ve just got a little malt extract. That’s it. No refined sugars. A tiny bit of oil. And a mountain of delicious sesame seeds.
For yeast, we use a live culture and let it develop overnight. This just adds a nice flavour to the dough – as opposed to that harsh yeasty smell that you can get with instant yeasts. As we’ve been reserving a bit of each batch to build up the yeast culture, it’s been turning a bit sour as well… Bacteria in the flour, in the air, allowed to grow over multiple days impart an even nicer flavour profile.
Oh, and a little salt. Not much, and my favourite Montreal shop doesn’t use any, but I like the flavour better with a touch of it. We use Himalayan pink salt.
Side-note: while the sesame seeds we use are imported, it strikes us that the Okanagan would be a fantastic growing environment – sesame loves hot, arid summers and relatively poor/sandy soil. If anyone you know would like to get into growing sesame… please let us know!
Any questions, comments, thoughts? We’d love to hear from you!
