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So far, all the cocktail syrups I’ve discussed in my Summer Syrup Series have come from the classic bartending tradition. Today’s, however, is drawn from an altogether different branch of the mixological family tree: Tiki drinks. The Tiki tradition calls on a wide array of different syrups, from plain old simple syrup to orgeat to [...]

For my first real homemade cheese, I decided to make fresh (that is, unaged) chèvre. There were a couple of reasons for this. First, cow’s milk production here is heavily regulated by the Dairy Farmers of Ontario, which makes it difficult to find a small-scale, independent cow’s milk producer. Goat’s milk and sheep’s milk are [...]

On Friday, my cheese starter culture (“mesophilic aromatic B”), rennet and cheese molds arrived from Glengarry Cheesemaking and Dairy Supply. On Saturday, I picked up some River’s Edge goat milk at the Guelph Farmers’ Market. The nice thing about a farmers’ market is that, when I asked about the pasteurization temperature, I could actually get [...]

I have no personal connections to the Caribbean, but some flavours are bigger than their borders. Jerk sauce is one of those flavours. I do have a strong connection to jerk chicken, though, because it was one of the first dishes I ever cooked for my husband. I was living on my own in a [...]

When I was growing up, one of my family’s favourite treats for the grill was the boerewors sausage from Florence Meats. It wasn’t a short trip from home, so my parents would tend to buy large quantities and stash it in the freezer. Sometimes, they would bring home another treat as well: biltong, which is [...]

“Do you want to make the candied orange zest garnish?” my husband asked me, about our next round of truffles, filled with an orange butter ganache. “Why not?” I replied. “The devil is in the details, and candied orange zest will make them that much nicer. Anyway, candied orange zest is easy.” And so it [...]

On his blog, renowned food writer and “cook it yourself” advocate Michael Ruhlman has dedicated the month of January to the topic of home bread baking. I’ve dabbled in bread in the past: there’s something so romantic about the idea of taking such elemental ingredients – flour, water, yeast, salt – and making a foodstuff [...]

After letting my blended cider-and-red-wine vinegar ferment for a week, as recommended, I checked on it. It definitely smelled more like vinegar than wine at that point, but I decided to leave it for another week. A couple of days later, it was smelling sharper still, and I had some leftover wine, so I added [...]

After the disastrous end to my last attempt to make my own red-wine vinegar, I was resigned to having to work with the only vinegar mother easily available to me, thereby producing a hybrid cider/wine vinegar. Being something of a purist, I figured I would start with a small amount of unpasteurized cider vinegar to [...]

I may still have a thing or two to learn about tempering chocolate, but I’m pretty good at sugar-based confectionery. Every year at Christmas, I make these lemon and rosewater jellies – a sort of faux-Turkish delight, since they’re set with gelatin rather than starch – from an old Bon Appétit recipe that’s inexplicably missing [...]