Metro Morning's food guide Suresh Doss joins the program every week to discuss one of the many great GTA eateries he's discovered.
This week, he's bringing us to French Made Café in Toronto.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of Doss's conversation with guest host David Common.
Doss: This is our first live tasting together, so I wanted to do French pastries. Are you a fan of French pastries?
Common: In fact, I lived in France for a period of time. So it's like one of the only things where I might be a touch snobby.
Doss: So I'm in the hot seat here. There was not a long time ago where you had maybe a handful of great pastry shops in the city. And then about six to seven years ago we saw this boom, this rumble of pastry shops and croissant shops. We did a tasting here, David, about six years ago. It was the search for the GTA's best croissant. And at the time, we surveyed 22 shops and I thought, 'Oh my God' that we have so many options at the time. If we were to do that today we could easily triple that number. There's so many spots now.
We have become a pastry-obsessed city, but there's also been a lot of cooks that didn't have a job at the time and they were perfecting baking at home. And they went on to open a lot of great places in the city. I'm talking about places like Geste, Barbershoppe, Emmer, Le Beau. There are so many places now. And Brendan Platt, who is the pastry chef at French Made, he agrees with me. He's been following this boom of pastry as well.
So Brendan took over as the pastry chef there about four years ago, and he's since moved all the pastry to in-house. Everything is made in-house. There's a lot of talent in a small place, David, and dare I say some of the best French viennoiseries are at this luxury hotel, in this cafe at the bottom. So I brought a plate for you to try. It's in front of you.
Common: It's very good. Again, I'm not a snobby eater, but I do get a little snobby on this just because I had experience elsewhere. It's the hard, crusty shell that's just hard enough, delicious on the inside. That's about as sophisticated as my palate gets, but it tastes right.
Doss: Well, let's expand on that. So he's using a lot of high quality ingredients and really high-fat butter and the idea of butter and dough being at different temperatures, so you get the right sort of lamination and it's a croissant that wonderfully shatters as you can see.
I'll cut one open for you so you can see that beautiful honeycomb texture in the middle. There are a lot of different things that I think are great about this croissant.
I also brought you a second one if you want to try it. This is something very unique in the city. Brendan used to be the chef at the Drake Hotel many years ago, and he won a butter tart competition. We get really obsessed about butter tarts in the city. He's made a maple butter tart croissant, which is this one over here. It is delightful, luxurious and there is nobody else in the city that's making a butter tart croissant, as far as I know.
Common: OK, I'm ripping it open now. Oh man, look at that. There's a butter tart, and in the middle it's the right amount of gooey.
Doss: There are some seasonal croissants. There is a raspberry croissant on the menu when the raspberries are in season. It's rhubarb right now. And then also on the plate here I brought two other of my favourite things, the madeleines, which are these small French sponge cakes, which are really nice. And then there are the financiere, these rectangular mini cakes with that burn set on the top.
If you love pastry in the city, French Made is where you want to go. You can walk there before your segment tomorrow if you want, or after today's if you like. Even if you don't go to French Made, I think if you like croissants in the city, just take a walk on any major street because there's so many amazing places.
Common: This is really good. How did you find this? How did you stumble across it?
Doss: A friend of mine posted on Instagram a while ago and I've been following Brendan's work for some time and then I heard that he moved all the baking in-house and there's been a lot of commentary about how good the pastry is. So I had to go try it.
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April 14, 2023 at 08:15PM
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Love butter tarts? This popular Toronto café is serving them inside buttery croissants - CBC.ca
"cafe" - Google News
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