First Bites: March 2022 Mix It Up

What the…
The name expresses the frustration Danielle McKenzie felt in trying to find a flour she could use to make family favourites such as pancakes that could be eaten by her young son, who faced a host of food intolerances. What started out as an experiment, resulted in What the Flour, a flour blend and line of baking mixes made from a combination of sorghum and millet, both ancient grains that are high in fibre, protein and micronutrients. It’s gluten-free and contains no nuts or rice (often a component of other gluten-free flours), which were unsuitable for her son. “I just baked my heart out,” McKenzie says of the trial and error process of coming up with the flour blend.

“It was also really important to me to find something everyone wanted to eat,” she says, adding that she wanted to make sure her son and the rest of her family weren’t sacrificing taste and that her son didn’t feel excluded by having to eat something different from everyone else.

And while trying to solve a problem for her own family, and never planning to have a food company, she soon realized that other families were faced with the same issues. What the Flour was born and the line now includes a flour bend, pancake and waffle, muffin and chocolate chip cookie mixes, the latter with dairy-free chocolate chips.

What The Flour
wtflour.com | @wtflourco

Hold my Beer
Back in 2019, Marc Wandler and Clinton Bishop, co-founders of Susgrainable, had come up with a creative solution for tackling food waste by turning the spent grain from local breweries into delicious cookies and breads they sold locally. Now bakers can work with Susgrainable’s innovative spent grain flour at home. The company has launched bags of upcycled barley flour and a range of quick at-home baking mixes, including chocolate chip cookie, waffle and banana bread.

“One of the reasons we work with local craft brewers is that the quality of the grain they use tends to be higher,” Wandler says. After brewers extract the sugars from malted barley to make beer, what’s left is spent grain that contains fibre, proteins and minerals, but none of the sugar.

Susgrainable takes this mixture and dehydrates it to make a shelf-stable product that can be used for baking. Wandler, who has a background in exercise and nutrition, sees Susgrainable’s products as tackling both the issue of food waste and its environmental impacts as well as helping to add fibre to our diets.

As if beer wasn’t great enough.

Susgrainable Health Foods Inc.
1507 Powell St., Vancouver, B.C.
susgrainable.com | 604.262.9165 | @susgrainable

Find it at: Organic Acres (Vancouver), Coho Market, Jarr, Fulfill Shoppe (online)

Traditional With a Twist
Paul Natrall is a trained chef and owner of the first Indigenous food truck, Mr. Bannock, where he uses traditional ingredients from the Squamish First Nation — such as juniper berries, smoked wild salmon and meats — and traditional methods, such as clay and stone baking, to offer up what he calls Indigenous fusion cuisine. He grew up in the kitchen, surrounded by his mum and grandmothers, and was influenced by watching his uncle, a traditional hunter, cook deer, elk and moose. Natrall trained at Vancouver Community College’s culinary school, where he studied classic French cooking techniques and traditional Indigenous cuisine.

During the pandemic, with less business for his food truck, Natrall “had to find ways to keep hustling.” Mr. Bannock’s Classic Bannock Mix has proven to be popular among his customers — so much so that it has sometimes been hard to keep up with demand.

Natrall is enthusiastic about the versatility of bannock. “We use it in the truck in various ways, from fried to baked. I’ve made pizza with it, even bannock calzones,” he says.

He offers tips for those who want to try it at home, recommending more water for fried bannock and a more sticky dough, while baked bannock takes a bit less water. He also recommends additions such as blueberries for a sweeter bannock.

Mr. Bannock
226 lawa Dr., West Vancouver, B.C.
mrbannock.com | 604.718.5148 | @mrbannockfood