Cooking with Emily - Bannock

Cooking with Emily – Bannock

Emily Mailhot Vegreville News Advertiser

When it comes to many things in life – cooking, working, friendships, and family relationships – adaptability is a key ingredient. This month’s esteemed guest for Cooking with Emily reinforced that message by adding a few interesting twists and turns of his own to the story. When I saw that this month’s recipe was for bannock, many memories of childhood dinners came to the surface, with my father Ed Mailhot at center stage. My dad, a Metis cowboy by nature, loves bannock, and he cooks it quite well, so I was happy to have a professional to consult for the Cooking with Emily segment.

A fun fact: the recipe you see on this page is not the one that was originally selected. According to my guest, that one was “no good,” and “didn’t make any sense,” not to mention “Mine is better.” But we kept trucking right along anyways. The first recipe we used had most of the same ingredients, but there was no lard (or butter, as my dad prefers to use,) and there was yeast in the recipe. Why was there yeast in a recipe for flatbread? We don’t know. There weren’t instructions to let it rise, either, so the end result wound up tasting like yeast, but with a heavy consistency. It wasn’t our favourite.

The next day, we regrouped to prepare another batch of bannock, but with “the right” recipe this time. The only notes I will include for the first few steps are that my guest’s preferred temperature at which to melt butter is as high as your oven will go, and that it doesn’t seem to matter if you “dig a ditch” in the dry ingredients before pouring in the milk and half the melted butter.

Once the ingredients are all mixed together, your bannock should have a “sticky” consistency.

“Sticky; adjective; the correct texture for raw bannock dough; if you put it on a stick and it stays.” This rule of thumb is especially important if you’re planning on cooking your bannock the good old-fashioned way over a fire. After cooking for 30 minutes in the oven, the house was much warmer than necessary, but the snack was delicious. Best served in one large piece so that each person may break off as much as he or she chooses to eat at a time.

Our final score this month is Dad’s recipe 1, other recipe 0.