Fall gourmet series - I've got great buns · Tuesday September 22, 2026 by colin newell
Once the sun starts slipping below the horizon a bit more every day, our palates start thinking about the cozier food of the fall.
These sourdough butter buns tick all the boxes for fluffiness, great taste and texture and an easy bake.
While no sourdough bread project can be considered “beginner level” (I’d say that title belongs to my focaccia bread…), this one is not complex. It does have a few extra ingredients and if I were to hand out some initial advice, it would be “measure everything!”
On your first attempts, keep your digital scale handy! Measure twice!
Uses for sourdough butter buns…
Serve warm from the oven and slathered with butter. Use as mini hamburger buns for sliders. These buns can be the foundation for small sandwiches. You’re only limited by your imagination.Stuff you need…
- 9” × 13” glass baking dish
- accurate digital scale
- bench scraper
- mixing bowls
Ready your starter…
Sourdough starter is a living and breathing entity – and in order for it to be “ready to work…” it needs to be fed and “prepped” with time to ready it to “do the work…”This blog is not meant as a Sourdough instructional – you are going to find a myriad of tips on the YouTubes, Internets and Chat-AI critters.
In my case, I often take my sourdough starter out of refrigerator “in stasis”, then I “feed it…” and let it sit out on the kitchen counter for 6 to 12 hours to build a head of steam. Any sourdough bread is a work and exercise of “slow motion…” You can shape it to work around your life schedule in a variety of ways – that is up to you.
Dough ingredients…
- 2 tablespoons (28 g) butter
- 1 cup (240 g) milk (options include any and all nut milks and oat milk)
- 3 tablespoons (44 g) sugar (or 2 tablespoons of honey)
- 1 teaspoon (5 g) salt
- ½ cup (100 g) active sourdough starter
- 3 cups + 2 tablespoons (375 g) bread flour
Let’s go!
- Melt 28g of salted or unsalted butter in a small pan… gently… do not boil or brown the butter.
- Let cool until around 100 to 110 (F) or anything less.
- Add milk or nut-milk, sugar (or honey) and salt. Stir to combine.
- Temperature should be cool to warm — but not hot.
- Add in the 100G of fed and feisty sourdough starter.
In a larger bowl add your flour – no need to sift it. Bread flour, standard white flour or a combination of brown and white can work well.
Gradually add your liquid stuff (butter, salt, milk and starter…) to the dry (flour) mix.
You can use a stand mixer with the hook attachment and mix for 5 or 10 minutes but I like doing this part by hand – it is mindful and restful and you get a better sense of the texture and direction the dough is going in.
I aim for a shaggy ball of “dough” where the bulk of the wet mix has been absorbed by the dry.
Once you achieve this, cover the bowl with a warm towel and let the dough ball rest for 30 to 40 minutes.
After that first rest, I do my first of 3 to 4 pull and folds – each spaced around 30 to 40 minutes each. With each pull and fold, gluten strands are developing giving the dough ball strength and integrity…
There is a fair bit of technique used here to do the pull and folds and develop a good ball of dough – it is up to you to know where you are at with this or ask the AI or YouTube gods to assist your knowledge base. When you are happy with your dough ball it is time to commence the first cold ferment and proof. This entails throwing a moist towel over your bowl and putting it in the fridge overnight. With a long ferment, you will be rewarded with better taste and texture.
Your alarm clock has awoken you!
By morning your first peek into the fridge will likely be an exciting one.Your dough has risen by upwards of 50% or more – ideally double in size.
Either way, turn it out onto a floured bread board.
With a “bench scraper”, cut the dough ball into 2 pieces… and cut these two pieces into two pieces… and again until you have 12 “lumps” of dough each weighing in at around 65 to 75g. This is good. You now need to form each of the 12 pieces of dough into balls – this is a technique I have yet to master – and once again, your YouTube Jedi will be very helpful.
Set your dough balls into 3 rows of 4 in a lightly greased (buttered) glass baking pan.
Bake for 25 to 30 minutes in a 375 degree oven or until they are golden brown. If you can measure them internally, a goal of 190 degrees (F) Is ideal.
After you taken them out, give them 15 minutes or so in the pan before turning them all out (in a block) onto a cooling rack. Yes, they will have expanded in the glass baking pan and will have become cozy. Not to worry as they pull apart easily.
Within another half an hour or so, they are ready to pull apart and serve with your best three veg and a meat dinner, or as the foundation for sliders or a charcuterie plate – the sky is the limit – these are delicious buns — and if you don’t need them all at once, they freeze happily for months. Enjoy!
Colin Newell is a Victoria B.C. resident and avid writer. His nattering on about the subject of coffee culture has reached far and wide… and maybe still does…
Brown Butter Peanut Butter Cookies Re-Boot · Monday April 13, 2026 by colin newell
When I make cookies, I do not mess around. As someone who has company over — coffee guests… music students… my music teachers… there has to be something to put out that is going to satisfy and delight.
I’ll admit – I make good coffee. And there is nothing that pairs up with a big ole’ mug of black java than a cookie treat.
And I am torn between two worlds – peanut butter or chocolate chip. Sometimes I do both in the same cookie — there are recipes here for that – go look. Use the search button. It is your friend.
One of the key secret ingredients here is brown butter – brown butter is the charm. Making brown butter is outside of the realm of this blog entry – but suffice it to say, you need 115g of it — so you start with around 145g of cold or room temperature butter in a sauce pan… why this amount you ask? Because the butter is going to lose moisture as it browns. Google this subject for a tutorial.
Brown butter brings an entirely new dimension to any cookie. But oh no, we are not stopping there – our other secret ingredient is miso paste. Yes. Miso paste. Trust me.
Ok – once you have created your 115G (give or take) of the browned butter, let it cool a bit then put it in the fridge for a minimum of one half hour — it has to solidify again before the next step.
Dry Mix
What you could do while you wait for the butter to cool and solidify is prepare your dry ingredients.
That would be: 330g all purpose flour or gluten free flour. Up to you.
Add the baking powder and baking soda.
This recipe asks for 12g of salt (any artisanal salt will do…) – but I would back off on the salt a bit because there is salt in miso paste… so try 7G of salt, OK?
Don’t risk it — whisk it! Whisk your dry mix for several minutes – there is nothing worse than a batch of cookie dough that does not have the leavening and/or salt properly distributed.
Creaming the wet ingredients…
Pull your cooled brown butter from the fridge. Scrape it all into your mixing bowl (I use a kitchen-aid mix-master…)
Don’t forget the deep brown bits of the browned butter – this is where the magic is.
Add the 115g of the room temperature butter on top of this.
Add your peanut butter. Whether you use creamy or crunchy… that is a secret between you and your jar.
You could bend the rules here and mix in a blend of tahini or cashew butter… the sky is the limit. You do you.
Put in your sugars. It may seem like there’s a lot of sugar in these cookies. You’re not hallucinating. Apologize to your pancreas later.
Add the honey or maple syrup… then the white miso paste…
Cream on low speed for 5 to 7 minutes.
Do not add the eggs and the vanilla until after this initial creaming phaseOK – breathe. Add your egg(s) and vanilla to the mix and blend on low for 2 minutes or so.
Dry into Wet…
Add your flour mixture into your creamed concoction and blend on LOW until everything is just mixed.
Prolonged mixing will develop gluten and make for a less desirable cookie.
Jump down for baking instructions.
The Wet Stuff…
* 115g (1 stick) butter, softened
* 115g (1/2 cup) brown butter, cooled and semi-solid (start with ~145g to account for water loss)
* 350g (1 1/3 cups) peanut butter
* 185g (scant 1 cup) granulated sugar
* 185g (1 cup packed) brown sugar
* 25g (1 1/4 Tbsp) honey or Maple Syrup
* 65g (1/4 cup) white miso
* 90g (6 Tbsp) whole egg, beaten (about 1½ large eggs)
* 20g (4 tsp) vanilla extract
The Dry Stuff…
* 330g (2 2/3 cups) all-purpose flour or gluten free flour
* 7g (1 1/2 tsp) baking powder
* 7g (1 1/4 tsp) baking soda
* 12g (2 tsp) salt read extra notes above!
Baking!
Ok – here is where I go off script a bit. I chill my dough! I chill my dough for as little as 4 hours and as long as 24-48 hours.
After I mix the dough, I turn it out of the mixing bowl onto a sheet of (plastic wrap) saran wrap and fashion it into a “log”. The objective is to create a sausage-like wrapped log of cookie dough that is air tight. This batch makes enough dough for upwards of 30 cookies and I strongly advise against baking all of this dough at once unless you are feeding a small army. In my case, I have created enough dough for three baking sessions or more (small house here…)
I’ll reiterate: I like to chill my dough overnight. Whether or not you do this is up to you. I find chilled dough, say 24 hours worth, has a better flavor profile. I may be out of my mind – that is entirely possible.
For those of you who need immediate gratification, you can spoon out “balls” of dough onto a parchment covered cookie sheet.
The size of the individual dough balls is entirely arbitrary – some folks use an ice cream scoop. I use a tablespoon for a smaller cookie. This is entirely subjective.
I do not press the cookie dough down with a fork… that is old school. The dough settles and spreads quite nicely by itself.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 15 minutes – or until a hint of golden browning appears at the base of the cookie.
Note - Cookies continue to bake while they cool – do not bake until they start browning at the top of the cookie!
Cool on the stove counter top for a minimum of 20 minutes before transferring to a wire rack – and then let the cookies cool further for an additional 10 minutes. Trust me: They need time to set up. Failure to acknowledge this patience-testing exercise will be rewarded with fall apart cookies… or cookies that seem to be under-cooked… they are not.
Enjoy!
Enjoy with black coffee or tea or even a glass of milk.
Colin Newell is a Victoria B.C. resident and long time coffee expert... his rambling has appeared everywhere from the New York times to the Wall Street journal, CTV Newsworld and in-flight magazines from carriers like Air Canada to Air Transat... he has been doing this blog thing since the dawn of internet time...
As we approach September, some ideas... · Saturday August 23, 2025 by colin newell
For those just joining us… hello. For those here for the first time or dropping in after a long time… Hola! Good day.
Looking at the stats for this blog, I see a lot of visitors… but I don’t get a lot of feedback.
I’d love some feedback. I have some ideas I am cooking up for the Fall.
One is a radio show. Yep. A new medium… or is it an old medium?
Either way. Yea. And it will be paralleled with a podcast.
But what are we up to? That is going to be the subject of some up and coming posts.
Stay tuned.
If you are a regular here, please send me a note via this easy contact page.
The 2022 Jeremy Dutcher Tour University of Victoria Farquhar Theatre · Friday September 9, 2022 by colin newell
Marking my first outing back into the world of live entertainment, Andrea and I bought tickets for the much anticipated Jeremy Dutcher and band at the University of Victoria Farquhar auditorium Friday night.
It has been two and a half years since I sat for some live music — a very long wait. And without question, this was worth waiting for.
Jeremy Dutcher is a classically-trained Canadian tenor, composer, musicologist, performer and social activist, born in New Brunswick. A Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) member of the Tobique First Nation in North-West New Brunswick, Dutcher studied music and anthropology at Dalhousie University and currently calls Montreal, Quebec home.
Many know him from his CBC radio exposure and his project of interpreting 110-year-old wax cylinder recordings of ancestral songs and creating breathtakingly haunting arias and ballads in dialogue incorporating samples of those recordings.
Dutcher, winner of the Polaris Prize capping a five-year journey to produce/release his debut album, is one of the approximately 100 individuals who speak Wolastoq. Described as a “severely endangered language”, Dutcher feels composing the songs developed a closer relationship with his own ancestors, creating a medium for healing among the younger generations – victims of generational trauma, cultural suppression and re-navigating an anglo-centric narrative in Canadian music history.
Prior to seeing Jeremy, I had little exposure to any of his multi-media work, videos, live stuff – etc. So it was an extra special treat to see him and the band with no expectations on how he would approach his material.
So it was a pleasant surprise to see a very sparse stage set-up with little more than a piano, acoustic bass, drums, guitar and a trumpet.
Jeremy Dutcher is a very fit and particularly hirsute fellow who commanded the stage in a way reminiscent of performances by Jim Morrison, Robert Plant and (yup, I’m going there…) Freddie Mercury of Queen. There is no denying this man is a force of nature, who seemed to have a maturity and sophistication way beyond his years.
And despite the fact that the bulk of the performance was in Wolastoq, the music held the audience captive through feeling and emotion — at one point the audience was split in two groups to provide a 2 octave drone in the key of G for one of his pieces… and it was pure magic. The line between audience and performers was completely dissolved.
Jeremy’s band consisted of UVic alumna (and Oscar Peterson School of Music faculty) Tara Kannangara, on trumpet, composer-producer-multi-instrumentalist Bram Gielen on double-bass, Spencer Cole,Toronto based drummer, pianist, vocalist, and composer and Thom Gill on some very funky guitar. These were very accomplished jazz musicians.
Jeremy Dutcher’s single 105 minute set felt like something of a seance – a connection with spirits long passed – or a raising of memories – a healing – a learning – a yearning for a better connection to who we are – to the Earth under our feet – to the misfortune and misdirection of our colonial past. Not so much as an exercise in judgement (from Dutcher…) – not at all. His was a position coming from a place of peace and love – a more encouraging exercise… way more than a series of learning moments.
And based on the standing ovations (three) the room as a whole achieved something. Something tangible. Something mystical. Something progressive.
And for a moment, back to the dialogue on pop stars past, Jeremy made me imagine what it would be like to be in an intimate live space with the likes of Jim Morrison of the Doors. It was palpable. He exuded a twin-spirited kind of sexuality that was hard to quantify in purely human terms. He effortlessly played with phrasing, fluid and flawless ascending and descending legato. Little hand gestures reminded me of Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin. Honestly, I have not had this much fun and this many tears at a live performance, well, ever.
So bravo Jeremy Dutcher and band! My first thought with his last note was: When can I experience this again? It was that good. Catch him when you can. Check out Jeremy Dutcher on his website.
Colin Newell is a Victoria area resident and long time author of the website CoffeeCrew.com – writing on the subject of cafe culture since 1996.
