Mouth-Watering Vegan Eats
If you’re looking for a scrumptious vegan cinnamon bun, consider your search over. On any given weekend, Melanie Boudens, the owner, chef and driving force behind Grow Your Roots bakery and café, serves hundreds of the buns to hungry customers who come to brunch at her small restaurant, tucked away in a business park in South Kanata.
Word of mouth has it that these are exceptionally good buns — and they’re vegan to boot. In place of butter, Boudens uses Earth Balance, a flavourful plant-based spread. Her cream cheese icing is made from Tofutti, similarly plant-based and a creditable substitute for conventional cream cheese. Something’s working, because there have been rave reviews. “The cinnamon bun at the end was INCREDIBLE!” wrote Laura Ultrarun from Ottawa on Tripadvisor, while Jasvirdhillon from Toronto wrote, “The cinnamon buns are the best — hot and soft.”
A cook’s instinct may account for some of this, but Bouden herself says there’s something more. “What makes them special is that they are a labour of love — and they’re not something people make at home.”
Of course, Boudens turns out far more than cinnamon buns and serves meals throughout the week. Her menu is a long one and everything is vegan. She is passionate about veganism, not only because she loves animals, but because she believes veganism is a sustainable way for us all to live on this planet. She loves introducing non-vegans to the alternatives, such as meat substitutes, “some of which are so good you really can’t tell the difference,” she says. “When they are properly prepared, properly marinated and seasoned, tofu and other products can taste as good as the real thing. My goal is to show people that they are wrong when they dismiss the alternatives.”
And she’s not rigging the comparison when she says meat substitutes can be just as satisfying as conventional meat products. After all, she points out, you wouldn’t take a chicken breast and just throw it in the oven, with no seasoning, liquid, or marinade and expect it to taste anything but dry. The same goes for tofu, tempeh and other meat substitutes. “It’s not the thing that tastes good or bad, but the flavours you bring to it,” she explains.
Boudens specializes in making the classics — think BLTs, burgers, Montreal smoked meat sandwiches and sausage in a bun. This is risky, of course, because she’s tampering with classics and consumers bring some pretty specific expectations to the table. But Boudens has found that some meat-substitute products, such as the Beyond Meat burger and sausage, are nearly identical to the real thing. The burger, made in the U.S. from pea protein, “has beet juice in it,” Boudens explains, “so it even ‘bleeds’ when on the grill, just like a conventional burger.” The sausage “has a skin that pops when you bite it in the same way conventional sausages do.” Even carnivores love these soy- and gluten-free products, she says.
Some of her sources are more local. For example, her smoked meat comes from Vegan Canteen, a company based in Val-Davide in the Laurentians, which makes small-batch vegan meat and cheese substitutes.
While Boudens has worked in the food industry since the age of 14, she took a circuitous route to becoming the owner-chef of a restaurant. Nine years ago she went vegan, “which really forced me to learn how to cook,” she explains.
She was still not quite ready to consider making a living in the food world, however. First, she took the Police Foundations course at Algonquin College. After that, she had a stint as a train conductor for Canadian Pacific Railway in Alberta. When she learned she was going to be laid-off from that job, she decided to return home to Smiths Falls and launch a business featuring her own baked treats. This went well and she found herself selling her goods at the Carp Farmers’ Market and running a vegan-food stand. Soon enough, Boudens was filling wholesale orders and catering.
With this nice upward trajectory, it was time to open a commercial space. Her first prospect was in the Hazeldean Mall, a possibility that fell through when the space proved problematic. She then decided to buy a food truck — and was poised to write a cheque when an ad for a space in a South Kanata business park popped up on her computer. She took this as a sign. “I already had a customer base in this end of the city,” she says, “and I wanted to bring people out in the west end.”
Grow Your Roots has been open since August 2016, in a space designed and renovated by Boudens and her husband, Justin. Out of sight on one side is the bakery, while the restaurant space is bright and cheery with a coffered ceiling, shaker-style panelling, plenty of natural wood, and antique pieces scattered around.
“It’s a reflection of my own tastes,” says the woman who grew up in Lanark County. “I wanted it to be country and cosy. I also wanted to show everyone a compassionate way to eat — by serving amazing, nutritious foods, so everyone knows that your food, the fuel that gets you from A to B, does not have to include animal products.
”We can all live a sustainable life on this planet without having negative consequences towards the Earth. It's simply about living the best life you can, while doing the least amount of damage and harm.”
Have a meal at Boudens’ café and you’ll probably say amen.
Grow Your Roots
220 Terence Matthews Cres., Kanata, Ont.
growyourrootscafe.com | 613.271.3777 | @growyourrootscafe
