Chef Jonathan Goodyear is a competitor. Perhaps it was his experience on the current season of Top Chef Canada that taught him to create culinary greatness– yet remain mindful of what other chefs are doing.
“I researched your Ghetto Gourmet,” he says.
“You what?” That was me, confused.
“I read your other stories, to see what everyone else made.”
Flattered and impressed, I jokingly told Jonathan there was no immunity at stake and no cash prize to be won, as there is on the show.
“I take this very seriously and I want to make something that is really amazing,” he insists. And his ice cream-stuffed S’mores beaver tail is just that. With melted chocolate bars and bacon, it kept getting better just as you thought it couldn’t.
Let’s start with his basic ghetto ingredient of graham crackers and marry that with his obsession for fried beaver tails pastry. Neither one of us is sure where beaver tails are sold in the city, but Jonathan has memories of eating the warm, flat, fried dough as a kid visiting Ottawa, and I’m familiar with them because there’s a closet-sized Beaver Tails shop on the Halifax waterfront.
If we can’t find these flat pastries in Toronto, we’ll create them in the kitchen of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club where Jonathan is the Executive Chef. First, graham crackers are ground up into a fine flour for the pastry. “Now this is ghetto,” says Jonathan as he rolls out the dough using a sherry vinegar bottle. Gooey marshmallow is spread on the raw dough, followed by chopped Aero chocolate bars and other versions with Twix candy bars, then spying a mound of cooked bacon nearby, we decided it would be a shame to not include it.
Another piece of rolled out dough is pressed on top — creating what looks like a deformed calzone. A giant lumpy dough pocket.
A quick blast into the deep fryer puffed up the stuffed beaver tail and once it was cut open, the marshmallow oozed out along with the melted chocolate and caramel from the candy bar. For some reason, one giant air bubble had formed in the top layer of the beaver tail. Looking at that hollowness begging to be filled, I muttered, “that’s where ice cream should go.” And as if by magic, Jonathan appears with a container of bourbon ice cream. A scoop went into the steaming hot hole…in the pastry and the stuffed S’mores beaver tail was complete. We decide that we’ve taken a childhood memory and made it a hundred times better.
Follow Jonathan on Twitter: @J__Goodyear
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