Gayle’s Greek Gourmet produces Greek food of uncompromising quality in the Cowichan Valley. All of our recipes are made with love, care, and the best ingredients available. After a soft launch of the menu items at a local brewery in the late winter of 2024, we relaunched in October as a food production company for retail sale. In 2025, we intend to present some pop-up events as well, perhaps beginning with a Mother’s Day Brunch.
We are now (November 2024) producing baklava, dolmathes with avgolemono sauce), hummus, htipiti (red pepper and feta dip), tzatziki, and spanakopita. These are being sold through local and regional retail outlets: Chemainus Public Market, Cowichan Milk Company, Cow-Op. Sweet Meadows Market, and The Old Farm Market Oak Bay. We are actively seeking further retail partners and welcome enquiries. We also intend to expand the line over time to include other popular dishes, such as keftethes, kotopita, moussaka, pastitsio, plaki, and souvlaki, as well as a host of mezes
.Our standards are high. They have to be. Greek cuisine has fewer recipes than many, and it is in the quality of the ingredients that a Greek cook is judged.
Our Greek baklava uses only butter (currently from Foothills), and honey (currently from Friedrich’s), as well as hand-chopped walnuts for the freshest flavours. There is no cheap oil or sugar syrup, and there are no stale nuts. We use excellent Greek olive oil, and ensure that all ingredients are are of superior quality. Where possible, homegrown herbs and produce from The Garden of Eatin’s, our small farm in Cobble Hill. Equally as important as the quality of the ingredients, we use them liberally, because butter, honey, herbs, and olive oil is where the flavour comes from.
Someday, we will have pop-up dinner events, including some bacchanalian extravaganzas that reflect the party culture of my family. Bouzouki’s, belly dancers, zeibeko dancers, broken plates, the works!
Many of the Gayle’s Greek Gourmet recipes will be published here both so you can see what you are getting, and because I refer to the website while cooking.
As noted above, my recipes never skimp on the quality of the food, and neither do I. My baklava uses only honey and never uses crushed walnuts, which can age faster because of the larger surface area. I chop my walnuts when making the recipe so that there are variable sizes, which adds to the texture and flavor of the baklava.
More recipes are on the way. Tarama, skordalia, moussaka, and keftethes will be publshed as time permits.
I’m also working on developing some anise flavored liqueurs from the herbs I grow, which will become part of the mix along with the Limoncillo and Nocino already published.
Keep watching this page for updates!
