This hyper-local bakery in Cambridge uses almost nothing but Canadian ingredients, right down to the salt

The sort-of secret: Terroir Artisan Bakery, a Cambridge bakery run by a former Langdon Hall chef You may have heard of it if: Your Instagram algorithm is nothing but bread and pastry But you probably haven’t tried it because: It’s about an hour and a half from Toronto by car, and it’s been open only since June

Daniel Angus had been working at Langdon Hall—Cambridge’s swish hotel, restaurant and spa—for around four years when he finally started experimenting with baking. A savoury chef through and through, his skill set fell short when the pastry chefs needed help. “It was embarrassing,” he says. “I was executive sous-chef at one of the best restaurants in the country, and I couldn’t understand sourdough.”

Unable to accept defeat, he started learning both the art and science of bread. A year later, the whole world got into it thanks to some pandemic-induced downtime. “It was cool. There was suddenly all this information and all these resources,” he says. During the little free time he had, he practised making sourdough and laminated pastries, selling some and giving the rest to friends and family. When lockdowns lifted, he stopped—much to the dismay of his regular customers. Cambridge residents had gotten used to his freshly baked artisanal bread.

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Angus initially moved to Cambridge from Toronto to work at Langdon Hall, and that’s where he met his wife, Heather, who is also a chef. They were married and now have two children. “As a chef, you’re working every night, weekend and holiday,” says Angus. “I’m passionate about my job, but I also like being there for bedtime with my baby girl—and that was something I wanted to do more of.” When Angus realized there was a demand for his baked goods, it sparked a new business idea.

Ever since Terroir opened this past June, customers start lining up an hour before the bakery opens. But the bakery didn’t happen overnight.

In 2021, when Angus launched it as an official business, he was renting space in a commercial kitchen in Brantford. “It was by the hour, so I would drive there, mix my sourdough, clock out, go to the gym, clock back in, fold my bread, clock out, let it sit overnight, clock back in and bake it off the next day,” says Angus. “And that’s how I baked sourdough for the first six to eight months of the business.” It wasn’t ideal. So when the owner of Lady Glaze Donuts, Mark Brown, invited him to use the doughnut shop’s new production kitchen during the day, he jumped on the offer.

Angus sold his products on his website, Dan’s Bread and Pastry, which later morphed into Terroir. He was providing wholesale orders to restaurants, selling his wares at farmers’ markets and putting together the odd retail pop-up. “I would just open my Shopify, put it in a preorder menu and let them know where to pick it up,” he says. And this was all happening on Mondays or Tuesdays, his days off from working at Langdon Hall.

Eventually, Angus and his wife went all in as co-owners on a brick-and-mortar space. And just like that, Langdon Hall’s fine-dining chef became a full-time baker—and his own boss. “Food is my passion. It doesn’t matter what I make, I just love working with food—so baking or cooking, it doesn’t matter to me,” he says.

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To take it one step further, Angus decided he was going to use only Canadian ingredients—right down to the salt, which comes from the Sifto mines in Goderich and Vancouver Island. This may be the only bakery without any vanilla or chocolate in its cookie recipe, but the cookies don’t suffer for it: they have crispy edges and soft centres, with a caramelized brown butter flavour. The honey glaze knot, a laminated pastry dipped in honey glaze and topped with crunchy oat streusel, is another top seller, as are the classic butter croissants and the rotating berry Danish.

Vanilla lattes were a point of contention, but Angus took it as an opportunity to double down on the local ethos. Instead of vanilla syrup, Terroir uses a house syrup made of honey, maple syrup and locally foraged woodruff, which has a sweet, subtle vanilla flavour.

Most of the ingredients come directly from farmers: fruit from Marcy’s Berries, milk from Walker Farms and flour from a Mennonite-run operation nearby called Howick Community Growers. They also work with 100km Foods Inc., a local wholesale distributor that connects chefs with products sourced from Ontario farmers and producers.

The only two things that are not grown in Ontario are the coffee beans and the sugar—and only because there’s no such thing as 100 per cent Canadian refined sugar. “Believe me, I’ve pulled my hair out trying to substitute honey and maple sugar, but it just doesn’t work for the texture,” he says.

In an industry where culinary secrets are often jealously guarded, Angus is doing the exact opposite. Pre-Terroir, he taught online courses on how to make sourdough and pastries to crowdfund his brick-and-mortar bakery. He also did online consulting by way of Instagram DMs, and he even started a subscription platform where he would answer questions about bread and pastry.

“If someone sent me a DM saying, I’m using a new local flour, but I’m having trouble with this recipe, I would just pop on FaceTime with them or send them a text,” he says. “The resources are our community—we have to help each other.” He now offers casual baking courses in-person at the bakery once a month.

Community means everything to Angus. “It’s so important to support communities. There are small farmers who are doing things really well, but it’s hard for them to compete with massive milk and bread companies,” he says.

At the same time, he stresses that there’s space for these corporations too, because people need to be able to buy affordable staples. “They’re feeding the world—but my focus is to feed my community. I want to make sure that, when people walk in here, they understand that they’re in Ontario and it’s the middle of summer. And when they come back here in December, it’s not going to look the same.”

Terroir Artisan Bakery, 215 Queen St. W., unit A100, Cambridge, terroirartisanbakery.ca, @terroirbakery