Urmia Market

Bakery: Urmia Market 
Address: 5321 Yonge St, North York ON 
Website: n/a 
Style: Persian, Middle Eastern
Price: $-$$ 

The second stop on my K-town North Cake Tour, Urmia Market is a Persian supermarket/deli with hot food, meat and grocery items. They also have their own bakery section (ha ha the reason why they're up here! ^.^) with freshly baked breads (there's actually a sign on the door that it comes hot from the oven at 9:00 each morning), like really well-priced Barbary bread ($1.50) and, of course, sweeter varieties as well ($2.99): milk, sweet, and walnut Gata breads. In addition to this, they have a small pastry counter with walnut cookies, some sort of cake, traditional baklava and other cookies and sweets that I have yet to see anywhere else, and which are presumably Persian specialties. At $22.00/kg for everything in the sweets case, they're at your standard baklava price, though certainly lower in the usual range, and a few pieces will set you back more than $5, doubtless. Um, I'll probably be back for those on a return trip. :P

This time, because I am a sucker for yeast baked goods and also because I had bought a milk Gata as my first experience with Persian baking and liked it, I went for one of the sweet breads. Having had the milk variety before, I went with the walnut this time around. This a round, fairly dense sweet bread topped with sesame seeds and filled with a bit of that milky-buttery mass, the same as was in the milk Gata, as well as big chunks of walnut. I would have liked a bit more filling -- in the very middle, this was really tasty and the two fillings went so well together, but once you got to the edge, it was pretty much plain dough. That was really my only negative criticism. Simple, but yummy in taste... I'm wondering if the pastries will be just as tasty. Time will tell (well, and weather and driving conditions :/)!

Rating: ***