The Great Brick Works Picnic

Ev’ryone who should be here is here. 

Ev’ry chef and chocolatier is here. 

Talking about farming, 

Ever such a charming 

 Spectacle, the Brick Works Picnic Day…

The fourth annual picnic at the newly reinvented Brick Works took place on Sunday, delighting well over a thousand visitors. Seventy-two chefs, chocolatiers, winemakers and brewers teamed up with farmers and growers from the culinary regions of southern Ontario, all organized jointly by Evergreen Canada and Slow Food Toronto. Evergreen will use money raised from the Picnic to fund food programming and children’s gardens at the Brick Works; funds for Slow Food Toronto will help develop schoolyard gardens in the city. The whole event was a celebration of the local-foods movement and of the chefs, retailers and caterers who support them. It was also an implicit recognition of the all-important third component of the righteous food chain: the consumers who support what is still an alternative food system. Without them – us – the whole thing falls apart.

Often the message gets lost at these big galas, but (kudos to co-chairs Arlene Stein and Paul DeCampo) putting the farmers front and centre beside the chefs prevented that happening. Ingredients were as important as cooking. Did anyone get to every single station? I began with the best intentions but the crowd soon thickened and I kept running into old friends. I’m sure I missed some excellent treats, but the following highlights give an idea of what was on offer.

Chef Chris Brown of The Stop teamed up with Cheese Boutique’s Afrim Pristine (looking very dapper in a green knitted Inca-style head-cosy) to give us little red fife pastry tartlets filled with a gentle apple-and-caramelized-onion chutney and topped with one of two cheeses. I couldn’t decide between the Forfar 10-year-old cheddar from the Ottawa valley or the blue from Thornloe Dairy, near Sudbury, that Afrim had aged until it was as decadently soft and brown as fudge. I thought of doing a best-out-of-three test but these were big mouthfuls and there were still 71 other things to taste.

Oyster Boy’s chef Trish Donnelly was working with Cornel Ceapa’s New Brunswick sturgeon, turning it into a brilliant, tangy ceviche served on a potato crisp and serving the fish’s caviar on a buckwheat blini with crème fraîche. Brad Long, whose new Café Belong will open soon in the Brick Works, pan-seared Jonathan Forbes’s chanterelles, four kinds of beans and chopped rainbow chard in a brown butter vinaigrette. The Buddha Dog guys presented their Wham Bam Thankyou Lamb dog – a scrumptious lamb wiener in a poppyseed-and-caramelized onion bun topped with tzatziki made from Monforte yoghurt and some tangy Bedda Fedda feta from Fifth Town Cheese.

Zane Caplansky was slicing smoked meat. “This is Lynn Leavitt’s beef,” he explained. “If I could afford to do it, I’d serve it every day!” And indeed, it was an awesome little sandwich, sweet and spicy and meaty and running with juices. Chef co-owner Victor Barry and the Splendido team stuck a stick into trembling bite-sized chunks of supremely tender pork belly cooked slowly in maple syrup and Creemore ale. Then they topped it with a dab of pork fat mayonnaise and a tiny ethereal nugget of very crispy crackling… A melt-in-the-mouth moment of porcine apotheosis.

Ezra Title worked with three different Fifth Town Cheese cheeses, melting them onto twice-baked fingerling potatoes.

It was impossible to play favourites but Albert Ponzo of Le Sélect deserves a special mention for his perfectly textured risotto made with squash and baby leeks from Brooklands farm, a little wild boar and some microsage leaves. So wholesome – and even the spoons were biodegradable, made from potato that looked and felt like plastic. Right beside him, Devin Connell from delica Kitchen served a tangy puréed arugula soup that contained a crunchy sweet radish and bacon slaw, topped with an aged cheddar scone.

And what about the awesome minestrone from chef Rocco Agostino of Enoteca Sociale and Pizza Libretto? Every little vegetable in the soup had a distinct texture while the broth was rich with parmesan rinds and spiked by a piquant parsley and jalapeño salsa verde.

Soups were a great idea on such a crisp fall afternoon but no one was feeling cold, least of all the volunteers who rode the stationary bicycles that powered the amplifiers for the band. Merriment was universal, especially around (and behind) the station from the AGO’s Frank where chefs Anne Yarymowich and Martha Wright and their team served what was my personal finale – a gorgeous little cake that Anne described as a cross between a tart tatin and pouding chomeur. In Quebec, a chomeur is a poor man, a person on welfare, and this classic dish is a baked maple pudding, devised at a time when maple syrup was cheaper than sugar. The clever chefs added Brantview apple caramelized in maple syrup in the bottom of the pan then turned it upside down to serve it, topped with maple whipped cream. Unbelievable. After that, anything more would have been pure bathos so I made my excuses.