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Coffee at Splendido

17 Apr

Van Houtte coffee expert Marie-Claude Dessureault and Splendido chef-co-owner Victor Barry

The idea for a meal matching dishes to coffees instead of wines began over breakfast in a famous Canadian hotel – a hotel renowned for its restaurant and its wine list and, quite rightly, for the fulsome breakfast buffet it offered its guests. There was everything from fruit salad to kielbasa, mushrooms on toast to chocolate croissants, smoked salmon to bacon and eggs – a huge variety of foods – and only one kind of coffee. Imagine only serving one kind of wine with a menu so disparate! A sommelier would despair. So why only one kind of coffee?

Coffee is like wine in many ways. Every coffee expresses its own terroir, reflecting the place where it is grown. We love the bright citrus notes in Kenyan beans, the sweeter flavour of Costa Rican coffee, the earthy, woodsy notes of coffee from Indonesia. Like wine, coffees have different acidity, intensity and body. We experience each coffee differently on our palate – salt, sweet, sour, bitter – while our noses revel in the complexities of aroma, the illusions of cherry and citrus, cinnamon and chocolate, caramel, nuts, smoke, mushroom, earth, etcetera. And just as a winemaker changes grape juice so dramatically through fermentation, so a coffee expert creates a unique product by roasting to different levels.

In short, coffee can be just as complex an accompaniment to food as wine.

In my disgruntled state, that distant breakfast time, the invitation from Van Houtte coffee to work with the company as Ontario brand ambassador seemed decidedly opportune. Van Houtte offers scores of different arabica coffees from 15 different countries: that’s plenty to be playing with if you want to start thinking about pairing specific coffees with specific foods. If I had had them all beside me during that hungry morning I might have chosen a Costa Rica Light Roast, with its subtle honey notes and vibrant acidity, to drink with my fruit salad. With mushrooms on toast, perhaps a Honduras San Luis Planes Medium Roast with its strong woodsy notes but delicate aroma and its hints of toasted bread. And to match that spicy, meaty kielbasa how about Napoletano, with its rich bitterness and dark, smoky depths?

Trout tartare

Well, one thing has led to another. Yesterday morning some of us gathered at Splendido for a lesson in professional coffee cupping from Van Houtte’s expert, Marie-Claude Dessureault followed by a magnificent six-course lunch created by chef and co-owner Victor Barry. I had presented him with six very different coffees and challenged him to create a matched dish for each one, talking it through one afternoon with him and co-owner-sommelier Carlo Catallo. We were looking for balance, contrast or compliment, connection, harmony, perhaps even an epiphany… When Victor came back with his dishes for a preliminary tasting, we were not disappointed. In fact we were thrilled!

It began with a Costa Rica Light Roast, mellow and fruity with zero bitterness but bright acidity, seved (as all the coffees were) in a stemmed wine glass. This was the match that looked the least promising on paper (coffee and fish not that well known as an ideal marriage) but it was a revelation. Victor began with fresh Ontario rainbow trout from Jim Giggy up on Georgian Bay (he brings them to town alive and knocks them on the head at the kitchen door), curing the fillets very lightly in lemon juice, Dijon mustard and chives then chopping them into a rough tartare. Close by were some drums of compressed cucumber that had been very briefly grilled on the plancha, the light charring finding all sorts of resonances in the flavour of the coffee. Dill fronds and dill oil brought out a herbal note while tiny spikes of lemon zest caught the coffee’s citrus acidity. Victor finished the dish with a cucumber relish, tiny dime-sized toasts of pumpernickel, fried capers and a miniature loop of sweetly pickled red onion. A buttermilk crème fraîche was simultaneously rich and refreshing but the overall textures were as delicate as the Costa Rican brew. It was a brilliant overture.

breakfast of champignons

Our second course featured Mocha Java Light Roast, a much earthier, woodsier coffee but still with a bright acidity undiminished by much of a roast. This time, Victor decided to play up the silvan character of the coffee with mushrooms – a dazzlingly eclectic fungal salad starring

maitaki mushrooms, raw sliced king oyster mushrooms, honey mushrooms pickled in lemon juice, shallot, garlic, olive oil and thyme and a mound of morel duxelles. The sweet earthiness of it all was amplified by whole roasted jerusalem artichoke and jerusalem artichoke chips. Tangy ramps came three ways – charred, pickled and as a soft white snow. There was a roasted spring onion and a dfark green pool of stinging nettle purée, crushed walnuts and a truffle crumble that looked like fine soil, dabs of tangy, house-made Guinness triple crunch mustard and to crown everything, fine shavings of the season’s very last Perigord truffles. It was another extraordinary dish and I loved how the coffee’s gentle, pervasive sweetness lifted the many mushroomy-truffly flavours.

Boudin noir and deconstructed Black Forest cake

Our third course starred Van Houtte’s Africana blend, medium roast – a fruity, slightly spicy coffee with audacious acidity. What I hadn’t really tasted in it was clove, until I sipped it alongside Victor’s soft, almost moussy boudin noir. There was clove in the sausage and it reached right into the darkness of the brew and found a clove-shaped bell hanging there which it immediately struck with a hammer. Amazing. Alongside this superior boudin Victor offered a sort of deconstructed Black Forest cake, components that were somehow fruity and chocolately without being sweet – a cherry purée, little shards of very bitter dark chocolate tuile, dehydrated cocoa cake like hard foam and moments of cherry compote. Hazelnut crumble and hazelnut snow added their own rich nuttiness. The clove epiphany attracted most attention but the cherry and the dark chocolate also found echoes in the coffee – another fine match.

 

Smoked venison and beets

 

On to medium-roasted Honduras coffee – toasty, and woodsy, with a hint of caramel. This time Victor found smokiness in the brew so he took some incredible red deer tenderloin, smoked it lightly with maple wood, cooked it sous vide then in the oven, and finished it by wrapping the meat in a scarf of brioche and bronzing it in a pan. The subtle smokiness mingled with the sweet juices of the meat in a perfect equilibrium of flavour and our guests from the media moaned with pleasure. Sharing the plate was a medley of sweet earthy beets – yellow and candy cane; roasted purple beets; slices of beet cooked in gastrique of sherry vinegar, honey and five-spice; raw beet shavings… There was a cranberry-port-caramel compote, a celery leaf for greens and a last moistening of pan juices flavoured with thyme, peppercorn and sherry vinegar.

For a fifth course we poured dark, bold, fruity Colombian coffee, brewed a little stronger to stand up to the intensity of the 85% chocolate ganache on shortbread crust that was our nod to dessert. Between the ganache and the cookie, Victor insinuated a layer of apricot-fig-nectarine-blood orange marmalade that picked up some fruitiness in the coffee. It was his take on a Sacher tort but the cake was almost eclipsed by the ice cream beside it – smoked burnt maple syrup ice cream with crushed candied pecans. The bold idea of cold ice cream and hot coffee worked brilliantly.

a savoury finale - stilton, pork belly and Sumatran extra bold

I wanted us to finish in left field not home base, to challenge our palates not appease them. The last course succeeded in that. We made Sumatran dark roast extra bold coffee and served it with Stilton. The wierdness of the mix forced concentration. The coffee didn’t really affect the flavour of the cheese; it was more that they sidled around each other, like prize fighters looking for an opening. It was weird and I loved it. The second component of the dish was an easier match. Victor roasted some pork belly in the restaurant’s Green Egg then bathed it in a gastrique of maple syrup, soy and sherry vinegar and tossed it with peanuts.

Thanks to Victor, the whole event was a triumph. Why not drink different coffees instead of different wines with a savoury meal? I think the idea will catch on.

 

 

 
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The Iron Sommelier

03 Mar

Canada's three Master Sommeliers, Jennifer Huether, John Szabo and Bruce Wallner

On Tuesday night, the disconsolate blue-and-white crowd that streamed out of the Air Canada Centre and past the soaring glass façade of Aria Ristorante were unaware that a contest was under way, behind those lofty windows, of a much more subtle and hard-fought intensity than anything the Leafs have provided of late. The Iron Sommelier competition, 2012, came folded into a VISA Infinite dining event – and that meant good times for the audience of 150 eager food-and-wine lovers. Not only would they have a superb meal at the hand of Aria’s Executive Chef, Eron Novalski, they would also taste the wines chosen for each course by Canada’s three Master Sommeliers and then vote on which of the three deserved the title of Iron Sommelier.

I was to share the MC duties with the excellent and always amusing Nick Keukenmeester from Lifford wine agencies which had provided the portfolio of dozens of spectacular wines from which the competitors could choose their matches. By some deft and ruthless manoeuvring I was able to shuffle off the lion’s share of the work onto Nick’s shoulders, leaving myself with a single duty – to describe the dishes themselves.

And so we began, milling about in the restaurant, sipping 2002 Feuillatte Grand Cru Blanc de Noirs Champagne and nibbling on Chef Novalski’s awesome canapés: confited duck tongue with duck egg aioli… Green olives stuffed with duck meat, veal and sausage then breaded and fried… Wicked little duck breast spiedini with orange sea salt (“speedies” are all the rage in Western New York State’s more fashion-forward bars these days, and are certainly coming soon to a restaurant near you.)… Duck prosciutto crostini with apricot chutney and shaved foie gras… Have you spotted the theme? Yes indeedy. Every course was to feature duck and of the potential wines available to the sommeliers, the vast majority were Pinot Noir. The white Pekin ducks, incidentally, were generously sponsored by King Cole of Aurora, Ontario, a hugely successful, righteous farm that lets the birds lead clean, happy, outdoor, organic lives.

Nick introduced Canada’s three MSs, and I was delighted to see that he was perfectly prepared to take the mickey out of them, as they were out of each other. So it was a merry contest from the outset and I was left free to torment Nick whenever I could think of something. John Szabo MS (uber-consultant, whose latest project is STOCK restaurant in the Trump tower)  looked splendidly virile in the black, embroidered dolman and pelisse of a Hungarian hussar, though he had left his shako, boots and sabre at home. Jennifer Huether MS (o.i.c. MLSE’s wine program next door at E11even, the ACC, and everywhere else) was all charm and good-magical-energy but with a rapier for a palate and cool acuity where the public’s preferences are concerned. Bruce Wallner MS (lately of Paese) was the joker of the pack tonight, though he is a man on a serious mission to turn Ontario on to excellent wine.

Course number 1

 

Ma foie...! (image marcpolidorophotography.com)

 

Chef used duck foie gras to create a slightly Italianized version of a classic French foie gras mousse, served in a most original way. That Italian component comes in right at the beginning when he marinates the whole foie gras not in Cognac or Armagnac or Calvados – but in a grappa that has been aged in port casks. After an hour or so he strains the grappa off into a pan, pours in some chicken stock, adds bayleaves and peppercorns and brings it to the boil. The cool pink foies are lowered into this hot bath to relax for a while. Then they are separated again and allowed to cool down to room temperature before the foie is put back into the liquid and they go into the fridge. It all sounds like some elaborate day at the spa. Then the foie and its fat is buzzed in a food processor together with a great deal of butter – to be finished in a pacojet. By now it’s a mousse – you would be too if you had endured such treatment. Eron spreads it out across the whole plate like hummus and then adds crazy extra flavours – orange peel that has been dehydrated and then ground to powder; crispy sage leaves for earthiness and baby shiso leaf for mentholated tang; crispy duck skin, deep fried then crumbled over the top; and dehydrated cherry, like the weightless, chalky “berries” you get in a packet of cereal, partially powdered, partially crumbled over the top.

I was able to pass on instructions about how to eat it. Eron had baked some foccacia and turned it into crostini. He suggested we all just broke a piece off and wiped it right through the plate so it picked up a little of everything. Pop it in one’s gob – and while the flavours are still ringing and resonating around the palate try one of the wines and pay close attention to what happens.

All three MSs chose a Pinot Noir – each wine a star in its own right. Jennifer went for Barnett Savoy 2010 from California’s Anderson Valley. It was far more sophisticated than I expected with complex swirls going on under and around the vibrant cherries. It was such a good match it seemed to disappear in the welcoming embrace of the foie. John’s Pinot was a magnificent old Burgundy – Louis Jadot Corton Pougets Grand Cru 2002 – the most delicate red Corton of all. He urged us to think about texture and he was right – silk on silk – heavenly but, again, so perfect a dancing partner for the mousse that I lost sight of the wine behind the foie’s broad back. Bruce’s wine came from Niagara – Malivoire Mottiar Vineyard 2009. Cherries all over the place, but there was a distinctive Niagara vibrancy to it – an acidity that was different and alive – as if this wine was playing an electric guitar while the other two were playing in the strings section. It was a great match but it also let the wine stand out in its own right. It got my vote.

Course number 2

Duck consomme (image: marcpolidorophotography.com)

Our next dish was a (possibly unintentional) homage to the Marx Brothers and their immortal movie, Duck Soup. A great consommè always begins with the bones, of course – in this case, roasted and then boiled into a brown duck stock with a mirepoix of carrot, celery, onions, cinnamon, allspice, rosemary and thyme, all simmered over eight hours. Chef let it cool, then strained it, then boiled it up again, this time adding a little gelatin, orange zest (one of the ubiquitous secondary flavours of the evening) and some pat chun sauce (like a tangy, citric hoisin). To clarify it, he froze the soup, wrapped it in cheesecloth and let it slowly thaw at room temperature, drip-drip-dripping through a perforated pan. The result was a beautiful consommé, clear and the colour of dark honey – like the chunks of topaz shoeless children try to make you buy in the Atlas mountains – and with layers of flavour that go on for ever.

Three tortellini bobbed about in the soup, filled with a smooth mixture of confited duck, grated parmigiano reggiano and a pailful of porcini mushrooms that had been cooked down with roasted garlic and puréed. He finished the dish with some chopped chives and just a droplet of truffle oil that created an invisible, intangible ambience of truffle hovering in the air about a foot above the bowl.

Soup is a notoriously tough match for wine (cold and hot liquids rarely work well together) but the MSs were unfazed. John began by pointing out that the consommé was basically an umame bomb but that the tortellini might be the key bridge. “There is also umame in wine,” he opined, “when grapes are perfectly ripe or even over-ripe…” His choice was a white Alsatian show-stopper, rich and heavy, sweet and complex, the Zinck Rangen Grand Cru Tokay Pinot Gris 2007. A gorgeous wine, but I found it too big and sweet for the surprisingly delicate soup and the subtlety of the tortellini. Bruce took a totally different route, using a very rare and prestigious sparkling rosé from Franciacorta, the Ca del Bosco Anna Clemente Rose 2004 (a wine that retails at $219.95 a bottle). It showed magnificently and was brilliantly refreshing with the dish, and perfectly capable of singing its own song clear and true against the complicated orchestration of the dish. But did it actually add anything to the moment? Was there a sublime epiphany? Not so much. Jennifer took yet another route into the soup, picking up on the savoury, umame, mushroom, truffle components in the consommé with a classic match – a mature Burgundy with its own delicate, earthy, mushroomy notes, the Louis Jadot 1er Cru Beaune Theurons 2006. Bingo! A great balance of texture and intensity. The Beaune got my vote.

Course number 3

Pasta - basta! (image marcpolidorophotography.com)

The pasta interlude. The pasta in question was hand-made cavatelli, one inch long, sturdy and filling. The sauce…? Well of course it was all about the sauce. Chef Eron made a marvellous duck ragu, first roasting whole ducks until they were brown then braising them slowly for six or seven hours in a mixture of red wine, veal jus, tomato paste and a mirepoix of vegetables. When they were done, he took of the duck’s skins and forked off all the meat from the bones, He strained the braising liquid and added it to the meat, then passed the vegetables through a mouli and added them, too. Then he started a new sauce with onion and garlic and fresh tomatoes, folded in the ragu and just before serving added a couple of spoonfuls of mascarpone to add extra richness and silkiness of texture. As a final flourish he roasted chestnuts, froze them, then grated them over each dish as it went out.

John declared this rich ragu to be the toughest match of the evening, though not the most complex. He chose a Carrick Central Otago Pinot Noir 2009 from New Zealand – a smooth, perfectly balanced Pinot Noir that seemed to slide gracefully over the surface of the food without ever making much contact with it. Bruce also went to Otago for his Pinot, the Felton Road Cornish Point Central Otago Pinot Noir 2010, a wine that still showed the clumsiness of youth, needing time in the bottle to achieve perfect integration. That clumsiness, which revealed itself as a separation of the wine’s components – glorious cherry and berry fruit up front, acids and tannins swirling in a little late to the party – was exacerbated by the dish but I thought the match was actually more interesting with the tannins and acids managing to penetrate the textures of the dish, letting the fruit reach out to the sweet duck and spices. Jennifer found a Pinot Noir from Sonoma, the Freestone Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir 2008. This wine is another beautifully knit smoothie with a great balance between the tangy, ripe red fruit, vibrant acidity and minerality. That vibrancy managed to handle the richness of the ragu – in my opinion, the best match of the three.

Course number 4

The breast (image marcpolidorophotography.com)

The main event. Someone asked me, “Why ducks on the menu tonight?” I tried to explain by asking her to imagine the shoreline of a great continent, the place where the land of food meets the ocean of wine. Armies of foodies ceaselessly roam the land; great navies of wine aficionados bob about on the seven seas. But in between lie vast tidal flats – lonely  and unvisited places, silent and wet under the infinite sky. But look there…! Far away across the miles of shining mud – distant figures are at work. It’s the sommeliers. They make their living where food meets wine, filling their string pouches with the glistening treasures they discover, collecting unique knowledge and original ideas. It can be a solitary place and they find companionship where they can – especially with the shore birds – the eiders and harlequins, the velvet scoters, the oldsquaws and goldeneyes – all the marine ducks – like the sommeliers, as comfortable on the water as on the land. I’m sure that’s why we had a duck menu.

And why, for our next course, Chef Eron worked with the breast, rubbing it with a dry marinade of liquorice, allspice, cinnamon, pepper, thyme and bayleaf and then sealing it in a vacuum for a couple of days to contemplate the error of its ways. When the meat was truly contrite, he cleaned it and then rubbed it with a second, fresh marinade of the same spices, but this time they had been toasted to mellow their pungency. Then the breast was quickly seared and sliced and the meat was arrayed over a velvet cushion of puréed celeriac and Gala apple, enriched with cream, thyme, bay and peppercorns.

There was also a tiny perfect brick of polenta that was mixed with butter and Parmigiano when it was still in its stirrable infancy. Eron spread it out onto baking pans and put it in the fridge to solidify. Then he cut it into rectangles and pan-seared them to reactivate the cheesiness.

As the evening’s token vegetable we had fennel poached in milk, then laid gently onto the polenta cake, only to be smothered in breadrumbs and cheese and gratineed under the merciless flames of the salamander. The sauce was a Veal jus with cocoa in it that was rich enough pass for a mole. There was a dusting of pink peppercorn powder around the plate and a final crumble of raw cocoa nibs – primal chocolate as a dark, savoury spice.

Such a complex, profound, tricky dish, with so much going on! The MSs did not let us down, working with three very serious Pinot Noirs. Jennifer chose an Australian star, the Kooyong Mornington Peninsula Estate Pinot Noir 2010, a very smooth and well-integrated wine that relied on fruit to make its statement. Bruce chose a huge Pinot, the Sequana Pinot Noir Dutton Ranch 2008 – a great wine in which he detected even caramelized notes. To me, the food exaggerated those hints, making the wine oddly sweet. This time John aced the round with a wine he described as “the most old-world of the new world Pinot Noirs,” Adelsheim Willamette Valley Pinot Noir 2009 from Oregon. This time the food gave the wine a leg-up and then they continued to climb towards the sun in a slowly turning gyre.

Jennifer Huether, Iron Sommelier, 2012

So who had won? My vote was just one of 150. While the numbers were tallied we feasted on. Debbie Levy of Dairy Farmers of Canada introduced a cheese course of aged Lankaaster (Ontario), Le Mont Jacob (Quebec), Avonlea clothbound cheddar (P.E.I.) and Bleu d’Elizabeth. I had lots to say about dessert – a layered verrine called Ciocolatto e Caramello created by Aria’s pastry chef, Melanie Harris. She loves salty things almost as much as sweet and this delectable little item reflected that. Layered from the bottom up was salted caramel-white chocolate mousse; pure salted caramel; a 77%-cocoa dark chocolate mousse then a very dark (99%) ganache. On top was a chapeau of espresso-flavoured whipped cream and on top of that a magic white powder, soft as talc, made from pure olive oil. Only a total dessert nerd would attempt to consume this layer by layer. Most people just dug in, enjoying it with a dazzlingly well-chosen drink – Bowmore 12-year-old single malt whisky, Islay’s most elegant malt.

Ah, but by now the results had been tabulated. No 2nd and 3rd was announced – just the name of the winner: Jennifer Huether. It was a most satisfactory conclusion to a fascinating evening.

 
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Allen’s Steak Festival 2012

16 Feb

I have always imagined John Maxwell, proprietor of Allen’s, as the most urban of men, a boulevardier very much at his ease in Manhattan, London’s West End or deepest Toronto. Perhaps he might occasionally be found in a wide-open space but only if it were the location of a rally of vintage Jaguar motor cars. How wrong I was. We can see from the photograph he kindly sent me that Mr. Maxwell is just as much at home in a cow pasture, especially when visiting his own herd of Dexter cattle. He acquired them last year, he tells me, and visits them, often, at their home on Wyatt Farm organics, Flamborough Centre, Ont. Dexters are one of Europe’s oldest domesticated breeds and they produce fabulously good steak, lean as venison when finished on grass and hay.

But don’t take my word for it. You can taste Dexter carpaccio, striploin, ribeye and bone-in rib from Maxwell’s own herd as part of the Steak Festival at Allen’s on the Danforth. It runs until February 25, so there is still time to indulge in the most fascinating forensic exploration of steak you will ever encounter. Maxwell assembles meat from animals personally chosen by himself from a number of different farms – many different breeds of cow, the creatures raised and then finished on many different feeds, the meat aged for many different lengths of time. Most are raised in Ontario but there is also an example of Angus from Prince Edward Island’s increasingly popular and delectable beef program, as well as bison from Quebec, USDA Prime Hereford from Nebraska and “Kobe” Wagyu-Angus from Alberta. Comparisons are encouraged.

Alongside this majestic menagerie is a dazzling wine list comprised of rare and old vintages of Ontario VQA wine. Here are bottlings you won’t find anywhere else – Reif’s Tesoro from 1995, the best vintage of the last century, Cave Spring’s superb 2005 La Penna, Hidden Bench’s 2007 La Brunante, Chateau des Charmes Equuleus going back to 2001, even a 2002 Zweigelt Reserve from Pelee Island Winery, a wine I have never tasted.

Anyone who claims to know about steak and wine has a moral obligation to participate in this amazing event. Allen’s is at 143 Danforth Avenue (as if you didn’t already know) and reservations are strongly recommended. 416 463 3086. www.allens.to/.

 
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Winners of the 2011 Winetasting Challenge!

31 Jan

The news is out. The winners of the 2011 Winetasting Challenge have been announced.

The Challenge was created in 2004 as part of The Renaissance Project, brainchild of Felice Sabatino of Via Allegro Ristorante, to celebrate and encourage excellence in our wine service industry. It was a huge success and, as the competition grew, Brock University’s Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute was appointed as the organizing, presenting and auditing body in 2005. It is now the most unique and largest wine tasting competition in the world, with the largest prize purse of its kind in the world – upwards of $100,000 including cash, trips, Spiegelau stemware and scholarships.

In the Challenge’s early days, Toronto Life was a media sponsor, an association that has since been dissolved but which made me proud when I was still involved with the magazine. I particularly liked the fact that the competition was open to anyone, professional and amateur, and that no entry fee was required. That is still the case. The event is operated by volunteers and all awards and competition expenses (venue, food, wines, etc.) are provided courtesy of the sponsors. In a healthy spirit of competition, neither The Renaissance Project nor CCOVI keeps or publishes any individual scores. Only the names of the winners and runner-ups for each of the categories are announced.

            It’s a very tough competition – as it should be with so much at stake. All the wines and spirits are presented ‘double blind’ (purchased and at the competition, pre-poured out of sight by “bonded” representatives from CCOVI at Brock University) the “challenge” is to correctly identify the grape varietal, country, region of origin and vintage from a diverse range of world wines. The professionals try to identify seven wines while the amateurs attempt to identify three wines. There are two supplementary rounds where (1) three VQA wines are presented double blind and (2) three spirits are presented double blind.

            You can find out much more and see a list of the noble sponsors who make all this possible at the Challenge’s website, http://winetastingchallenge.com/.

Peter Boyd has something to sing about tonight

            And so to business:

1st Prize, professional: Peter Boyd, Sommelier at Scaramouche and an Instructor with the International Sommelier Guild, songwriter and preternaturally gifted blues musician.

2nd Prize, professional: Jonathan Salem-Wiseman, Professor at the Humber School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, winner of 1st Prize, amateur in 2010.

3rd Prize, professional: Eugene Mlynczyk, Key Account Manager, Sales at Vincor Canada.

1st Prize, amateur: Anthea deSouza

2nd Prize, amateur: Jordan Mills

3rd Prize, amateur: Monika Janek

Spirit Champion: Mark Coster, familiar to all as a contributing writer at Good Food Revolution.

CCOVI VQA Challenge Champion: Peter Bodnar Rod, Director of sales and marketing at 13th Street Winery and the Director Online education, Wine Industry Liaison at the International Sommelier Guild. He was also the first Grand Award winner of the Challenge, back in 2004.

            Huge congratulations to them all!

 
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OHI awards announced

24 Jan

  

 

There you go… That’s the mandate of the Ontario Hostelry Institute, an organisation that does a great deal of good for anyone who likes to eat out in this province – or stay in a hotel, or shop for local, artisanal products, or read about food and wine. The OHI provides scholarships and bursaries to talented young people who might not otherwise be able to afford professional training, and we all benefit from that. The OHI does this, in part, through its gala – a most convivial black tie party held every spring at the Four Seasons that is also an opportunity to celebrate the careers of industry leaders by giving out gold awards.

Last week, past honorees gathered just after dawn to discuss who should be honoured in 2012. The meeting was convened (and governed with his usual mixture of tact and firmness) by the OHI’s chair and president, Charles Grieco. He has generously allowed me to share the news of the winners in each category.

Chef: Stephen Treadwell, Stephen Treadwell Farm-to-Table Cuisine
Hotelier: Anthony (Tony) Cohen, Global Edge Investments

Independent Restaurateur: Frédéric Geisweiller, Le Sélect Bistro

Educator, Dr. Julia Christensen Hughes, Dean, College of Management & Economics, University of Guelph

Media/Publishing, Jody Dunn, Editor and Marketing Manager of Food & Drink magazine

Foodservice Chain Operator: Cora Tsouflidis, CORA

Supplier: Stephen J. Shamie, Hicks Morley

Artisanal supplier: Stephanie Purdy, Purdy’s Fisheries Limited

A star-studded list of people. And that’s not all. Mr. Grieco will also be presenting the Chairman’s OHI Gold Award to Anita Stewart M.C., LL.D.and the Chairman’s Lifetime Achievement Gold Award to Dean John Walker MBA of George Brown College. The following people have been newlt elected as Fellows of the Ontario Hostelry Institute: Jamie Drummond – Good Food Revolution; Jeff Stewart MBA – Centre for Food and Wine – Niagara College; Melanie Coates – Fairmont Royal York; Connie McDonald – Royal Ontario Museum; Chef David Chrystian – Hotel Le Germain; Jill McCoey – Langdon Hall Country House Hotel & Spa;

Afrim Pristine – Cheese Boutique; Lori Stahlbrand – Local Food Plus; Peter Bodnar Rod – 13 Street Winery; Gary Hallam M.Sc. – Conestoga College.

Congratulations to all. The gala dinner will be held on March 22 this year (please see below). It’s going to be a smashing beano with Anne Yarymowich, executive chef of Frank, and Michael Bonacini, executive chef of Oliver Bonacini, serving as the Honorary Dinner Chairs.

 

 
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Massey College Wine Grazing Italy

22 Jan

 

To Massey College for the annual Wine Grazing, where 100 junior and senior fellows of the graduate college get together to roam between the library and the Junior Common Room, tasting lovely wines and the delectable dishes matched to them. I’m honoured to be a part of the event, helping to choose and introduce the wines and figure out the food.

This year our theme was Italy, dalle Alpi in Africa – “from the Alps to Africa.” When Sabrina Bandali, head of the Massey College Wine Committee, and I started planning the evening, almost a year ago, we envisaged a neat and tidy, scientific comparison between the wines of northern Italy and of southern Italy. To put it into zoological terms, we would find the wine that filled the same gastronomic niche in either region and taste them side by side. But Italy has a way of interposing itself, muddling our precise northern intentions. Last summer, we came across a white wine from Tuscany – in the middle of the country – just where we had intended to fold our map – that would not be denied. Like an actress auditioning far too hard for a part, this bianco threw herself onto the table and began to emote until we had to include her. It was the same story for our dessert wine. I had cherished plans to pitch a northern recioto di Soave against a southern Zibibbo – but the same thing happened. Another ravishing Tuscan – more mature, undeniably eccentric, but no less mesmerising – bewitched us again. And then Sardinia shot up its hand, reminding us that Italy has islands too. So our tidy north-south plan turned into a fairly chaotic race around the country. In other words, much more Italian in mood as well as matter. And how could it be otherwise? There are more than 2,500 different grape varieties in Italy, with as many as 600 of them used in a serious, commercial way. I think we work with around 20 varieties in Canada. Choosing 10 Italian wines to represent the country was always going to be a challenge.

We started with a sparkling wine from the north – from Franciacorta in Lombardy, to be precise – a charming, ephemeral bubbly, Ca’ del Bosco’s NV Cuvée Prestige (agent: Lifford Wine Agency). There have been vineyards in Franciacorta, where the Padana plain suddenly bumps into the foothills of the Alps, since Roman times but the idea of using them for sparkling wine is only about 35 years old. Ca’ del Bosco was one of the pioneers, the creation of a teenager fresh out of oenology school, a young man called Maurizio Zanella. He had fallen in love with Champagne and didn’t see why it couldn’t be grown in Lombardy. Fortunately, his family was immensely wealthy – his dad one of Italy’s largest auto parts manufacturers – so the project came to pass, with Chardonnay, Pinot Nero and Pinot Bianco planted in tight rows in the French way and a cellar built where Zanella could mimic the méthode Champenoise. That’s what we drank last night – classic, fresh, crisp Franciacorta bubbly with a nose of green apple and melon, a soft supple mousse that doesn’t last long and a streak of minerality in the finish. It’s still a rarity in Canada, something the millionaires who own the country clubs in that part of Italy like to keep to themselves. We matched it with a parmesan crisp to catch the wine’s buttery, yeasty nuances, and a slice of fresh apple to mirror the fruit.

After that we divided the crowd into two groups of 50 and sent the first cohort up to the library to begin the Grazing proper. We started with Tiefenbrunner’s 2010 Pinot Grigio (agent: Rogers & Company), a stunner from the Alto Aldige, that amazingly beautiful area that used to be part of Austria until 1919. The Adige river has carved a profound valley through the Alps and temperatures get as hot as Sicily there during the summer but when you look up –up –up you can still see snow on the tops of the mountains thousands of feet closer to heaven. There are Gothic schlosses, and little alpine stuben where you can get lunch, and some terrific white wines. Vineyards have been planted there since pre-Roman times. Hilde and Herbert Tiefenbrunner started making wines at Schloss Turmhof in 1968 and today they are one of the great bastions of quality in the Alto Adige. This Pinot Grigio had a fairly subtle nose, like yellow plums, but there was so much more texture to it than one might expect – a creaminess balanced by tangy acidity. Those yellow plums are there on the palate too but then it suddenly finishes with an unexpected flourish of peppery spice.

            Alongside the Pinot we poured Silvio Carta’s Badde Alva 2009 Vermentino from Sardinia (find it at Vintages). Vermentino is a lovely, lively, aromatic white grape that loves the climate around Corsica, Sardinia and the Ligurian coast, an enthusiasm it is easy to share when one recalls the sparkling Mediterranean, the cloudless skies and the landscape of yellow hills covered with a herb-scented macchia that gioves way here and there to olive groves and vineyards. Silvio Carta is a family firm based in the Orestano region on the western coast of Sardinia, a relaxed and easygoing place after the bustle of the Alto Adige.

            For these two wines, the brilliant Darlene Naranjo, who is in charge of Massey’s talented kitchen, created something consciously simple, a jumble of boiled potatoes and fresh arugula stirred with grated Piave cheese and plenty of Olio Carli’s super olive oil. The peppery arugula and the oil picked out the citrus element in the Pinot Grigio beautifully while the less acidic Vermentino provided a richer liaison with the food. The crowd appeared to be delighted with the match.

            Our second station also featured two whites, starting with Donna Chiara’s 2010 Greco di Tufo from Campania (agent: The Case for Wine). I love Greco di Tufo. It’s a deceptive wine, appearing rather shy on its own but proving surprisingly self-possessed when you pour it alongside food. We provided a salad of shaved squid and pine nuts liberally dressed with parsley, lemon and olive oil, and the wine rose to meet it. Donna Chiara does something unusual with its Greco, harvesting it late so there’s more flavour and body than usual – a tad less crisp acidity. It was a dazzlingly good marriage.

            The other white at the table was Frescobaldi’s Castello di Pomino 2010 Bianco, a blend of Chardonnay and Pinot Blanc from Tuscany (agent: Lifford Wine Agency). It’s fascinating to see how Chardonnay changes when it gets to central Italy. That uptight, chic, blonde Burgundian ice-queen in the Hermes scarf lets her hair down. It’s still a tightly woven wine but fragrant with peach and a good splash of oaky spice from Frescobaldi’s barrel program. We decided it deserved a salad of its own – grilled asparagus (that picked out the oakiness in the wine) tossed with mushrooms and fennel that isolated some unexpected herbal notes behind the fruit.

            Many of our guests were waiting for the big reds and we plunged deeply in for our next station, whizzing back northwards along the autostrada to Piemonte and Barolo country – steep, up-and-down hills smothered in tightly planted vineyards that look like green corduroy from a distance, the deep valleys filled with white fog on autumn mornings. This is the land of white truffles and of many fabulous red wines, the king of them all being Barolo made from late-ripening, tannic, perfumed – amazingly complex Nebbiolo grapes. In very old age, Barolos are spectacularly beautiful – the colour of orange Victorian brickwork, fragile and heady with the scent of old-fashioned roses. Our Barolo, however, was revelling in the vigour of youth, Fontanafredda’s 2005 Serralunga d’Alba (agent: Noble estates Wines & Spirits). It had a robust acidity with lots of spicy tannins coming in at the end of the palate, but there was so much going on in terms of aroma and flavour – ripe cherries and old oak furniture, the smell of walking through oak woods on a warm afternoon. We served a rich dish of fresh pasta with dried porcini mushrooms and a cream reduction, topped with shredded prosciutto. The richness of the food and the austere structure of the wine cancelled each other out letting the mushrooms find their proper place among the woodsy aromas of the Barolo. A smashing fit.

            Our second red wasn’t quite so well-balanced with the dish but it stood out magnificently on its own, Planeta’s Santa Cecilia 2007 Nero d’Avola from Sicily (agent: Halpern Enterprises). The ancient Greeks brought this grape to Sicily and it settled right in like a native, quite at home in the parched landscape, though it ripens very late, sometimes not until November. Back in the 1990s, when Diego Planeta and a group of other talented pioneers set out to revitalize the island’s wine industry, Nero d’Avola was a natural, native star for them to work with. Planeta bought land in the south-east, far from his own western estates, simply to flatter the grape and it responded beautifully. The wine is profound and opaque, almost black, full of the scent of black and red currants, oak and spice and shoe leather (though it’s Ferragamo shoe leather of the very finest quality), and underneath darker forces are at play – espresso and dark chocolate and a hint of burnt caramel.

            Our next station presented two more red masterpieces, starting with Tenute Girolamo’s 2008 Aglianico (agent: Liberty Wines). Some say Aglianico is another ancient Greek grape; others that it was already here in southern Italy when the Greeks arrived. Either way it is the great red of the south – making Taurasi wines around Avellino and Aglianico del Vulture in Basilicata where it grows on the slopes of the volcano Monte Vulture. Tenute Girolamo brought it over the regional norder into north-western Puglia into a green valley deep in the mountains. In its youth, this wine has been described as dark and feral like the howling of the wolves that still roam these central mountains. This one had mellowed a little but it still spoke of wild places – forests of juniper and smoky evergreens, bramble thickets and dried black fruits, pepper and spice, liquorice and dark chocolate. It has become one of my current favourite reds and I’m delighted it will be appearing at the LCBO any day now.

            Up against it was a super Amarone Riserva, the 2005 vintage from Zenato (agent: J. Cipelli Wines & Spirits). I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about Amarone, how it’s pressed from grapes that have spent the winter drying out on trays, how the sweet, sticky juice slowly ferments itself dry without losing those ripe, raisiny flavours. The 2005 Zenato is a beauty, though it required a little palate-reconfiguration after those three dark, well-structured powerhouses – as if you had spent the evening listening to three very tall, stern and humourless maths teachers in their academic gowns, one after the other, and then suddenly came upon the English professor, sitting by the fire in an old tweed suit, smiling serenely… Do not be fooled! There is an intellect behind that warm and fuzzy manner. And the amarone provided the defining match of the evening, brilliant with our dish of juniper-spiked venison stew served with soft polenta and side orders of hot roasted chestnuts and peperonata.

And so to our finale, Badia a Coltibuono’s 2004 Vin Santo from Tuscany. Vin Santo is made in lots of places in Italy – I’ve had some brilliant ones in Udine, up by the Slovenian border, and some very strange specimens farther south – but Tuscany is surely its homeland. Like an amarone, it is made from dried grapes – but white grapes, usually trebbiano, malvasia and occasionally grechetto. The grapes are hung up in bunches for the winter rather than spread on trays, then they’re pressed and the syrupy juice goes into small barrels made of chestnut or oak where they are left to ferment very slowly, for years. Never topped up, there is loss to evaporation – the angels taking their share. It’s not unlike what happens to whisky. Yeasts die at 18 percent alcohol so that’s the strength these wines reach, usually, though not always, leaving plenty of sugar behind. Our version was simply magical, its nose suggesting everything from dried apricots and raisins to Scotch whisky, instant coffee powder and toffee. Darlene baked some almond-apricot biscotti to go with the Vin Santo and I urged our civil gathering to dunk them into the wine. I suppose it is indecorous to then try to suck the Vin Santo out of the sodden biscuit but it’s hard to resist doing so; better to just bite off the wet bit and enjoy it. I don’t really know why but it’s something that always gives me an enormous, almost visceral pleasure.

            So the gathering ended but no one really wanted to go home. Roberto Martella, co-owner of Grano and Italy’s unofficial cultural ambassador, was there. He had been a huge help all year, suggesting wines and making key introductions to agents on behalf of the Committee – such a generous soul. Brunello Imports provided a loot bag of Rustichella d’Abruzzo pasta for everyone to take home. Any day now, we’ll start thinking about a theme for next year’s gathering.

 
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Parties for wine lovers

26 Oct

Everyone knows how good Prince Edward County bubbly is getting. It’s a style that suits the terroir perfectly and it’s going to grow in importance with every passing vintage. How to keep up with the latest wines and enjoy them at their very best? Here’s a great opportunity that also supports Slow Food the County. More details below, courtesy of Peter C. Fleming, chair of Slow Food the County:

 

Slow Food the County has changed the format for its annual fundraising event and announces a beginning of winter celebration of Sparkling Wine. Local sparkling wine producers and area chefs will partner to produce an evening of delectable bites each paired with its perfect liquid partner. Proceeds will go to supporting our ongoing food education activities, including the Healthy Lunch program and to other County food charities.

The gala event will take place on Saturday 19 November from 6:30 to 10:30 at Highline Hall in Wellington and will feature an auction of wine, art and other unique items as well as a chance to bid on dinner prepared in your home by one of our fine chefs. The event will feature music from the Lenni Stewart Jazz Trio.

Sparkling wine is a growing sector of the County wine industry with 8-10 sparkling wines now being produced in a variety of styles including méthode champenoise, méthode ancestral, Charmat and Prosecco. The following wineries have confirmed their participation – Huff Estates, The Grange of Prince Edward, Hinterland Estates, 3660 Vineyard and County Cider. Our chef partners are Michael Hoy, Heinz Haas, Sebastien Schwab, Luis de Sousa, David Dee, Paula and Victoria from Pasta Tavola and apprentice chefs from the Loyalist College hospitality program.

Tickets are $75 per person and are only available in advance. They can be purchased online at County Tix http://www.countytix.ca/events?view=list.

 And…

 Ottawa wine-writer Natalie MacLean is coming to town, on tour with her new book, Unquenchable, A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines. Natalie has so many devoted readers in print and online that she needs no endorsement from me but it’s rare to have a chance to meet her in person in Toronto. By way of a launch party, she’s hosting two events – the first being a multi-course gourmet dinner with matching wines at Grano Restaurant in Toronto on November 23. Anyone can go simply by buying a ticket and great food and wine, merriment and story-telling is guaranteed. More info can be found at http://bit.ly/GranoDinner. Call 416-361-0032 or email Ben McNally (ben@benmcnallybooks.com) to buy a ticket.
The day before, which would be November 22, according to my calculations, Natalie’s hosting a wine tasting in Niagara. More details on that at http://tktwb.tw/NiagaraWine.
Unquenchable is an excellent read, chronicling the travels of a perpetually curious and often thirsty wine writer, visiting great characters around the world and listening to their enthusiasms. Natalie’s writing is always vivid and entertaining so that one feels more like a travelling companion than a reader. For more information about the book and an amusing video trailer about it, please visit www.nataliemaclean.com/book.

 
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La Bonne Cuisine

23 Oct

Chef Alexandra Feswick of Brockton General, purveyor of delectable treats inspired by dazzling music

It was the most fun I’ve had, standing up, for a long time: this afternoon’s concert by the Amici Ensemble at the Glenn Gould Studio with guest chef Alexandra Feswick of Brockton General. The sun shone outside and it was unseasonably warm, which might have accounted for the full house – or perhaps it was the unique opportunity the concert afforded to explore the relationship between music and food.

Musically, it was a bold and eclectic program that ranged from Mozart, Rossini and Schubert through Poulenc and Martinu to Nikolai Kapustin, Leonard Bernstein and William Bolcom, the heartbreakingly sublime to the hilarious. Some pieces were inspired by food; where others were concerned, we invited Alex Feswick to listen to the music and then interpret it as an hors d’oeuvre. Her food surprised and astonished and invariably delighted the audience, her responses ranging from the instinctive to the cerebral. She did most of her prep work at her restaurant but created a kitchen in one of the Studio’s larger dressing rooms to finish the dishes. They were served during an extended intermission which meant the audience were also given a work-out for their memories, forced to remember the music from the first half of the concert when they tasted each piece’s respective treat and then to remember the taste and texture of other dishes once they sat down to listen to part two. It all worked splendidly.

We began with L’Invitation au Château by Francis Poulenc. He wrote it in 1950 after seeing the play of the same name written by Jean Anouilh – a play that might be more familiar to you in the adaptation by Christopher Fry called Ring Round the Moon. If you recall, it’s a satirical comedy of manners with twin brothers in love with different women and all sorts of deceitful schemes, assignations and misconceptions. But it’s far from a door-slamming farce – there’s a bittersweet edge to it – snobbish confrontations between lovers of different social classes – and the frame of the play is the smouldering rubble of the aftermath of World War II, looking back to a more genteel era of waltzes and country-house weekends. It was the play that inspired Poulenc’s lyrical, nostalgic music and its plot that got Alex thinking about deceptive twins. She sent out a “blackcurrant jelly” topped with pea shoots that was really beets, not blackcurrants.

L'Invitation au Chateau: quivering to the beet

Bohuslaf Martinu was a prolific Czech composer who moved to Paris in 1923, at the age of 33, where he discovered all the musical joys of surrealism, neoclassicism and jazz. He composed La Revue de Cuisine in 1927 as a ballet involving the tango and the Charleston, and then quickly worked it into the four-movement suite the Amici ensemble and their brilliant musical guests performed. The ballet’s narrative is a whimsicality set in a kitchen with dancers portraying a variety of cooking utensils involved in a range of love affairs and dalliances. We withheld this interesting libretto from our chef, hoping she would respond more directly to the music. And she did. For her, the many distinct layers of sound from the piano, violin, cello, trumpet, basson and clarinet conjured images of walking in a forest, as if in a dream – Snow White suddenly approached by a 1920s flapper. The forest led to aromatic thoughts of mushrooms; the rich musical layers to buttery puff pastry. The result was delicious – little pastry discs topped with peppered goat cheese, caramelized onions and mushrooms that Alex had partially dried and then re-infused with butter, thyme, garlic and lemon juice.

La Revue de Cuisine: Snow White and a flapper walking in the woods

We gave Chef a break for the third composer – the immortal Gioachino Rossini. I have always loved the story of Rossini’s life. He was born in 1792, the son of talented but impoverished musicians and when his father was imprisoned for backing the wrong political side he and his mother went to live with his grandmother, who was a baker. He was apprenticed to a pork butcher while he studied music – and that experience, as much as his gran’s pastries, helped form his lifelong passion for delicious food. Young Gioachino worked incredibly hard and by the age of 38 he was the toast of Europe, having composed no less than 38 operas. At that point he decided to retire and spent the second half of his life, another 38 years, coincidentally, in total self-indulgence, famous and beloved, eventually settling in Paris where his home became a glittering salon. His passions were devoted to his second wife, Olympe Pélissier (a great beauty who had been, in her youth, the model for Judith in Vernet’s painting of Judith and Holofernes), and to their parrot, Perruche, and their little dog, Nini. And above all to food, for Rossini was a seriously accomplished amateur chef. Many dishes were created in his honour, including, of course, Tournedos Rossini.

He still composed, but only for friends and for his private gatherings, with no thought of publication. Among his last works was The Sins of Old Age and it begins with four hors d’oeuvres dedicated to  radishes, anchovies, gherkins and butter. Serouj Kradjian (one of the Amici’s three artistic directors) played Anchovies, a set of variations that conjured up images of shoals of the living fish, flashing and darting in the water. Before that he played Dried Figs, another of the maestro’s food-inspired dainties, a companion piece to Raisins (dedicated to Perruche the parrot), and Hazelnuts (dedicated to Nini the dog). Dried Figs was dedicated to his wife – not that he was in any way likening her to the sweet-but-wizened fruit. Rossini explained at the time that he was remembering a morning when he woke her up in bed with a plate of delectable dried figs for her breakfast. He followed it with a Fig’ of a different kidney – a piano reduction of highlights from The Barber of Seville – a dazzling virtuoso piece. One imagined the great man playing it for his smiling guests after dinner, showing off the fact that he still had his technical musical chops, reminding them of his genius – a delicious confection indeed.

            During the intermission, I hung about backstage, grabbing stuff off the plates of food that Alex Feswick continuously sent out to the ravenous audience in the lobby.

L'amero Saro Costante: what becomes of the broken-hearted

            Act two began with Mozart’s exquisite aria, L’ameró saró costante, from his opera The Shepherd King, written when he was 19 and first performed in Salzburg in 1775. The role of the shepherd king, Amintas, was originally written for a castrato voice but was sung this afternoon, unforgettably, by the dazzling soprano Aline Kutan. It’s a moment in the opera when Amintas sings of his true love for the beautiful Elisa but the man who overhears the song, Agenor, thinks he’s singing about Tamiri, the woman Agenor loves, and is therefore heartbroken… (Yep, it’s an opera…) Chef Alex responded to the paradox of passionate love set within the ironical emotional context of heartbreak and represented it in a startlingly literal way, sautéeing chicken’s hearts quickly with a montée of butter and soft white onions, cutting them to the quick with a piece of tartly pickled carrot and then impaling them on a skewer as the coup de grace de l’amour. The hearts were piteously tender and delicious. While some audience members seemed alarmed by the tiny, bulbous, pink organs, most devoured many.

            After that, we heard the fiendishly difficult, jazz-influenced Burlesque for Cello and Piano by Ukrainean composer Nikolai Kapustin, and then Leonard Bernstein’s 1947 song cycle, La Bonne Cuisine. Each of the four songs is a setting of a recipe from a cookbook – La Bonne Cuisine Francaise by Emile Dumont, that was awarded an honourable mention in the Great Exposition of 1889 and has since been through 31 editions – it’s still available on Amazon. Plum Pudding, Queues de Boeuf, Tavouk Gueunksis (a Turkish chicken dish) and Civet a Toute Vitesse (sung incredibly fast by Aline Kutan) were the recipes he chose. Chef Alex chose to interpret the Queues de Boeuf, braising ox tails with a brunoise of carrots and celeriac, reducing the braising liquid and adding it to the fork-pulled meat which she then formed into plump, juicy, melt-in-the-mouth croquettes topped with tart plum sauce. This time, the entire audience swooned.

Then The Shepherd on the Rock – one of many lieder Schubert wrote in 1828, in the final months of his tragically short life. He was only 31 when he died. The song was commissioned by Schubert’s friend the operatic soprano Pauline Anna Milder-Hauptmann as an exhibition piece that would show off her command of a wide range of emotions, and Aline Kutan sang it superbly with Joaquin Valdepeñas on the clarinet and Serouj Kradjian on piano. So much of the music Schubert wrote in his last two years seems deeply introverted and meditative – you can hear a vast silence behind the music – certainly in the intensely lonely middle section of this lied – and yet there are also moments (the final section that looks forward to the coming of spring) when he seems to find reconciliation with the infinite.        

I first heard this music years ago in a concert hall in Germany. I was really over there for the spargelfest – the annual festival dedicated to white asparagus – when the whole country aches and yearns for white asparagus and every restaurant menu is devoted to it. Ever since then I have imagined the sound of a clarinet as the aural representation of poached white asparagus – bright, firm, shiny, slippery, tubular, perfect – as flawless as Joaquin’s playing – with a little soft, grated, almost-melting Limberger cheese in the lower register.

The Shepherd on the Rock: playing with his bundnerfleisch

Chef Alex approached the music in a different way, putting herself into the mind of the shepherd, imagining what he might have to eat up in the mountains. In her interpretation, the lad was also lucky enough to be rather a dazzling cook, setting down his clarinet to rustle up a little potato rösti, adding a dab of the crème fraiche he must have made earlier that morning and topping it with a shaved slice of his air-dried bundnerfleisch.

The sweet finale of our afternoon was an outrageously funny song by the serious and much-revered American composer and pianist William Bolcom, called Lime Jello Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise. One of Bolcom’s lifelong goals has been to erase the boundaries between popular songs and art songs and this number certainly achieves that, but at the same time the lyric drags gastronomical dissonance down to new and abysmal depths. It’s sung by a woman on the committee of some sort of small-town club and is a litany of the dishes served at its “culture night,” including “strawberry ice enshrined in rice with bits of tuna fish,” and “shrimp salad topped with choc’late sauce and garnished with a leek.” Chef Alex was keen to prepare something inspired by the words but that idea was firmly vetoed by all. Instead we finished with a redemptive encore – Morgen, by Richard Strauss – one of the most beautiful and rapturous songs ever written, impeccably sung by Aline Kutan and played by Serouj Kadjrian on piano and Marie Bérard on the violin. Its ethereal intensity sent the audience into prolonged applause (Alex Feswick received a standing ovation) and we all stepped out into the warm, sunlit evening emotionally drained but thoroughly well fed.

The Amici Ensemble (www.amiciensemble.com) is playing again on December 16, January 29 and April 22, offering the most creative series of chamber music programs I’ve ever come across. How lucky we are to have such artists in our midst!

 

 

 
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Top Chef Canada stars cook for Visa

21 Oct

Mark McEwan, arbiter of talent

To Bymark on Wednesday, to MC an evening for VISA Infinite card holders, an evening starring the three finalists from the television program, Top Chef Canada, and the show’s head judge, Mark McEwan. Not having a tv, I had missed the popular series but caught up quickly last week through the miracle of the internet. Besides, I had eaten these chefs’ food before. Connie DeSousa is co-chef and co-owner of Charcut Roast House in Calgary, a place renowned above all for the quality of its meats and house-made charcuterie. Before opening Charcut, Connie competed for team Alberta at the Culinary Olympics in Germany in 2004, cooked in Cologne for a year then moved to California where she opened a restaurant in the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco and also worked with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Rob Rossi spent the last couple of years as Executive Chef of the Mercatto restaurants in Toronto, raising the standards of the homespun Italian cooking to deliciously unexpected heights. He’s in the process of opening his own first restaurant, called Bestellen, on College Street at Rusholme – it should be ready by Christmas. Dale MacKay, the ultimate victor of Top Chef Canada, worked for six years in Gordon Ramsay restaurants around the world before taking over as Executive Chef of Lumière and DB Moderne in Vancouver. When Daniel Boulud closed them down, MacKay opened his own restaurant Ensemble. For the last two years, he competed at Gold Medal Plates in Vancouver and won silver (he is an intensely competitive chef). He’s back this year and will be a strong contender for gold on November 4.

Each of these chefs contributed a canapé to the pre-dinner Champagne scrum up in the bar and an appetizer to the meal downstairs. The main course and dessert were courtesy of Bymark’s own chef, Brooke McDougall. Wines were generously provided by Lifford, the wine agency, and introduced (though not actually chosen) by the brilliant Melissa Stunden, a gifted sommelier who now works for the agency.

            Rob Rossi got the ball rolling with a dish that looked delicate but packed a punch in terms of vibrant flavours. He started with some big raw scallops from the Bay of Fundy – plump and juicy with that creamy, almost sticky texture raw scallops have – cured them for a quick half hour in a dry mixture of salt and sugar, citrus, coriander, black pepper and bay. Then he rinsed them clean, dried them and diced them into trembling opalescent chunks.  Beneath them was a green streak of peppery, citric arugula purée that he made by sweating some shallots and garlic in a pan, throwing in the arugula with a little oil and lemon juice and then blitzing it to an emulsion. He finished the dish with a little dressing of meyer lemon and olive oil, a pinch of smoked Maldon salt, some tiny fried garlic crisps and a scattering of basil cress. The final flourish was bottarga – the dried and pressed roe of Mediterranean grey mullets – which he grated over the top with a microplane to make gorgeous intense little flakes of flavour. I thought it was a brilliant dish. Scallop is always rich but raw scallop seems even more so because of the texture and the tangy purée and dressing brought out the sweetness in the protein. The wine match was spot on – a creamy2009 Sauvignon Blanc from Craggy Range Te Muna Road in New Zealand’s Martinborough area – not as tart as a Marlborough SB and richer, with the body to match the sticky weight of the scallops.

Dale MacKay prepared our second dish, using ingredients he brought with him from B.C. – a perfect, juicy little fillet of baked black cod that looked like a white building block in a topaz-coloured Thai pork broth. There were pea shoots and bok choy and smoked maitaki mushrooms in that heady consommé, perfumed with kaffir lime, lemon grass and a trace of chili oil. The flavour was wickedly layered and exotic and people could be heard moaning with pleasure as they tasted it. The wine wasn’t so happy. Mitchell Watervale 2010 Riesling from Australia’s Clare Valley tasted fresh and pleasing before the soup arrived but, together, it was as if that blithe, innocent Australian child had woken up in an opium den in Thailand surrounded by shadowed people in masks and incense and cellos… never to be seen again.

            Connie DeSousa created the third dish – a radical leap into an entirely different style of food. Charcut is a real nose-to-tail shrine and Connie and her co-chef, John Jackson, take pride in breaking down and using up the entire animals that they buy. The largest beasts on their shopping list are the farmed bison up in Grand Prairie and for this dinner they used the bison’s heart and a lot of pork to make massive, hearty smoked kielbasa sausages that came to the table on platters, served family style for people to help themselves. Under the sausages was Connie’s take on sauerkraut – shaved raw fennel pickled with caraway – and a rather good grainy mustard made by a Calgary company called Brassica. The sausage was excellent and there were so many that half the guests (including me) asked for and were given doggie bags. The wine was Piovene Porto Godi merlot Fra I Broli 2008 from the Veneto – a classy, ripe, demure Merlot that played well with the sweet juices of the sausage. I would have liked something bigger and rougher with more acidic structure – a rustic Sangiovese maybe – but I suppose that would have been fairly predictable. A good proportion of the room approved the Merlot match.

            The main course was classic Mark McEwan – gorgeous short rib braised in white wine beside a garnet-coloured slice of beef striploin with soft polenta, a spoonful of tomato sauce that had been made from oven-dried tomatoes and was textured halfway between a concassé and a purée, and the very last of the year’s fava beans. What wasn’t classic McEwan was the fact that the beef was Canadian. For as long as I’ve eaten Mark McEwan’s food – going back to Pronto, circa 1988 – he has been the champion of USDA beef. Last summer, however, he and Brooke McDougall did an event where they compared USDA Prime with grass-fed beef from Prince Edward Island. McEwan was so impressed that he went out to PEI to see for himself and found a great little operation with a dozen or so small farms raising grass-fed, hormone-free cattle which were briefly finished, just before slaughter, on potatoes. Well, what else would it be on PEI? McEwan decided to switch to this beef in his restaurants and at his store and he hasn’t switched back. His kitchens still use USDA beef for burgers and there’s a USDA cowboy ribeye on Bymark’s menu, but otherwise it’s now Canadian beef for Mark. Last night’s showing explains why – a delicious dish, honest and hearty and beautifully matched with a 2007 Bordeaux blend from Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, the legendary Te Mata Coleraine.

Then there was cheese – the cider-washed Le Guillame Tell from Quebec with a subtle aroma of apple and mushroom; sweet, gentle Niagara Gold from the Upper Canada Cheese Company; and a firm, forthright Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar from Prince Edward Island – in honour of the beef, presumably. Melissa Stunden poured a smashing young single-vineyard vintage port with this – Quinta do Noval Silval 2005 – that surprised everyone by its precocity.

The finale was a miniature chocolate and peanut butter torte with concord grape ice and crisp vanilla tuille that was gone in a flash.

Apparently the second season of Top Chef Canada finished shooting in September and is now in the editing salon, ready to appear on tv screens next March. The nation is holding its breath.

 

 
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Foodstock!

04 Oct

There has never been anything like it! Over 100 chefs from across Canada will gather on October 16th to cook in the country, all in support of the righteous movement to Stop the Mega Quarry. The event is called Foodstock – and like Woodstock back in… well, I forget when exactly… it will be the sort of gathering that can define a decade and a generation. This is not a weekend, it’s a Sunday afternoon but it will go down in history.

There will be awesome music – the great Jim Cuddy will be performing, and so will Ron Sexsmith, Sarah Harmer, Tom Barlow, Cuff The Duke, and Hayden! There will be inspiring speeches – from Dr. Faisal Moola of the David Suzuki Foundation and from Michael Stadtländer, President of the Chef’s Congress of Canada and the mastermind behind this event.

There may also be mud – Foodstock is happening in the fields, just like Woodstock, to remind us of the farmland we will lose if the appalling quarry is allowed to proceed. So guests are encouraged to wear boots and dress appropriately. It would be a great idea to bring your own plates and cutlery too, to cut down on waste and clean-up.

The purpose of all this? To encourage the people of Ontario to stand up for the land that feeds us and to show the government that we mean business.

The price? Pay what you can. All funds raised will go to fighting the mega quarry application that has been put forward by the Highland Companies to create a limestone quarry over 2,300 acres in size on prime, fertile agricultural land and digging into pristine aquifers.

 Above all there will be food! Here is the unbelievable line-up of chefs who will be present – and the list will no doubt have grown larger by October 16th! Each chef will be preparing a dish that celebrates the local bounty.

 TORONTO

Paul Boehmer, Milana Lise, Boehmer

Teo Paul, Union

Adam Colquhoun, Oyster Boy

J.P. Challet, Ici Bistro

Lora Kirk, Ruby Watchco

Jeffery Claudio,  Scarpetta at The Thompson Hotel

Chris Brown, The Stop Community Food Centre

Jamie Kennedy, Jamie Kennedy Kitchens

Aaron Bear Robe, Keriwa Café

Fabio Bondi and Michael Sangregorio, Local Kitchen and Wine Bar

Rocco Agostino, Enoteca Sociale, Pizza Liberetto

Luis Valenzuela, Torito Tapas Bar

Victor Barry, Splendido, The County General

Donna Dooher, Mildred’s Temple Kitchen

Albert Ponzo, Le Select Bistro

Hiro Yoshida, Hiro Sushi

Anthony Walsh, Bannok and Oliver and Bonacini Restaurants

Carole Ferrari, The Bus Kitchen

Carl Heinreich & Ryan Donovan, Marben

Michael Sacco &Chrystal Porter, Chocosol Chocolate Traders

David Kokai, Loic Gourmet

Anthony Rose, The Drake Hotel

Derek Bendig and Colen Quinn, Pangaea

Zane Caplansky, Caplansky’s

Alex Johnston, Hockley Valley Resort

Evelyne Gharbirian, Hearty Catering

Rodney Bowers, Hey Meatball

Matty Matheson, Parts & Labour

Derek, Merchants of Green Coffee

Keith Frogett, Scaramouche

Lorenzo Loseto, George Restaurant

Rob Gentile, Buca Restaurant

Patrick McMurray, Starfish Oysterbed and Grill, Ceilei Cottage

Joshna Maharaj, Freelance

Stefan Czapalay,  (representing Nova Scotia)

Steffan Howard, Palais Royale, Casa Loma

Kevin McKenna, Globe Bistro

Kevin McKenna and Phillip Heilborn, Earth Bloor West

Kevin McKenna, Earth Rosedale

Trish Donnelly, Chef Donnelly Catering

Anne Yarymowich, Frank Restaurant at the AGO

Brad Long/ Sara Kuntz, Belong Café

John Higgins, George Brown College

Daisuke Izutsu,  Kaiseki Sakura

Joe Levesque,International Centre

Graham Pratt, The Gabardine

Giacomo Pasquini , Vertical

Audrey  Demers, private chef

Bertrand Alepee, The Tempered chef

Fawzi Kotb,  Veloute Bistro & Catering

Nick Laliberte, Poutini’s House of Poutine

Ruth Klahsen, Monforte Dairy

Christopher Palik, L’eat Catering

Diane, Whole World Trade Ltd.

Dawn Woodward and Ed Rek, Evelyne’s Crackers

Linda and Suzy, Alternative Grounds

Alexandra Feswick, Brockton General

Jeff Brown and Jennifer Rashleigh, Delight

Carin Balint, Garden of Vegan

Lesia Kohut, LPK’s Culinary Groove

Joe Friday, i.am.CHEF

Two Brothers Inc., Jacob Sharkey Pearce

 

DURHAM

Michael Shmidt, and Chef Carey McLellan, Glencolton Farms

 

SHELBURNE

Rob Uffen’s Trout House, Pine Springs

 

OWEN SOUND

Robin Pradhan, Rocky Racoon Café

 

CREEMORE

Chez Michel, Creemore

Dave Nesbitt, Creemore Coffee Company

 

COLLINGWOOD

Gareth Carter, Men with Knives

Andrea Greyerbiehl, Chef Leona Nyman, Azurra

Jeremy Korten, Oliver and Bonacini Blue Mountain

Mark & Christen, Espresso Post

Scott Chalmers and Andrew Barber, Simplicity Bistro

Christophe and Wispy Boivin, Tremont Café

Joelle Rogers, Tesoro Restaurant

199 Broadway

Roger Genoe, Ravenna Market

Don Akehurst, Sovereign Restaurant

 

SINGHAMPTON

Marita and Jorg, Haisai

Michael and Nobuyo Stadtlander, Eigensinn Farm

 

ORANGEVILLE

Jason, The Mono Cliffs Inn

 

MARKDALE

Shawn Adler, The Flying Chestnut

 

BURLINGTON

Tobias Pohl-Weary, Red Canoe Bistro

 

NIAGARA

Paul Harber, Ravine Vineyard

Janice Suarez, Pastry Chef

Ryan Crawford, The Stone Road Grille

 

AURORA

Jason D’Anna, Magna Golf Club

 

 

PARRY SOUND

Philip Patrick, The Ridge at Manitou

 

BARRIE

Matthew Flett , Dave Jones, Georgian College

David Keenan, At Five, Barrie

Chef Daniel Hong, Owner Anna Kim, Furusato Restaurant

Ceasar Guinto, Cravings Fine Food Market and Catering

 

THORNBURY

Jennifer, Bruce Wine Bar

 

HUNTSVILLE

Rory Golden, Deerhurst Resort

 

OTTAWA

Ross Fraser, Fraser Café

 

SASKATECHWAN

Moe Mathieu

 

People can pre-register at: http://canadianchefscongressfoodstock.eventbrite.com/

Buses are being organized from the following locations:

FROM HAMILTON:

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171213449626497

 

FROM GUELPH:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=167799386628287

 

FROM TORONTO:

(SLOW FOOD) http://guestlistapp.com/events/71778

(ELECTRICITY) https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=272927569398365

 

If people would like to volunteer on the day of the event, they can click here:

http://www.volunteerforfoodstock.com/

 

One day your grandchildren will ask you what you did to fight the Mega Quarry. What will you tell them? Be there or be square.

 

 

 
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