‘My turkey dinner is better than yours’

By macleans.ca - Monday, October 8, 2012 at 6:21 PM - 0 Comments

‘My turkey dinner is better than yours’

Noted: Tweets about turkey with all the fixings

Storified by Maclean’s Magazine · Mon, Oct 08 2012 15:20:35

7 surprising facts about poutine

By Blog of Lists - Wednesday, August 15, 2012 at 2:25 PM - 0 Comments

Darren Calabrese/CP Images

To the uninitiated, it looks like nothing more than a steaming pile of fries, gravy and half-melted cheese curds. But in Canada, the signature dish of Quebec is a point of culinary pride. (And sometimes intrigue. What better alias to figure in a political scandal than Pierre Poutine of “robocall” fame?) More than half a century after it first appeared in rural Quebec, restaurants across the country are providing new spins on the iconic dish, throwing maple syrup, pulled pork and even lobster into the mix.

Here are seven facts about poutine you probably didn’t know:

1. It is widely accepted that poutine was invented in 1957 when a trucker asked Fernand Lachance to add cheese curds to his fries in Warwick, Que.

2. “Poutine” is Quebec slang for “a mess.”

3. The average male would have to jog 2.5 hours to burn off the 1,422 calories contained in the country-style poutine (bacon, chicken, gravy, fries, onions and mushrooms) available nationwide through Smoke’s Poutinerie.

4. In 1970s New York and New Jersey, poutine was served as a late-night side dish at clubs. They called
it “disco fries.”

5. At a 2010 poutine-eating contest in Toronto, the winner, Pat “Deep Dish” Bertoletti of Chicago (pictured above) ate 5.9 kg of poutine.

6. The largest poutine in the world was made in Saguenay, Que., and weighed 654 kg—about as much as a large horse.

7. Considered the most expensive poutine in Montreal, the poutine au foie gras is available for $23 at Au Pied de Cochon

See also: 12 foods Canada has given the world (besides poutine)

Sources: Restaurants; news reports; Livestrong.com

Have you ever wondered which cities have the most bars, smokers, absentee workers and people searching for love? What about how Canada compares to the world in terms of the size of its military, the size of our houses and the number of cars we own? The nswers to all those questions, and many more, can be found in the first ever Maclean’s Book of Lists.

Buy your copy of the Maclean’s Book of Lists at the newsstand or order online now.

12 foods Canada has given the world (besides poutine)

By Blog of Lists - Friday, August 3, 2012 at 11:19 AM - 0 Comments

Home made pea soup! (Sheryl Nadler/CP Images)

1. Butter tarts: It’s true! Butter tarts are Canadian through and through. In fact, these crumbly, almost shortbread-like pastry shells—oozing with butter, sugar, syrup and eggs—date back to the early 1600s, when they provided sweet sustenance for our pioneers. There’s a great deal of variation today—some bakers add raisins, others pecans—but it’s safe to say they’d all satisfy the most discerning sweet tooth.

2. BeaverTails: Even Barack Obama stopped for one when he visited our nation’s capital in 2009. The Ottawa-based company that came up with the idea of hand stretching pastry shaped like beaver tails, then frying it and topping it with sweet confections like whipped cream and berries, has been dishing out their treats since 1980.

3. Nanaimo bars: It’s no wonder these ultra-sweet bars consisting of a chocolate top layer and a wafer-crumb base, which perfectly sandwiches a custard-
flavoured centre, have fairly contested origins. But since the late 1950s, Nanaimo bars have become staples at every bake sale, not only in British Columbia but across the country.

4. Fish and brewis: The Italians can keep their baccalà, and the Portuguese can have their bacalhau. We
prefer our salt cod to be served along hard tack (hard bread, soaked overnight in water) and scrunchions (fried bits of salted pork fat), thank you very much. The traditional Newfoundland dish, which was probably created by sailors who needed good sustenance out at sea, differs from door to door, but it’s always certain to fill you up.

5. Figgy duff: There are many variations of this Newfoundland boiled pudding, but most contain flour, butter, sugar, molasses and raisins, which used to commonly be referred to as figs on the Rock. So its name fits, sort of. Coincidentally, figgy duff bears a striking resemblance to another of the world’s funniest-named sweets, the British spotted dick.

6. Canadian bacon: We call it peameal bacon but the rest of the world lovingly refers to it as Canadian. And here’s the thing: it’s just lean, boneless pork loin that’s been brined and rolled in finely ground cornmeal (years ago, it would have been peameal).

7. Tourtière: This traditional Québécois double-crusted meat pie may be traditionally served at Christmas, but there’s a good chance French Canadians eat it all year long. While they can be packed with a combination of pork, veal and beef,
in Montreal tourtière is usually made with only
pork—finely ground—and seasoned with cinnamon and cloves, and served with ketchup. Comfort
food personified.

8. Saskatoon berry pie: Many a Prairie native has childhood memories of filling pails with these sweet, fleshy-fruited berries to fill double-crusted golden pies. And even though the shrubs that bear them are grown from western Ontario to British Columbia and the Yukon, they’re especially dear to the people who live in the city that shares the berry’s name.

9. McCain’s french fries: We may not have invented the humble french fry, but Canadian-owned and operated McCain’s has been making frites for more than 50 years. At last count the company, the world’s largest producer of french fries, was dishing out
more than 20 products.

10. Maple syrup: Not only has one of our most beloved chefs, Montreal’s Martin Picard, dedicated a 386-page cookbook to the boiled-down sap—first collected by Aboriginal peoples of North America—but our nation produces a whopping 85 per cent of the world’s supply.

11. Split pea soup: The Oxford Companion to Food says this Québécois, rib-sticking delight with a base of dried yellow split peas and a ham bone, or smoked ham hock, is probably our best-known food export.

Sources: Oxford Dictionary of Food, Canadian Oxford Dictionary, food and company websites

Have you ever wondered which cities have the most bars, smokers, absentee workers and people searching for love? What about how Canada compares to the world in terms of the size of its military, the size of our houses and the number of cars we own? The nswers to all those questions, and many more, can be found in the first ever Maclean’s Book of Lists.

Buy your copy of the Maclean’s Book of Lists at the newsstand or order online now.

Gold is tasteless: So why put it in food?

By Scaachi Koul - Friday, July 20, 2012 at 2:08 PM - 0 Comments

Getty

How do you like your burger? Well, you need the juicy patty, of course, and maybe some lettuce and tomatoes. Any ketchup? Some mayo? And how many gold leafs do you want it wrapped in? 

Last week, a New York City food truck launched a $666 “Douche Burger.” It’s a foie gras-stuffed Kobe beef patty with Gruyere cheese (melted with Champagne steam, of course), topped with caviar, truffles and lobster. It’s then wrapped in six gold leaf sheets.

Although the burger was intended to make fun of the super-rich, the owner actually received legitimate requests for it, showing the demand for high-priced grub.

The most unorthodox ingredient—edible gold—isn’t exactly a new gastronomical trend. Magic Oven, a pizzeria in Toronto, has had a 24k gold leaf-garnished pizza for $108 on their menu for several years now.

Although eating gold sounds like the ultimate in gourmet luxury, it has no taste, texture, and adds nothing to a meal other than, quite literally, a lot of glitter. 

“It certainly was being used in large feasts in the Middle Ages,” says Dr. Heather Evans, a food expert and historian. “This was the period that people referred to as the Dark Ages. Among the upper class, the small percent that had loads of money, this was a really glamorous, luxurious era. They wanted their fancy stuff.”

Toronto food writer Corey Mintz finds the gold-eating trend an act of inexcusable opulence. “Eating gold is the absolute height of tastelessness,” Mintz says. “If you find yourself eating gold, just take a moment for self-reflection, you’ll see just what a callous act it is.”

But Executive chef at Toronto restaurant Aria, Eron Novalski, has a simple explanation of why restaurants use gold leaf in their food. “It’s gold. It kind of speaks for itself.”

When Aria first opened, the menu included an opera cake garnished with gold leaf. “When I studied in France, we used to use a lot of it in pastries, and it’s become a trend to augment a dish,” Novalski says. “The glistening, the flakes—it’s almost like fire.”

It’s not cheap, either. A sheet of edible gold could cost as much as $50, depending on the carats.

Unlike other expensive ingredients or garnishes—like caviar—edible gold adds nothing to a meal other than, quite literally, dollar signs. “Take something like a truffle oil,” says Mintz. “It can be wonderful with, say, an egg. In macaroni and cheese, it’s just a way to make something seem fancy or expensive.”

“The cynic in me would say it’s a little bit of a gimmick,” Evans says. Mintz adds that advertising gold in your restaurant’s dishes is sometimes more of an advertising ploy to get customers in the room, only to have them buy a $12 meal.

“Right now in times of austerity, we’re all a little hungry for that sense of luxury that many of us might feel that we have lost,” Evans says.

That sense of luxury is popping up on low-brow dishes with high-brow ingredients, like burgers or pizzas topped with $50 worth of gold. In fact, the World Record Academy even has a sub-category for most expensive foods with gold. The most expensive pizza in the world with gold is at Margo’s Pizzeria in Malta, with nearly a $400 USD price tag. The Douche Burger is the world’s most expensive gold-covered burger. “People are trying to put new twists on classic foods,” Novalski says. “Now it’s coming to gold leaf.”

Evans says that the presence of gold on low-brow, casual dishes is similar to how replications in the fashion industry work. “Just like fashion, what we see on the runway one season shows up in a reduced and much cheaper version in Walmart in another season,” she says. “People are having access to that higher end food.”

Accessible or not, eating gold is still the height of gastronomical excess. “I’m all for waste,” Mintz says. “But for most people, if it seems like something only a Bond villain would eat, you should not eat it.”

Foie gras fans feast in face of ‘famine’

By Jessica Allen - Friday, June 29, 2012 at 1:33 PM - 0 Comments

Lovers of foie gras in California are planning on getting their fill of the delicacy this weekend, according to the LA Times, before the state’s ban on selling and serving the livers of fattened ducks and geese goes into effect on Sunday.

Restaurants are eagerly helping out those bidding adieu to the luxurious stuff by concocting multi-course tasting menus featuring everything from classic seared foie gras to foie gras ice cream. And gastronomes are organzing “foie gras crawls” in order to satiate themselves in a timely and organized manner.

California will be the first state to ban foie gras in the U.S., a decision made by legislators based on the inhumane treatments of the birds who are force-fed in order to sufficiently fatten them up. But, as food writer Ivy Knight asks, “Are these animals treated any better than factory-farmed chickens?”

Knight recently spoke with food industry insiders in both Canada and the U.S.  about the impending ban. San Francisco chef Chris Cosentino is not impressed: “What we’re dealing with here is a freedom-of-choice issue; our freedom of choice is being taken away from us,” he told Knight. “When you go out to eat, you have a choice, it’s called a menu.” Meanwhile, the director of Farm Sanctuary in Washington D.C., Bruce Friedrick, says, “Science confirms what intuition indicates, that cramming pipes down animals’ throats and inducing a disease, which is what foie gras is, is horribly cruel, causing death rates to skyrocket by 10 to 20 times.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time that the lobes of liver have stirred up controversy: in 2011 a German food fair banned foie gras, for example, upsetting their French suppliers. It’s happened at home too: remember when organizers of Ottawa’s Winterlude festival asked Martin Picard, who eats foie gras for breakfast, literally, not to cook anything with the stuff?

Picard, not surprisingly, bowed out instead.

Another measure of the severity of the eurozone crisis: Olive oil prices

By Tamsin McMahon - Friday, June 1, 2012 at 3:18 PM - 0 Comments

When analysts talk about an oil crisis, it’s usually to complain about pain at the pump. But Europe is facing a different kind of oil panic. The price of olive oil has been crashing, as Spaniards, Italians and Greeks switch en masse to cheaper soya and sunflower oils.

Extra-virgin olive oil has fallen to below $3,000 a ton during the past year, half its 2005 price, and its lowest level in a decade, according to the International Monetary Fund.

In Italy, pasta’s heartland, prices dropped 38 per cent in the past year alone. Europe’s Mediterranean countries have been rocked by Europe’s fiscal crisis; in both Greece and Spain, the unemployment rate tops 20 per cent.

According to the IMF, olive oil prices have dipped almost as low as they did during the height of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, another sign of the severity of the current eurozone crisis:

The European Union has been pushing companies to stockpile olive oil to keep prices from falling, to little success, and the crisis isn’t contained to Europe. Olive oil imports to Canada are down 20 per cent this year. There is one bright spot in the global run on olive oil: emerging markets are developing a taste for extra-virgin oil. In China, demand is up 25 per cent.

What you’ll be eating soon

By Kate Lunau - Friday, April 20, 2012 at 10:16 AM - 0 Comments

Photo Illustration by Adam Makarenko

It’s the year 2035. Craving a burger and a beer, a hungry traveller wanders into a nondescript gastropub, the type that’s found in almost any city. What’s on the menu? As an appetizer, there’s a salad of blue lettuce sprinkled with elderflowers and cloudberries, or a Zanzibari pizza: Indian-spiced rabbit meat served on a piece of naan. For the main course, the traveller can choose between fish—the “catch of the day” is plucked from a nearby indoor fish farm—or he can order a burger, made of cow, bison, chicken or pork, fresh out of the bioreactor. “We have an excellent meat-grower,” the waitress says.

This is the scenario imagined by Chicago-based writer Josh Schonwald in his new book, The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food. For the past several years, Schonwald has been on a mission to discover what the “salad, meat, seafood and pad Thai of the future” will be. He’s explored everything from genetically engineered foods—like a cherry tomato modified to carry a lemon basil gene, which is said to be delicious—to meat grown in a test tube. Canadian scientists are working on this too, building healthier hot dogs and other processed foods.

In an age of rampant foodie-ism that prizes the traditional, local and organic above all, writer Michael Pollan’s famous advice not to eat anything packaged or anything with more than five ingredients has become a well-known principle. Schonwald disagrees, criticizing what he calls the “rising tide of food-specific neo-Luddism” that insists food and technology shouldn’t mix. If we’re going to feed the planet, solutions won’t just come from farms, but from the lab, too—and if scientists can engineer food that’s tastier, more nutritious and sustainable, all the better.

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The whiter the bread the quicker you’re dead

By Gabriela Perdomo - Monday, March 5, 2012 at 9:49 AM - 0 Comments

Food and our approach to it is as political as ever these days. A new book by Aaron Bobraw-Strain called White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf  argues industrial white bread is a powerful indicator of our ever-changing notions of health, class, status, and race. Its release comes as sales of whole wheat bread have surpassed those of white bread for three consecutive years in the U.S.

Salon has excerpts. Here are a few highlights:

With the emergence of the “hippie” counterculture. (…) Changing diets had become an arena of politics in its own right — perhaps the arena. (…) As influential whole foods guru Beatrice Trum Hunter proclaimed, bread baking constituted “a revolt against plastic food in a plastic culture. The free-form loaf is but another aspect of the revolt against the mechanization of life.”

(…)

A Washington Post article commemorating the moment in 2009 when whole wheat bread sales surpassed white for the first time in U.S. history explained this reversal. Growing awareness of the importance of the fiber and nutrients found in whole grains played a role, but so did status aspirations. Today, the article observed, whole wheat bread “signifies the sophistication of your palate, your appreciation for texture and variety…. The grainier you like it, the more refined your sensibilities. The darker it is, the greater your chance for enlightenment.” Industrial white bread has completed its two-hundred-year trajectory from modern marvel to low-class item.

Prince Charles, the foodie

By Gabriela Perdomo - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 10:37 AM - 0 Comments

His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, also known as Prince Charles, might not be highly regarded by most people. But he does have one group of devout followers: farmers and food activists advocating for a more sustainable food production worldwide. Last May, Prince Charles was in Washington D.C. speaking at The Future of Food conference, where he reportedly dazzled the audience with a passionate speech about sustainable farming. The speech has now been turned into a book: The Prince’s Speech: On the Future of Food, published by Rodale, and now available online and in specialty book stores.

Marion Nestle, one of the most influential food activists in the United States, author of Food Politics and the blog by the same name, writes about the Prince’s book and recalls her impression of the original speech: “I…was impressed at the time by his broad overview and understanding of the problems inherent in industrial food and the implications of those problems. He described himself as a farmer, which was not exactly how I had imagined him. It’s impressive that someone of his stature cares about these issues and is willing to go on record promoting a healthier food system.”

‘Pink slime’ vanquished from U.S. McDonald’s burgers

By Alex Ballingall - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 11:33 AM - 0 Comments

Walk into an American McDonald’s restaurant, and you’re going to have to deal with the burbling shame associated with eating greasy fast food and guzzling back pop in our age of health food fanaticism. But at least now, thanks largely to celebrity chef Jamie Oliver—the Naked Chef your mom has been raving about—you won’t have to worry about ingesting chemical soaked “pink slime.”

Don’t know what “pink slime” is? It’s what Oliver and other good food advocates like Food Safety News call the slurry of “fattty beef trimmings” and other animal byproducts that are mashed up for use in pet foods and, until recently, McDonald’s hamburgers. Because the “trimmings” are prone to go bad and spawn horrific bacteria like e. coli, the pink slime meat is paired with ammonia hydroxide, a chemical preservative typically found in household cleaning products.

Apparently, people have known about this for some time. In a 2002 email to colleagues, U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein said: “I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling.”

The “pink slime” is made for American fast food chains by a company called Beef Products, Ltd. They didn’t have to label it as an ingredient because the chemical is considered a processing agent. In light of the bad press, Beef Products had a bad year, with sales dropping 25 per cent. And alongside McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Burger King also pulled the “pink slime” from their beef products recently.

But Canadians need not worry—at least when devouring their Big Macs. The Canadian branch of the fast food chain gets its beef from Cargill, which told the National Post their burgers are nothing but salt, pepper and beef.

Food Safety News

New York Times

National Post

Italian ovens are hot, hot, hot

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

When lifelong friends John Dawson and Todd Vestby decided to open an Italian restaurant in Toronto, they figured they’d need a wood-burning oven. So they imported one from Italy made from special heat-absorbent clay. “It came in six pieces,” says Dawson, sipping coffee at F’Amelia’s butcher board-topped bar on a recent morning. “It took eight guys just to unload it from the truck.” Two days later, the oven was assembled; after, “we fired it for seven days to dry the clay slowly, starting with a small fire and doubling it every day.” The oven turns out delicate Neapolitan-style pizzas, blasted for just 90 seconds in intense 650° F heat; it sits behind the bar, where diners can watch the flames inside.

F’Amelia is just the latest to install a wood-burning oven, which have been popping up in restaurants, parks, and backyards across the country. Of course, local builders are perfectly capable of making them, but for some restaurateurs, only Italian-made will do. Transporting one of these monsters across the Atlantic isn’t for the faint of heart. F’Amelia’s competition, Pizzeria Libretto, has brought over three for its two locations; unlike the oven at F’Amelia, theirs were assembled in Naples. “The last time we shipped two ovens over, they got to Montreal, and we were randomly chosen to search for weapons and drugs and pornography,” says owner Max Rimaldi. “That held us up a couple weeks.” When the ovens finally arrived they were a bit banged up, so Rimaldi flew in the man who built them to do the repairs.

Olivier Reynaud, who owns Rouge Restaurant in Calgary, emigrated to Canada in 1999. He used to have a restaurant in Andorra (between France and Spain) with a wood-burning oven, and making pizzas was one of its many jobs. “At the end of the night, I would let the oven cool down and, just before leaving, I’d put in an iron pot of cassoulet and leave it overnight,” he says. “It would be done in the morning, with a nice smoky flavour.” Reynaud doesn’t have a wood-burning oven at Rouge, known for its upscale French food, but he installed an Italian-made one in his backyard. “I cooked a 20-lb. Thanksgiving turkey in it,” he says. “We had it brine overnight,” then cooked it at a low temperature, covered in foil. “It was very juicy, and not at all dry.” F’Amelia uses its oven to bake bread, too.

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Pass the spinach dip and other antiquated holiday favourites, please

By Jessica Allen - Friday, December 30, 2011 at 3:22 PM - 0 Comments

The night before she flew home to Truro, Nova Scotia, my friend Erinn came over for a pre-holiday meal. We got to talking about what sort of Christmas treats we were both in store for at our mutual family gatherings and as we listed off all sorts of delights a few common denominators were observed. First, most of the recipes that our mothers and aunts make during the holidays come courtesy of old issues of Chatelaine, Canadian Living, Family Circle and newspaper clippings. Second, the other recipes may be marked “from Debbie” or “Linda’s” but they too are, in fact, magazine recipes that have been adapted as “Lynn’s” own. Third, they all contain either cream cheese, instant soup mix, sweetened condensed milk, or some other canned good. And fourth, we two 30-something-year-old gals, who enjoy leafing through the occasional issue of Gastronomica and eating tacos and gnudi at Toronto’s latest restaurant hot spots, couldn’t wait to eat them, along with the water-logged shrimp from the shrimp rings and cruddy milk chocolates stuffed with weird nougats.

“The first thing I’ll do when I get home tomorrow,” explained Erinn, “is open up the fridge, where I’ll find about ten of those Philly cream cheese bricks, and get started on making the dip.” The dip is actually called Pepper Spread, which is odd, since “it is neither spreadable and peppers don’t feature any more than any other ingredient.” And those other ingredients include margarine, sugar, vinegar, eggs and–of course–the brick of cream cheese. Apparently it’s wonderful with “veggies”.

Two things that inevitably show up at my mom’s family’s holiday gatherings are that spinach dip thing–the one where you hollow out a loaf of pumpernickel and fill it with frozen spinach, sour cream, mayonnaise and a package of Knorr vegetable soup mix–and my Aunt Sandy’s shrimp dip, which, as it turns out, is actually Sandy’s friend Carole’s shrimp dip, but Sandy’s been making it every Christmas for the last 15 years, which entitles her to the copyright in our family. It’s supposed to be made in a mold and then turned out onto a festive platter. But Sandy simply serves it in a plastic container. Why go to all the trouble of a mold when 20 or so hungry relatives will pile crackers inches high with the stuff and deplete the precious stock within minutes of it being put out?

How is it that all these jellies, molds and dips, that most wouldn’t dream of serving at a dinner party, are perennially featured in holiday spreads?  Maybe it just comes down to tradition. “The new magazines are what my mom goes to for inspiration throughout the year,” says Erinn, “but at Christmas she leans on tried and true recipes from a bygone era.”

I can relate. For Christmas dinner this year I tried a Bon Appétit recipe for glazed carrots that were gussied up with fresh tarragon, sherry and clementine. They were great, but I’ll be honest: those fancy time carrots didn’t come close to Marg’s carrot casserole, which came courtesy of “Diane.”  It’s a dish that requires a half pound of processed cheese slices, among other things. Enough said, no?

Why won’t they eat their vegetables?

By Julia McKinnell - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 7 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

If cookies are all your child wants for lunch, then author Elizabeth Pantley may be able to reverse the situation. In her new advice book for parents, The No-Cry Picky Eater Solution: Gentle Ways to Encourage Your Child to Eat, Pantley explains the biology and science behind picky eating, and what to do about it.

Picky eating is normal, she notes, affecting about 85 per cent of kids. After interviewing hundreds of parents in Canada, China, Zaire and India, Pantley, a mother of four from Seattle, concludes that picky eating is not the fault of “weak, indulgent parents and stubborn, power-seeking kids.” Biology and genetics are at work. “Studies tell us that if one or both parents were picky eaters as children, chances are their child will be a picky eater, too . . . If you disliked broccoli, fish, or fuzzy foods such as peaches and kiwis, chances are your child will dislike the same sort of foods.”

As for why kids can’t get enough candy, Pantley notes, “a link has been found between the preference for sweet foods and the rate of bone growth. When children are in high-growth periods, their preference for sweet foods is elevated.”

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Tim Hortons goes beyond the double-double

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, November 14, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 8 Comments

Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

So Tim Hortons sells lasagna now, which makes sense because lunchtime is when our workplaces finally stop smelling like the company’s breakfast sandwiches. Now the pungent aroma of hot beef and tomato sauce can prevail from noon until the Ritual Mid-Afternoon Microwaving of Popcorn By the Colleague We All Secretly Hate.

Even so, Tims selling bowls of lasagna casserole is a little weird, right? The company’s commercials seem to acknowledge this. A guy buys the stuff for lunch and his work pals are like, “Tims sells WHAAAA?” One character seems equally thrilled and confused by the notion, as though the very idea is utterly mad—like going to Starbucks for good chow mein or Red Lobster for good seafood.

And now the iconic coffee chain is starting to serve lattes, too, because apparently people in smaller towns across the country have been demanding the right to overpay for warm milk. One thing is for sure: Tims getting into the latte business is a body blow to Canadian political rhetoric. What easy symbol will aspiring populists now co-opt to identify and belittle the so-called elites of the land? This could be the break you’ve been waiting for, artisanal bread.

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Why are female executive chefs so rare?

By Jacob Richler - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Chris Bolin

In Calgary recently, catching up with star chefs Connie DeSousa and John Jackson over some small Latin plates (chorizo, gallina, oxtail empanadas, etc.) and drinks at Ox and Angela, a trendy downtown tapas bar, the conversation turned to the related topics of women in the kitchen and role models. For DeSousa is that rare commodity: she is both.

She achieved a national profile earlier this year as one of the final contestants on the inaugural season of the series Top Chef Canada. Meanwhile, in a highly unconventional arrangement, she is co-executive chef with Jackson at the enormously successful Charcut Roast House in Calgary, as well as its co-owner (with Jackson again, along with their respective spouses). Also in Calgary, where the New York and L.A.-spawned gourmet food truck trend is catching on fast, they operate a mobile burger truck called Alley Burger.

Recently a young girl, no older than four, turned up at the food truck to deliver a little homemade sculpture of a heart. Other days, mothers bring their young daughters by the restaurant proper in the hopes of introducing them to the high-profile female chef. A decade ago it was Iron Chef that got young kids interested in being chefs; now it appears to be the Top Chef series. So I asked DeSousa and Jackson who their own role models had been back in their shared, formative early days in the 1990s, when both worked in a Calgary restaurant called the Owl’s Nest.

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The trigonometry of tortellini

By Anne Kingston - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

George L. Legendre; Photo Illustration by Sarah Mackinnon

Like many brilliant, if lunatic, brainstorms, the idea for Pasta by Design was hatched late at night over good food as the red wine flowed. Architects George Legendre and Marco Guarnieri, who share an address in London’s Bermondsey district, were dining on spaghetti all’aglio, olio e peperoncino two years ago when talk turned to the mathematics of various pasta shapes. Such inquiry comes naturally to the Paris-born, Harvard-educated Legendre. The 42-year-old principal of IJP Architects uses a “mathematics-based knowledge model” that reduces objects to schematics and trigonometric equations which are then used as a blueprint for everything he makes—from bridges to playground slides.

Why not subject fusilli, orecchiette and linguine to the same scrutiny, they wondered. So Legendre did. The result is an oddly surreal, poetic paean to pasta that invites readers to view it not as a carb smothered under sauce but pure, beautiful form in itself.

Legendre has created a taxonomy of 92 pasta types—from tiny peppercorn-shaped acini di pepe to tubular ziti. The presentation is elegant: on one page, a photograph of the pasta; beside it, its ghostly reproduction in Matrix-like schematics with a trigonometric equation, cross-section and data on its physical properties. A brief note on regional provenance and serving suggestions is also supplied. Curled gramigna, or “little weed,” from Emilia-Romagna, we learn, is best with a chunky sausage or light tomato sauce. As a bonus, Legendre includes a zany three-page pull-out, “Family Reunion Seating Plan,” a phylogenetic diagram of pasta types that’s delightful in its inscrutability.

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The NYT’s annual food and drink issue is here!

By Jessica Allen - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 3:58 PM - 4 Comments

Sometimes I flinch when I shell out $8.40 for a copy of the Sunday New York Times. But not yesterday! Inside was the fourth annual food and drink issue and it was chock full of  ”mysteries, riddles and impertinent questions” answered by some of the Times’ most beloved contributors, including Mark Bittman, Sam Sifton, Amander Hesser and Eric Asimov. Despite having so much to do yesterday, I ended up reading the entire thing cover to cover. It took me all morning. Several cups of coffee were consumed. And even though I forget most of the really good ideas that were born as a result of my labours, I have no regrets. (Just a bit of gut rot.)

There are some really great spreads, like Mark Bittman’s Dinner Party Matrix—a guide that promises to deliver stress-free dinner parties. Continue…

A cheese so good people ‘attack’ it

By Pamela Cuthbert - Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Photography by Andrew Tolson

I was at a bustling food fair in Italy when a cheese stopped me in my tracks. All other enticements—white truffles, rare molluscs, champagne—blurred into the background. Gouda would never be the same again.

That’s right, the stuff we know as “goo-duh”—mild, adaptable and as inexpensive as it is unremarkable—is having its potential pushed to extremes through aging processes: the rewards can turn out an ultimate taste experience that packs a punch of caramel, coffee and salt—or, if taken too far or mishandled, a wax-like inedible waste.

Afrim Pristine of Cheese Boutique in Toronto started importing, and then aging, a farmstead Gouda (meaning the milk is sourced from the family farm) from the family-owned Lindenhoff label after trying it with his dad at an international show. “We had a taste,” he says. “And then we freaked out!” He set out to see if he could buy up all of their supply. His cellar today is stocked with hundreds of the 11-kilo wheels. “In my opinion, this is one of the top five cheeses on the planet.”

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You’ll absolutely love ‘minkfish’

By Jacob Richler - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Simon Hayter

Early one morning on a recent West Coast Fishing Club trip to the Haida Gwaii, I dipped a baited line into the frigid waters with the expectation of an imminent battle with a ripped and angry tayee, as the biggest chinooks are locally known—and instead, promptly reeled in a five-kilogram ling cod. I had never seen one before and it was ghastly, with a huge and hideous head, monstrous pectoral fins and a long, slender, amber-flecked grey body that once on deck writhed like an eel. “You should keep it,” said chef David Hawksworth, who was fishing on the same boat, and went on to explain that from a culinary perspective, if not that of an angler, he often preferred ling cod to salmon. So keep it, I did.

Two days later, back in Toronto with company over for dinner, I pulled the ling cod from the refrigerator. The fish had been cleaned and filleted for the journey home, and sizing it up thus, I could not think of another creature whose aesthetic could be so vastly improved through a simple act of decapitation.

The remaining flesh of the two long fillets was thick, firm and white. While the grey skin still wore its scales, chef Hawksworth had assured me that these were so tiny as to be undetectable on the palate, once cooked—and that is what I call convenient fish design. So I progressed directly to portioning it up, and cooking it.

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Leave tiramisu alone!

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 11:59 AM - 2 Comments

Stijn Nieuwendijk/Flickr

Florence Fabricant wrote about a disturbing new food trend in the New York Times dining section recently: people are messing around with traditional tiramisu by adding new stuff, like lemon and berries, to it.

I know. I’m panicking too. Fabricant reports that a new specialty shop that serves six variations of the classic Venetian dessert has just opened up on Christopher Street in Manhattan. And get this: a similar-themed spot also opened up not too long ago in the motherland itself (Milan, specifically). Continue…

A baking test with stone-milled flour

By Jacob Richler - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 2 Comments

Photographs by Andrew Tolson

Some weeks back, a friend of mine returned from a lamb-eating expedition to Charlevoix, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, with the thoughtful and intriguing gift of a bag of flour from an old Quebec mill. A very old Quebec mill called Laterrière at Les Éboulements, which was built around 1790 and functions today precisely as it did then, via the combined forces of water power, grindstones, and a miller named Tremblay (Jean-Guy, the current meunier, is a descendant of the original owner, Jean-François).

What’s more, the flour in the bag is made exclusively from wheat grown on those same nearby fields that were once part of the seigneury that the mill was built to service.

Pretty nifty, it seemed to me. A nice one-kilo bag of culinary history to keep on my desk. But what I really wanted to know was what it tasted like, as bread.

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Tonight’s special: nostalgia, with a side of authenticity

By Jessica Allen - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 5:14 PM - 1 Comment

While I was trying to think of a food-related idea to pitch for Maclean’s upcoming innovation issue, something occurred to me: there aren’t any, unless you count nostalgia as an innovation. Think about it: Denmark’s Noma, voted the best restaurant in the world last year, fashions most of its dishes from ingredients that have been foraged from the woods. Plus, it’s practically mandatory for all new restaurants to display homemade jars and cans of preserves on (ideally wooden) shelves, just like grandma had. (You’ll also find preserves in the pantries of any self-respecting 30-something food hound, myself included.) And the farm-to-table trend, not to mention the desire to find the most authentic of everything—from pizza to pasta to Peking duck—is so widespread it deserves parody. Continue…

Pitchmen with pitchforks

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 0 Comments

Using the qualifier “natural” to sell food to a hungry public is nothing new. But mass-market food advertisers have recently taken the strategy to new heights by getting the people that actually grow the food to sell it, too. A new McDonald’s television ad, which opens with a farmer carrying a bushel of potatoes, drives home the idea that their fries are made with the same potatoes you mash at home. Wendy’s new TV ads show farmer Jim Carter eating the strawberries he grows that end up in the fast-food chain’s new salad. And the latest Lay’s ad campaign features the potato farmers who provide the produce for the company’s chips. (They also include a “chip tracker” on their website, where customers can enter a product code found on bags in order to find out exactly where the potatoes inside were harvested.) The underlying message seems to be, “Our food is made with food. And it’s grown by real farmers.” Continue…

Yes, that is a snake in your soup

By Sarah Elton - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 4 Comments

Reuters

There’s a joke in Hong Kong that pokes fun at the cultural gulf between those who eat snake and those who don’t: “How do you know that Adam and Eve were not Chinese? Because they ate the apple and not the snake.” Snake as a meal hasn’t travelled well, unlike other Cantonese dishes that are staples at Chinese restaurants in Canada. And to the North American palate, snake soup especially is unappetizing. While one can find the dish, made from frozen imported snake meat, in upscale restaurants catering to Chinese-Canadians, it doesn’t have the ubiquity of chow mein or sweet and sour pork.

My own association with snakes was something different. When I asked for a kitten as a child, my dad gave me a pet snake. (My mother was allergic to fur.) He popped over to a ravine at lunch and came home from work with a baby garter snake in his breast pocket. Before dinner, we put a rock, a water bowl and some newspaper in a terrarium and welcomed Corey to her new home.

So on a recent trip to Hong Kong, a city known for its cuisine, I tried to hide my alarm when my cousin, who lives there, informed me we were heading out for snake soup. In Hong Kong, as in many parts of China, snake is considered as delicious as its ocean-bound cousin, the eel. It’s also said to be healthy. According to traditional beliefs, snake has heating properties. You eat it during the winter to warm your blood and encourage your qi, your energy, to move around. It’s also purportedly an aphrodisiac and increases male “potency.” There are little shops that open only in the colder months to serve snake soup to those who still believe in the old ways.

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