| It was an innocuous spot for buried treasure, marked only
by a patch of burnt-looking soil and a cloud of tiny flies. But the curly-haired
truffle puppies Contess and Choco knew better. Once they got a sniff of what was
hiding amid the muddy, tangled roots, it took them only a few seconds to uncover
the precious fungus that made an investment of eight long years and a million
dollars worth every bit of trial and effort. “Grant said, ‘Honey,
come!’” Betty Duckett recalls. “I came, looked, smelled, looked
and hollered, ‘Yahoo!!’ Then we checked Mount Arrowsmith at a distance
to see if it had moved because I had hollered very loud.”
With that discovery last December on their Vancouver Island farm, the Ducketts
became Canada’s first successful truffle producers, joining a culinary force
you could call New World gourmet. It’s represented by a growing number of
farmers and foragers, chefs and consumers proving that Western Canada can produce
luxury foods as fine as any anywhere in the world. “I think it’s easily
comparable to Europe, but I don’t like making that comparison,” says
Scott Pohorelic, chef at Calgary’s River Café. “We should be
standing on our own two feet. We’re not a colony any more.”
In fact, almost any luxury food you can think of is being harvested, cultivated
or produced in Western Canada, including Kobe-style beef, pasture-raised bison,
succulent oysters, excellent cheeses, fine wines, promising spirits and now, at
long last, black, Perigord-style truffles, albeit small and immature ones. Still,
as Duckett says, “We are so very proud for B.C.”
And for Alberta, where exquisite restaurant-quality pheasant is farmed. And
for Manitoba, which produces award-winning “golden caviar” from freshwater
whitefish. And for Saskatchewan, where some of the world’s finest chanterelle
mushrooms grow in the northern forests.
Defining Luxury
There are many reasons chefs and consumers are preferring homegrown gourmet. Although
cost and taste will always be factors, what makes a food luxurious is ever-changing.
After all, these days raspberries are available in January and salmon is sold
for pennies a pound, while a century ago, caviar was served as a bar snack.
“Luxury means exclusive, like caviar. High quality. And a lot of the
meaning is availability, if something’s hard to get,” says Daniel
Buss, chef at the Fairmont Banff Springs’ Banffshire Club. “But in
the last few years, Charlie Trotter has been making items as mundane as grits
luxury foods.” Even something as proletarian as a potato becomes elevated,
if it’s the right potato, like the delicate la ratte fingerlings Buss recently
discovered at Poplar Bluff Farms in Southern Alberta.
What one culture considers luxe can easily be overlooked by nother—especially
when it’s hidden among the leafy debris of the forest floor. Just ask Joe
Salvo, who supervises hundreds of freelance pickers as president of Ponderosa
Mushrooms, which collects wild mushrooms all over the West and distributes them
across North America and Europe. Western Canada is home to more than 25 varieties
of wild mushrooms, including porcinis, morels, chanterelles and the pricey Matsutake
or pine mushroom.
“It’s highly revered in Japan. Though with lower prices over the
last couple of years, its use by Canadian chefs is on the rise,” says Salvo.
Luxury can also be found among foods that are still upscale, but that we now take
for granted. “We’re kind of done and bored with salmon, but if you
meet the right fisherman you can get some amazing fish,” says chef David
Hawksworth, formerly of Vancouver’s West, who is developing a new restaurant
at the city’s revamped Hotel Georgia.
What truly makes foods precious is the care and hard work that goes into making
them. On Vancouver Island, Venturi-Schulze Vineyards is making painstakingly authentic
balsamic vinegar. “The latest we’ve looked into it, we’re the
only commercial producers in North America doing the traditional balsamic,”
says co-owner Marilyn Venturi. (And it just happens to pair nicely with the delectable
organic canola oil from Highwood Crossing in Southern Alberta that River Café’s
Pohorelic describes as “Alberta’s olive oil.”) “Things
that take a lot of time and effort become luxury products because people appreciate
what it took, and therefore the cost in doing it,” says Venturi.
“The quality of your raw material makes all the difference,” says
Rick Pipes, co-owner of Merridale Cidery on Vancouver Island, who recently started
making eau de vie and calvados from organic cider apples. “As small producers,
we’re going to put in the care and love the big guys can’t.”
Farm to Table
In our world of industrialized farming, the most precious food is likely one that’s
painstakingly handcrafted, organic, free range and, above all, local and tasting
uniquely of the land that produced it. “It’s like wine and terroir,”
says Pohorelic. Many consumers are also increasingly concerned about the environmental
impact of industrial farming and long-distance shipping. Supporting local farmers
ultimately supports their own communities.
Chefs agree. “I try to seek out luxury ingredients locally as much as
possible,” Banffshire Club’s Buss says. “People really want
to have sustainably farmed, organic ingredients. The market is changing. The taste
of each item sells itself, but I think the ethics help do it, too. It all adds
up to better quality and appreciation of the ingredients from our guests, for
sure.”
Because so many of these foods come from small producers who have little time
or budget for marketing, chefs must become foodie foragers to find them, working
directly with farmers through programs such as Alberta Showcase. They’re
happy to make the effort because customers are more willing than ever to spend
money on quality food.
“The Baby Boomers are at the age where they’ve got a little extra
money, the kids are out of the house and they’re saying, ‘Let’s
have a little fun,’” says Rick Wood-Samman, owner of Dirt Willy Game
Bird Farm and Hatchery in Ardrossan, Alberta. He sells his pheasants to some 50
Alberta restaurants and, increasingly, direct to the public. “I get a lot
of farm- gate business. I sold all of my wild turkeys at Christmas and I’ve
never done that before.”
“There is certainly a niche market for that sort of thing and part of
it is that it is still an affordable luxury,” balsamic vinegar producer
Venturi says. “They say that even when times are tough, people still buy
flowers and chocolate.”
Inevitably, all this trade creates an intimate relationship between producer,
chef and consumer that makes for the ultimate dining experience. Pohorelic says:
“It’s so easy to be a great chef. You don’t have to do fancy
cuts or crazy techniques—we do, because we like to show off—because
you can taste the difference of good quality ingredients. No matter what you do
to a bad carrot, it’s still a bad carrot.”
Hard to be Humble
Still, producing gourmet foods isn’t without its challenges: bad weather,
voracious predators, a fickle market and even government restrictions.
Take the situation of Rick Wood-Samman, who raises the kinds of birds chefs
across Canada would clamour for—if only they could get them. He began his
operation in 1990 when he received a federal hatchery permit that allows him to
sell chicks around the world. His meat, however, has to stay in Alberta for now
because the province has only one processor that can handle game birds and it’s
not federally approved. “If they were to decide not to go federal, I would
have difficulty finding another processing plant,” Wood-Samman says. “I’m
too old to want to start over.”
For distillers like Merridale Cidery’s Pipes, the biggest challenge is taxation.
“If I sell a bottle of eau de vie or brandy for, say, $40, I get less than
$14,” he says. “And that’s after the British Columbia government
removed the half-million-dollar bond it once required distillers to pay just to
go into business.”
“It’s so disheartening when you see the difference between here
and Europe, where wine is treated like a food,” says Venturi. “People
here have traditionally paid a so-called luxury or sin tax, so they have just
come to expect it.”
A Little Respect
What these producers do might not be an easy endeavour, or a lucrative one, or
even a respectable one. But it can be profoundly satisfying to defeat the naysayers
and create foods that are truly, purely good. And every once in a while, there
is a moment of pure ecstasy: the day Giordano Venturi sampled the first drop of
baslamic vinegar from his winery, or that glorious day that Betty Duckett knew
she and her husband had truly managed to grow their first truffle. “We danced,
had a touch of scotch and toasted all the years,” she recalls. “We
went this road alone, but the ‘Duckett Method’ is going to produce
truffles for B.C. and for Canada.”
“I can’t wait until we’ve got those truffles here. They’ll
be on everything,” Vancouver chef David Hawksworth says. “There’s
always potential for luxury products,” he laughs, “as long as I’m
around.” His fellow Western Canadian chefs concur.
|
Pheasant
Breast with Stewed B.C. Fire Morels, Parmesan Foam and Grilled Asparagus- By chef
Scott Pohorelic (River Café, Calgary) 
