Huron Farms to Tables: The Citizen 100K Meal makes its epic return
This is the third installment of The Citizen 100K Meal, which has received rave reviews from readers since it began a few years ago. The goal, of course, is to shed light on all of the wonderful and delicious local food options that reside right in our backyard.
For this year’s meal, we decided to do lunch, dinner and dessert. Reporter Scott Stephenson and his wife Chelsea took on lunch with a variety of tapas, while Editor Shawn Loughlin kept things simple with a traditional, yet tasty pasta and photographer John Stephenson and his wife Maria topped things off with a maple pie for dessert.
Enjoy!
TAPAS BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
The project of making a meal in which all of the ingredients come from within a 100-kilometre radius is about finding creative solutions to self-imposed restrictions. Optimally, participants will gain appreciation for locally-produced food while broadening their understanding of the massive, largely invisible network that brings food to the people. For a festive, affordable luncheon for four people, I teamed up with my wife to put on a Spanish-inspired tapas meal using exclusively local ingredients.
An interesting thing about trying to put together a fully local meal in an age of near-instant access to all things is how impossible it is to achieve for so many communities, be they urban or rural, central or remote. Both Huron and Bruce Counties are absolutely replete with the most edible of options - we produce very high-quality meat, milk, eggs, fish, vegetables, fruits and grains. We also produce salt, maple sugar, wine and cider, all useful for creating flavourful dishes. In fact, the only outsourced item for our 100-kilometre lunch was the oil we used for frying.
Tapas are always simple to showcase local ingredients, and can be whipped-up ahead of time to create the illusion of effortless entertaining. The word tapas means “to cover” - the tiny plates should be able to rest comfortably on top of a wine glass. Each region of Spain is home to its own unique styles of tapas, from the rustic topped toasts of the Basque region to sleek skewers of meat, vegetables and seafood found in Barcelona. Tapas represent a complex tapestry of regional delights with a rich history, so, for the purpose of our tapas party, we have divided tapas up into four overly simple categories: 1. Things on toast. 2. Things on skewers. 3. Fried things. 4. Salads.
A tasty dip is essential for fried things - we made ours by roasting a ton of our homegrown garlic, scapes and onions and processing them with farm fresh eggs and oil to create a rustic sort of aioli. Divide up your base sauce into four bowls, and add different flavours to each one. We used Pepper & Pickle Hot Sauce from the London-based Hot Sauce Co (just under the wire at 98.5 kilonetres away, but picked up right near the office at Penny’s in Blyth) to make a spicy aioli to go with our Metzger’s ham and Pine River cheddar croquettes. Mixed cucumbers, peppers and onions from Homegrown in Wingham became pickles using Goderich’s Red Cat Bakery’s quaffable apple cider vinegar which, after mincing, transformed the base aioli into a remoulade to top fish cakes made with Lake Huron whitefish, smoked in-house at Out of the Blue in Bayfield. Add garden herbs like dill and basil to make an herb dip for our crudité of French breakfast radishes from the garden and baby carrots from the Huron Bruce Produce Auction. The herb dip also makes a great base for a salad dressing when mixed with Maitland Heights honey from Clinton and Red Cat’s apple cider vinegar, which you can use to dress greens from Firmly Rooted or to marinate bits of peppers and tomatoes for a village style salad. The fourth aioli took on minced sage to complement our turkey and spinach fritters, made with turkey from Hayter’s in Dashwood, spinach from Firmly Rooted in Belgrave, and bound together with farm fresh eggs and stone-milled flour from Stone Bridge Flour in Ripley.
While variety is the name of the game, making featured ingredients pull double or even triple duty will save on time and effort. Since new potatoes are very much in season, we picked up a few quarts from a roadside stand in Goderich, along with tomatoes. Boiling the potatoes (water salted with salt from Goderich) and dividing them into four piles creates the opportunity for four dishes. Diced boiled potatoes with minced radishes, carrots, onions, cucumber and herbed aioli become a classic tapas-style potato salad, while sautéed onions, tomatoes and peppers, divided in half, can be infused with hot sauce to top fried potatoes, while the other half can be sweetened with maple sugar from Robinson’s Maple Products in Auburn, added to stewed beef neck from Meeting Place Organic Farm and served on toast from Goderich’s Red Cat Bakery. A third potato dish of tiny skewered, salted potatoes to dip in aioli is a classic tapa, leaving just enough potatoes to mash for the ham and cheese croquettes and smoked fish cakes. Simply form into balls or cubes, dip in beaten egg, excess breadcrumbs from cutting all your Red Cat bread, or dredge in Stone Bridge Flour.
The Goderich Farmers’ Market, hosted on The Square, is a great nexus for local products for busy shoppers of discerning tastes looking for a unique, one-stop experience. Where else could you find pork sausage from Auburn (Bachert Premium Sausage), sourdough and sweets from Goderich (Burdan’s Red Cat Bakery) and unique cider and fruit wine from Bayfield (Bayfield Berry Farm) all within five feet of each other? Last weekend’s market was paired with a local arts and craft show, which persevered, despite heavy rains.
Sausages cooked in cider is a traditional tapas dish from the Principality of Asturias in northwestern Spain. Slowly simmer slices of smoked sausages (thin if you’re going to serve them on toast, thick if you’re going to skewer them) in the cider of your choice until most of the liquid has reduced down, leaving a sweet, sticky coating on the sliced sausages. The traditional chorizo and sidra may be out of reach, but smoked pork sausages from Green’s Meat Market in Lucknow and apple-peach cider from Bayfield Berry Farm are stellar stand-ins.
Auburn’s Bachert Premium Sausage has been making Huron County hogs into sausages of all sorts for years now, and their garlic sausage, sliced and sautéed with onions, garlic, and sage makes a great toast topper. Cheese curds from Pine River can be dipped in Stone Bridge Flour Batter, deep-fried, and served on a salad of herbs with herbed dressing.
Sometimes, the simpler a tapa is, the better.
Tunnel-grown tomatoes that have reached peak ripeness can be used to make one of the most simple tapas dishes - pan con tomate. Simply rub tomatoes on sippets of toast, salt lightly and serve. Slices of Metzger’s Black Forest ham need only be warmed and sprinkled with a bit of Robinson’s Maple Sugar to become a top notch toast topper, and Blyth Farm Cheese’s Ewe-da need only a drizzle of honey to become an elegant little plate all on its own. Put it on toast, or on a stick. Feature homemade pickles or gifted jams of all kinds in their own little dishes, and let them shine.
These are only a few of the possibilities to help you get started on the road to your very own tapas party - the combinations are quite literally endless. Finish your meal with little glasses of Bayfield Berry Farms fruit wine for an evening that will be chic, unforgettable, and local - Salud!
LINGUINE IN BUTTER AND GARLIC SAUCE BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
Here we are with another 100-kilometre meal from the staff at The Citizen and here I am with another pasta recipe. I promise I’ll change it up next time. I promise.
I was going to prepare pasta aglio e olio, which is something I’ve been making quite often lately. It’s quick, fresh and really tasty when holding it up against how much work you have to put into it.
Film fans will know pasta aglio e olio - which translates simply to pasta with garlic and oil - from the movie Chef with Jon Favreau. Carl Casper, played by Favreau, uses his skillful cooking, making this exact pasta, to help him seduce Scarlett Johansson. If that is a feat that pasta can accomplish, we all owe it a try once in our lives, but, for today, I made a simple garlic and butter sauce with fresh noodles.
Unless you want to make your own pasta (which I covered in a previous 100-kilometre meal and is easily achievable within the parameters of a 100-kilometre meal with local eggs and flour), you start with a pot of boiling water. Season the water with salt and choose your favourite pasta. This is also a good time to remind you that if you want to use box pasta, Italpasta ensures you’re using products milled in Blyth at Howson and Howson - keeping the 100-kilometre meal dream alive.
I, however, used fresh, packaged bundles of linguine from Goderich’s new Beach Bum Pasta - a company that has struck some sort of professional partnership with Red Cat Bakery. The pasta is made with stone-ground Italian semola rimancinata and it takes mere minutes to cook (and it was delightful).
The recipe is so straightforward, frankly, a case could be made that it doesn’t need someone to write about it, and yet, here we are.
Mince an entire head of garlic (yes, you read that right - that’s a lot of garlic). Melt a quarter-cup of butter in a pan and get your garlic cooking in the pan. Be careful to toast the garlic until it softens and begins to turn light brown. The butter can brown and the garlic can burn quite rapidly at this stage, so be sure to keep an eye on everything.
Next, get your pasta going in a pot of boiling, salted water and, when it’s done, reserve a bit of pasta water to be added to the final sauce if you need to adjust its consistency (though I have found I don’t have to).
I like to add some crushed red pepper flakes to mine for some heat, as well as some fresh-cracked pepper, both of which add some great flavour to this rather rich pasta. Something like parsley or another interesting microgreen, perhaps from somewhere like Veggies on Parr or Huron Ridge Micros, could also be folded in here to brighten the dish up with some freshness, if you so choose, though it really is glorious in its simplicity.
Once your sauce is looking good, pour it out of the pan and into a mixing bowl so it doesn’t continue to cook in the pan. Then, drain your pasta and add it to the mixing bowl, tossing it to ensure all of the pasta is covered in the rich, glossy sauce.
At this point, you can either grate a nice, hard, salty cheese (the likes of which you might find at Blyth Farm Cheese, perhaps) over the pasta, either in the bowl to be tossed and incorporated into the sauce, or to grate on top of the pasta in the bowl to finish it, though it’s not necessary.
Enjoy with a cold, crisp glass of local white wine (maybe something a little more acidic, which this dish doesn’t really have on its own, and you’re all set.
***
Scott was even more generous than you might have originally thought (imagine that!) and brought me a freshly-baked baguette from Red Cat Bakery, which I toasted with some salt, pepper and olive oil to have with the pasta. However, you can make a relatively simple focaccia with your 100-kilometre ingredients, courtesy of celebrated chef Samin Nosrat, the author of Salt Fat Acid Heat. If 14 hours of fermentation isn’t your thing, BRØD Bread and Pastry in Blyth also regularly has focaccia available.
She relayed a recipe for Ligurian focaccia from locals in the northern tip of Italy, which includes over 12 hours of fermentation.
At least 14 hours before you hope to be eating bread, mix five-and-a-third cups of flour with two tablespoons of salt, adding two-and-a-half cups of warm water with a half-teaspoon of yeast (not local, I’m afraid) with two-and-a-half teaspoons of honey. Then, add a quarter-cup of olive oil (the flavour will really come through, so use the best olive oil you can find, perhaps from the Southampton Olive Oil Company or Olive Your Favourites in Stratford).
Let the dough ferment at room temperature in a large bowl (the dough will at least double in size), covered in cling wrap for between 12 and 14 hours.
Oil a baking sheet and gently release the dough onto the sheet, doing your best to agitate it as little as possible (the air bubbles are crucial to the fluffiness of the bread). Pour some more olive oil on top of the dough, spreading it out to the edges of the tray a few times over 30 minutes.
Create some dimples on the top surface of the bread and completely cover the bread with a brine made of a third-cup of warm water and one-and-a-half teaspoons of salt, which creates a pleasant saltiness throughout the entire loaf. Add a few more drops of olive oil alongside the brine and allow the bread to proof for another 45 minutes.
Sprinkle some delightful flaky sea salt on top of the dough (not local, but the Newfoundland Salt Company makes some top-notch sea salt) and put it in an oven heated to 450°F for between 25 and 30 minutes. Nosrat’s instructions include using either a baking stone or an inverted baking sheet in the oven, so it can get super hot and blast the bottom of the bread with heat.
Finish the bread on the top rack of the oven for another five to seven minutes and then remove it, then add a few more tablespoons of oil onto the bread as it cools (the bread will absorb the oil). Let it finish on a cooling rack.
CANADIAN MAPLE PIE BY JOHN AND MARIA STEPHENSON
Instead of sticking with the traditional breakfast, lunch and dinner road map for The Citizen’s 100-kilometre meal, we decided to go with lunch, dinner and dessert, putting the sweet, baking skills of Maria Stephenson (and her husband John, Citizen photographer) to good use.
The perfect end to a 100-kilometre meal prepared by your favourite local journalists and photographers is a Canadian maple syrup pie, all prepared with ingredients sourced (or that can be sourced) from within 100 kilometres of their Brussels home.
To begin, you’ll make pie crust.
Use a cup and a quarter of unbleached white or spelt flour, sourced from Brant Flour Mills, though there are other closer options as well, half a cup of cold butter, a quarter teaspoon of salt and between three and five tablespoons of ice water.
You cube the cold butter and incorporate it into the flour, using a pastry blender or a food processor, until it’s the size of small peas.
Then, add the ice water a tablespoon at a time and continue to mix the dough until it comes together in a ball. Take care to not overwork the dough, however, which may result in an overly tough pie crust.
Flatten the ball of dough into a pie dish, wrap in parchment paper or plastic wrap and let it rest in the refrigerator for about an hour. Then, pre-heat your oven to 350°F.
For the maple pie filling, you’ll need a cup and a half of pure maple syrup (preferably of the amber-coloured variety). We used Jakemans amber maple syrup from Beachville, but there are many local options. You’ll also need six tablespoons of butter, a quarter-teaspoon of salt, one tablespoon of spelt flour, a half-cup of whipping cream and two eggs, which came by way of our neighbour Robin Small.
In a heavy saucepan, bring the maple syrup just to a boil over medium heat. Cook the syrup at a gentle bubble for five minutes, reducing the heat if necessary.
Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the butter until it has completely melted. Then stir in the cream.
Transfer a half-cup of the mixture to a small bowl and whisk in the flour and salt before whisking this portion of the mixture back in with the rest of it.
Beat the two eggs together in a small bowl and then whisk them into the mixture, bringing everything together until its consistency is smooth and even.
Next, roll out the pie dough into a nine-inch plate and pour the warm pie filling into the shell.
Bake the pie for between 50 and 60 minutes on the oven’s middle rack. The centre should be golden brown and relatively firm when jiggled back and forth. It will probably be a bit wobbly, and that is alright.
Let the pie cool completely before serving - about one or two hours.