Slow Food Toronto

alexandra — Tue, 04 May 2010 01:29:46 +0000

I first heard of Slow Food International when I lived in Barcelona through an interview with Carlo Petrini in a local newspaper. It was a short interview but Petrini’s brief description of how he decided to do something to fight fast food and a fast life stayed with me. While driving home in Italy, he decided to stop at a friend’s restaurant to have a peperonata. Made from an indigenous local pepper, the region was known for this particular dish and his friend, a local chef, made a particularly good one. It had been years since he had been able to visit his friend so he took the opportunity and stopped by at his restaurant. The dish looked perfect but upon the first bite, Petrini realized something was wrong. It was completely tasteless. Later, when talking to his friend. he asked what had changed. His friend explained he no longer used the local peppers since he could get much cheaper and bigger peppers from Holland. It was hybrid variety that yielded perfect, uniform peppers. Conforming himself to the new reality on his way home, Petrini passed by a local farm that he was sure used to produce those wonderful peppers. He stopped and talked to a farmer who confirmed they no longer cultivated the Asti peppers since they couldn’t compete with the cheaper Dutch peppers. “What do you produce now?” asked Petrini. “Tulip bulbs!” replied the farmer. He confessed they cultivated tulip bulbs up to a certain stage of their development and then shipped them to Holland to finish their growth. Two products typical of their respective regions were now being produced thousands of kilometres apart and shipped back to the region where they are popular. The waste of resources in shipping these products back and forth as well as the poor quality of the final product was enough to get Carlo Petrini to think more actively on what could individuals like him, do to protect local cultures and products such as those.

I have since read his book Slow Food Nation: Why our Food should be Good, Clean, and Fair and I strongly recommend it. I don’t think I was quite as aware how far the Slow Food movement went into issues of social justice, social responsibility, and sustainable agriculture. And it was browsing for more information on the Toronto chapter of Slow Food International that I came across an event that was to be held at the Gladstone Hotel a few weeks ago. That’s when I learned how to make butter, remember?

The event brought together many organizations from the Greater Toronto Area as well as further afield to share news about their initiatives. KEG was there, as were other CSAs. I talked to the representatives of a couple of them that looked quite interesting. One was Everdale, who runs a Harvest Share Program and delivers in Toronto on Tuesdays at Brunswick Ave, north of Harbord St. Like KEG, they seem ideally situated to provide for the U of T community. Chick-a-biddy Acres was another small farm that runs a CSA program that provides vegetable and meat offerings. Every Wednesday from June to October, farmer Sherry Patterson, from Chick-a-biddy, provides produce to chef Marc Breton at the Gladstone Hotel for a unique event called Harvest Wednesdays.

Other interesting organizations attending the event included:

West End Food Co-op

Mapleton’s Organic

Green Thumbs Growing Kids

Fifth Town Artisan Cheese

Riverdale Park Farmers’ Market

and the coolest, in my opinion, Greenest City

* If you have a Delicious account, you can import all these links through this link.

Making butter

alexandra — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 01:57:35 +0000

I attended a Slow Food Toronto event this Saturday aimed at introducing people to Community Shared Agriculture options around Toronto as well as other food initiatives such as the awesome Greenest City initiative in Parkdale, here in TO. It was also great to hang out with Shannon Holton from KEG. But the highlight of the event for me was finding out how easy it is to make the most delicious, creamy butter. All you need is a small plastic container with a lid, heavy cream, and two marbles. All it takes is pouring an inch or two of heavy cream in the container with the marbles, putting the lid on, and shake, shake, shake. After a couple of minutes the sound of the marbles start going fainter until it gets to a point when you don’t hear anything moving inside since the cream have gotten so thick. But you keep shaking, shaking, shaking and soon enough the buttermilk separates. The key is to keep shaking until the butter is one compact chunk. It doesn’t take very long; maybe 5 minutes? I’ll time it next time… Yes, because once you make it once, there will be plenty of next times! Back to the recipe – once the butter is ready, strain the buttermilk and rinse the water in cold water until the water comes out clear and you have cleaned it of all the buttermilk. Should you leave any buttermilk on the butter, it would spoil in the fridge. You can of course add salt, herbs, or whatever strikes your fancy when you first add the cream to the container to make different flavours of butter. More detailed instructions here. Some pictures of my butter making – don’t mind the quality, the light was awful and I’m too excited t get this post up quickly to mind about fixing them up on photoshop:

Straining my butter

Savouring my very own awesome butter.

The nicest, creamiest butter. Alan was quite impressed.

By the way, I didn’t have any marbles lying around, so I used to small river stones… worked quite well!

Mató & Maple Syrup » Slow Food

Slow Food Toronto

Making butter