COOKING ON THE WILD SIDE
Vancouver and Salt Spring islands feature in Food Network Canadian campground tour
PREVIEW
What: Chuck & Danny’s Road Trip When: Fridays, 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Where: The Food Network (check local listings)
When you take cooks out of their comfort zone, anything can happen. That’s what chefs Chuck Hughes and Danny Smiles were banking on when they visited campgrounds across Canada for their new Food Network show, Chuck & Danny’s Road Trip.
“It was not structured, which opened it up to different adventures and things that can go wrong,” Hughes said. “Cooking is 99 per cent problem-solving.”
Professional cooks specialize in controlled environments; campgrounds are anything but. Hughes and Smiles, the supervising chefs at Hughes’ Montreal restaurant Le Bremner, had to deal with all sorts of problems during their sixweek summer shoot, which resulted in six episodes of freeform camp cooking.
In each episode, they spend the day meeting local food providers and the night cooking a feast for those who helped them along the way. “A lot of the chefs we knew personally, and most people were really enthusiastic to show us where they cook and their local ingredients,” Hughes said.
That the show put them on the road for tapings in New Brunswick, Ontario and P.E.I. during Le Bremner’s busy tourist season only made matters more hectic for the pair.
“It was the worst time possible for us to do anything,” Hughes said with a laugh. “And I had a baby in between two episodes. But in terms of Canada’s bounty and ingredients and being able to cook directly from the earth, if you will, those were the best months to do it. Harvest period, for a food show, makes a lot of sense. Everything was growing, everything was fresh and ready.”
The pair travelled to B.C. for two episodes of the show, which debuted March 3 on the Food Network. On the episode Island Time (which airs Friday), they camped and cooked at Goldstream Provincial Park, among other locations. Salt of the Earth (which airs March 17) sees them roam Salt Spring Island and visit the popular Saturday market.
The two friends have television experience — Hughes on Chopped Canada, Chuck’s Day Off and Chuck’s Week Off; Smiles was first runner-up on Top Chef Canada, in 2013 — but camping while cooking proved difficult at times. “Recipes came together on the fly, as we were gathering ingredients,” Hughes said.
They ran into a snag during the Salt Spring episode, when they tried, but failed, to catch a salmon, he added. “That’s the beauty of cooking outdoors. You don’t always have exactly what you want or need, but you make it work.”
Hughes and Smiles said they were “blown away” by their Vancouver Island shoot. They scored figs and flowers from Mary Alice Johnson at ALM Organic Farm in Sooke, sea urchins and box crabs from Victoria commercial fisherman David McRae, seaweed from Amanda Swinimer at Sooke’s Dakini Tidal Wilds, seaweed gin from Alayne MacIsaac of Sheringham Distillery in Shirley, and chicken from Jesse and Evelyn Pereira at Terra Nossa Farm in Mill Bay.
They also hooked up with Duncan chef Dan Hudson, winner of the TV cooking contest Chopped Canada in 2016, who served them halibut at Glenrosa Farm restaurant in Metchosin. On Salt Spring Island, they worked alongside chef Brooke Winters at BNur tured, the island’s first farmto-fork food trailer.
Hughes said Pacific halibut is on the menu at his restaurants in Montreal (he also owns the hot spot Garde Manger), but the experience of eating fish and seafood caught hours, sometimes minutes, earlier was something he will never forget. “For cooks, it was Mecca.”
Smiles was similarly moved. “We definitely have a great understanding of Canadian cuisine, and we’re in touch with our suppliers. But to actually go out in B.C. and harvest seaweed … that was something really special and humbling.”
While not everyone might be inclined to tackle the recipes Hughes and Smiles create on the fly in Chuck & Danny’s Road Trip — a seaweed brine for fried chicken cooked on a campfire might be a stretch for some — Smiles maintains camp cookouts shouldn’t be intimidating.
“That’s the hardest thing, to keep things simple,” he said.
“It’s always easier to add and add and add. To make something taste so good with three ingredients, that’s what we really wanted to do.”
Making Chuck & Danny’s Road Trip forced the two hardworking chefs to be on vacation, something neither does very often.
The fast-paced atmosphere of the restaurant industry in Montreal means the trips of Smiles’ youth, when he would spend a month each summer camping with his family at Ontario’s Algonquin Park, are a thing of the past.
“It was something I had definitely not done in a long time,” Smiles said.
Hughes would like to do more of it in the future. “Fifteen years ago, this would have been no problem,” Hughes said.
“But now, we have a lot of responsibilities and a lot of things on the line. An opportunity like this was amazing, because it allowed us to really live the RV lifestyle, camp out and cook amazing food.”