Root vegetables deserve to be in the spotlight
With sky-high prices for imported produce, it’s time to lift local veggies out of the cold cellar. Old-fashioned and boring? Take another look
Might something good have come from this winter’s skyrocketing produce prices?
When cauliflower from California hit $8 a head a few weeks ago, carrots from St-Rémi, at under a dollar a pound, suddenly seemed a lot more interesting. With the sagging Canadian dollar and wild weather conditions in southern American growing regions, the price of imported fruits and vegetables have hit the roof. The Food Institute of the University of Guelph is forecasting two to four per cent food inflation rates this year due to fruit, nut and vegetable price hikes (which means the average Canadian family could spend $345 more for food in 2016.)
Though that $8 head of cauliflower has since dropped as the drought in California eased and cheaper alternatives from Mexico became available, produce prices in general are expected to remain higher than usual for the rest of this winter, said Michael Kalogeras, a veteran buyer of imported produce at Thomas Fruits and Vegetables. As a result, more of his customers — restaurants and institutions, among them — are buying in lesser quantities or switching to more locally grown produce like carrots, parsnips, beets and other root vegetables and cabbages.
“Fruit and vegetable prices are always volatile, but this year has been particularly bad. Things like tomatoes, which usually go up and down, have gone up and stayed there. Red peppers have tripled in price,” Kalogeras said.
“Where restaurants could change the menu, they did and where they couldn’t, they piled more french fries on the plate and less salad. Or they sliced the red peppers thinner than usual.”
Bernard Lavallée, a Université de Montréal nutritionist and localfood proponent, said it’s about time consumers look closer to home. He said just one in three of the groceries in the average Quebecer’s shopping basket was grown or produced in the province. (On his blog Le nutritionniste urbain, he cites a study by Quebec’s agriculture ministry that concludes if all Quebecers replaced just $30 each a year of groceries from elsewhere with products from home, the province’s economy would benefit by $1 billion within five years.)
“It’s pretty easy to eat local all through summer and fall, but people have this notion that, come winter, it’s all over,” said Lavallée. “It’s really too bad, since there are so many great local foods around that are quite inexpensive. Not just potatoes, but carrots, and beets and onions, Jerusalem artichokes and garlic and many varieties of cabbages and apples.”
With improved harvesting and refrigerated-storage technologies, these cold-hardy offerings can stay fresh and flavourful for many, many months. Why then are we eating so much imported kale, for example, when local red and green cabbage and Brussels sprouts are just as tasty and nutritious?
Lavallée said he isn’t prescribing an austerity diet of nothing but celery root all winter long. But he thinks that local roots and brassicas, as well as apples, could provide a solid base from which to get much of our daily requirements for vitamins, fibre and other essential nutrients, complemented with imported leafy greens. (And for greater variety, why not look for frozen Quebec berries and local vegetables, he suggested. Berries are rich in antioxidants and in frozen form they can be even higher in nutrients than fresh imported ones, since they are picked when ripe and flash-frozen.)
The trouble is root vegetables and brassicas have got an unfair rap as old-fashioned, starchy, boring. People remember overboiled cabbage their mother or grandmother used to make. But as a new genera- tion of chefs make their menus more vegetable-forward, those old notions are changing.
At Le Fantôme, the new Griffintown restaurant that is getting a lot of buzz, chef Jason Morris said he was already playing with veggies before prices spiked. Now he’s getting even more inventive.
“I want the food to be playful and fun. And like every restaurant, I need to be ever-careful about food costs,” he said. “It makes sense for economic, environmental and taste reasons to buy local.”
In his veg-forward dishes, root vegetables and local cabbages get star treatment. For instance, he roasts beets in a salt crust, which is traditionally used to seal in juices when roasting whole fish. He has made lasagna not with pasta but with thin slices of marinated celery root layered with tomato sauce.
To get everything he can out of red cabbage he has been cooking it with cloves then puréeing it with apples to serve alongside venison. More recently, he has begun juicing red cabbage, extracting its beautiful pinky-purple colour and adding salt to ferment it. He mixes the fizzy and mildly acidic brine into the olive-oil vinaigrette he makes to garnish trout.
Morris said he’ll still splurge on imported produce like blood oranges, leafy greens or whatever sparks his culinary creativity, but he’s paying extra attention to vegetables closer to home. When cauliflower prices spiked back in December, for example, he replaced it on the menu with carrots and cocoa nibs roasted in hazelnut oil.
“Root vegetables are so meaty, so full of earthy flavours,” he says. “They have been around a long time. What’s new is that they are being treated with creativity, in ways that make them more memorable.”