It’s the essence of cooking

Vancouver-based chef Andrea Carlson insists spontaneity is at the heart of Burdock & Co.

— that it’s this very tactile, sensory experience. You really have to have an intimate connection with it to know what steps you want to take.

‘Keep Vancouver Wet” — an unofficial slogan emblazoned in white paint on wooden slats — hovers above an unassuming kitchen garden on a stretch of Main Street in the city’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. As if providing justification for Vancouver’s inordinate rainfall, the containers overflow with the likes of Japanese ginger, sweet woodruff and artemisia. Nothing too overtly edible, though. As chef Andrea Carlson has learned from experience, potatoes and tomatoes prove too irresistible for pilfering passersby to overlook.

At Burdock & Co, her farm- to- table restaurant set behind the garden, such ingredients are fundamental. “It gives us some really unique flavour profiles that I personally love,” says Carlson. “For me, ( botanicals) are the most exciting things. Those little, super- fresh flavour notes, like green fennel seeds and fuki.”

An early proponent of local cooking in Canada, Carlson launched a 100-mile tasting menu in 2006 at Vancouver’s Raincity Grill, and has honed her West Coast style over the past two decades at the renowned Sooke Harbour House on Vancouver Island, among others.

Since she founded Burdock & Co in 2013, produce from artisans, farmers, foragers and growers — local, and by extension, seasonal — has continued to be the catalyst for all that she creates.

When it came to writing her debut cookbook, Burdock & Co (Appetite by Random House, 2019; with Clea Mcdougall), the decision to structure it by locality — in chapters including “On the Ocean, “In the Garden and “Hidden Places” — was an organic one. “The spirit of the food that we do — the spirit of my passions on this journey that we’ve had so far — is definitely rooted in the context of the chapters in terms of the places, and their expression of experience,” she says.

Carlson’s use of layered elements — especially botanicals and ferments — offers new opportunities for adventurous home cooks. Rather than simplifying the recipes for the book, she chose to “stick to their essence” and stay true to the way she would have served them at Burdock & Co. As with the ethos of the restaurant, she encourages adaptability when cooking from the book; incorporating ingredients you have around you rather than a strict adherence to the ingredient list. While some recipes involve labour- intensive and longer processes ( such as the following recipe for pork ragout, fennel and pappardelle), others are more approachable (like warm ricotta, caramelized persimmons, honeycomb).

She equates fermentation — a craft to which she devotes a chapter entitled “Of the Air” — to her methodology in general. It’s “spontaneous, unpredictable, serendipitous”; malleable and of the moment. Take a deluge of green apricots for example, which she might salt-cure with shiso in the manner of umeboshi. Three months later, the pungent ferment could show up in a fall dish with braised cauliflower mushrooms, potato cream and aged miso-butter sauce. “It’s about curing things, putting them away and then literally finding them and going, ‘ Oh! That would be amazing with this thing now!’” says Carlson.

This spontaneity colours all that she does in the kitchen. Rather than revisiting past recipes, Carlson prefers to create dishes on the fly — scrawling down details on scraps of paper, led by the product at hand. ( Prior to writing Burdock & Co, she tended not to record recipes at all: “Now I know that I have to write things down.”)

When she writes a new menu, as Carlson was in the midst of doing the day we spoke, the dishes she conceptualizes in the morning and tweaks throughout the day will hit tables that same evening. “Maybe it’s because we’re dealing with so many different organic growers and there’s always variation in the product that’s coming through the door. You’re responding to those particular cues in terms of size and colours, and all those sorts of things,” she says of her instinctive style. “It’s the essence of cooking — that it’s this very tactile, sensory experience. You have to see the product, you have to smell it. You really have to have an intimate connection with it to know what steps you want to take.”