Tastes like sunshine
Kricklewood Farm makes eastern Ontario’s first homegrown cooking oil
Once you find the correct country road south of Smiths Falls, you really don’t need a road number to find Kricklewood Farm. It’s the one with 400,000 blazing, bright yellow sunflowers standing tall in the field.
It’s also the source of eastern Ontario’s first truly homegrown cooking oil, available just since spring, and being snapped up by local-food connoisseurs as fast as it’s being pressed and bottled.
Dale Horeczy and Brad Daily bought their 90-acre farm near Frankville in 2009 because they wanted an old house in the country and enough land to raise goats.
Daily is a chartered accountant and Horeczy has a background in marketing, but, when they lived in Atlanta, where Daily had a corporate job, they learned how to raise goats and make goat-milk soap from a woman who had an urban goat farm.
Since they moved to their Frankville farm, they’ve been making goat-milk soap and goatmilk fudge, as well as beeswax candles and cards with farm photographs, and collecting eggs from their 50 heritage-breed chickens, all of which they sell at area farmers markets and their farm gate.
But that still left them with about 60 extra acres of arable land.
“Then we saw the article in the Citizen about Loïc,” says Horeczy, “and the light bulb kind of went off.”
Loïc Dewavrin grows sunflowers and makes organic sunflower oil at his farm just west of Montreal. Called Le Moulin des Cèdres, his oil has been popular with local-food enthusiasts in the Ottawa area, since, until now, it has been pretty much the only source of culinary oil made close to home.
But it wasn’t just the story of the pure, organic oil that grabbed Horeczy, 51, and Daily, 52.
“That photo of the field of sunflowers … Brad and I are both from Winnipeg and we grew up seeing fields of sunflowers. We thought, if he can do it in this area, maybe we can too.”
They contacted Dewavrin and he offered them advice and encouragement.
They planted 15 acres of sunflowers last spring, purchased a press in the winter and produced their first bottle of sunflower oil in February. “It’s quite amazing,” says Horeczy.
“It’s a light oil and it tastes like sunflower seeds. It tastes like Loïc’s oil, but subtly different, because of a slightly different climate, different soil.”
Sheila Whyte, the owner of Thyme & Again catering and fine-food shop, was one of the first to sell Kricklewood Farm’s oil.
“We were interested in carrying this oil as soon as we heard about it as it is so local,” says Whyte. “And it really does taste like sunshine.”
Thyme & Again featured the oil at the Savour Ottawa Harvest Table event on Sunday, using it in a vinaigrette.
It’s now sold at about 30 stores, from Kemptville and Kingston to Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works, which requested the oil from Horeczy and Daily.
“I’m hearing from retailers that customers are coming in looking for it,” says Horeczy. “We’re pleasantly surprised and amazed, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t really sat back and thought about it.”
Horeczy says he’d like one day to make his farm into an agro-tourism destination, with the press behind glass, allowing visitors to see the process; a food shop; and the sunflower fields as the colourful draw at this time of year.
For now, he says that he and Daily have started using their sunflower oil every day in their meal preparation. “Once you have it and enjoy it, you want to drizzle it on everything. It has a smoke point of about 225 F, so it’s better for finishing or sautéing than frying.
“It’s great on popcorn or steamed vegetables or rice. Just last night we had chicken and used the oil with new potatoes and corn on the cob.”