WAKEFIELD GOES WILD
Foraging down on the farm
A new farm near Wakefield is allowing Ottawa chefs to go wild.
At Ferme et Forêt, which is in its first full year of operation, you’ll find a large organic vegetable field with the usual carrots, onions and kale. You’ll see chickens around outside (more on them later.) But it also sells such things as juniper berries, sumac juice and wild trout lily leaves — and Ottawa chefs are eating up these wild things.
“During the spring, I used some of their spruce tips — I did them in a tempura fry,” says Mike Portigal, chef at Das Lokal. “I also made some into a jelly, similar to a mint jelly. I think it will be awesome to use in the winter — that fresh spruce flavour. I use their juniper berries to cure meats; they’re a lot more flavourful than the store-bought stuff.”
At Beckta, the current menu features a sumac reduction on the Scallop Crudo, pickled daisy buds with the Veal Sweetbreads and fresh sumac on the Heirloom Tomatoes appetizer. The fresh sumac and daisy buds — as well as dandelion buds, wild plums and spruce tips — come from Ferme et Forêt.
“I enjoy them because I find using the most interesting and delicious ingredients available will create the most memorable dining experience for my guests,” says chef de cuisine Katie Brown Ardington. And while she admits that a few diners have asked her why she’s serving them “weeds,” she says in general the reactions to these foraged foods have been overwhelmingly positive.
“Serving foraged goods that are found right outside of our city automatically allows our diners to connect with the food. Usually it is a matter of them seeing those ingredients around them and not knowing that they were not only edible but delicious. Diners ask how they can treat them and cook them at home. It is a truthful representation of our terroir.”
The farm — and the foraging — are the brainchild of Geneviève LeGal-Leblanc and Sean Butler, who, like so many of the fresh new faces of farming around Ottawa, are university educated and did not grow up on farms. LeGal-Leblanc, however, does have foraging in her background: her uncle, Gérald LeGal, started the Tremblant-based wild foods business Gourmet Sauvage about 20 years ago, growing it from a small regional operation to a national company that now sells everything from wild rose syrup to sea asparagus mustard.
He has visited his niece’s Wakefield-area farm to offer workshops on wild foraging.
“When we got the farm, we walked around and realized there were about 40 wild edible plants with commercial value,” says LeGal-Leblanc.
“It was busiest in spring with fresh greens, cattail shoots and spruce buds. Now it’s day lily tubers, burdock roots and milkweed pods.”
In fact, of the four types of things they produce and sell — cultivated produce, foraged foods, eggs and maple syrup — the wild things are by far the biggest, in terms of volume and sales.
“As a test, we harvested about 5,000 pounds of wild foods in 2013,” says Butler. They sell some of their harvest, for example chokecherries, to Gourmet Sauvage, are now collecting huge bags of milkweed pods to sell to a Granby, Que. company that makes the seeds’ downy white “parachutes” into fabric, and offer twice weekly deliveries of edibles to Ottawa-area restaurants.
“There’s a growing interest among chefs in wild foods, and often when chefs introduce things, the general public gets more interested,” says LeGal-Leblanc.
Some of wild foods’ attraction is their nutritional value. Sumac juice, for example, is thought to be a better source of Vitamin C than orange juice. (while Ferme et Forêt sells it at their farm stand lightly sweetened with maple syrup, Ottawa chefs like to use an unsweetened version in cocktails.)
In last year’s award-winning Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health, Jo Robinson makes the argument that in cultivating fruits and vegetables, farmers have unintentionally bred most nutrients and other valuable phytochemicals out.
“Wild plants have natural defences, which can offer natural defences to disease for people, too,” says Butler. “Also, wild foods tend to be perennials, with deeper roots that get more nutrients out of the soil than, say, lettuce.”
They also have more concentrated flavours: the pepper grass seeds that LeGal-Leblanc and Butler harvest taste like a lively cross between mustard and black peppercorns.
Wood sorrel, which looks like bright green shamrocks, has a bright, lemony taste that their twoyear-old son, Téo, loves to munch on. The juniper berries, served in a sauce with game — “well, that just tastes like Canada,” says LeGalLeblanc.
But the couple also values harvesting wild foods, which generally flourish in the border between their woods and fields, because it’s easy on the land, unlike so much of traditional agriculture.
“We do it by hand — we aren’t using any fossil-fuel-powered machinery to get these things,” says LeGal-Leblanc.
Butler, who in the past has worked as an urban filmmaker as well as on farms from B.C.’s Cortes Island to Newfoundland, says he chose the farming life “because it’s a chance to have a meaningful living doing something positive by feeding people healthy food and healing the earth.”
Recently, Ferme et Forêt was the first in the region, as far as Butler knows, to have its pastured eggs (their chickens are free to roam outside, eating grass and bugs) certified Animal Welfare Approved, which is the most stringent animal welfare label in North America.
“I believe that agriculture as it is currently practised over most of the industrialized world is one of the most destructive things humans do to the planet,” says Butler.
“I don’t blame the farmers doing this — they don’t believe alternatives exist. My mission is to prove an alternative does exist.”
MAPLE PIE
One of the delicious things you’ll be able to taste at Sunday’s Fall Festival at Ferme et Forêt is this maple pie, adapted from an Ontario farm-to-table blog called Kitchen Vignettes and an old Quebec recipe from LeGal-Leblanc’s father. At Ferme et Forêt, they make it with their fresh pastured eggs and the maple syrup harvested from their woods. If you like, you can add a handful or pecans or walnuts — “black walnuts would make this a truly local, wild dessert,” says Butler.
1½ cups (375 mL) maple syrup ¼ cup (60 mL) butter ½ cup (125 mL) whipping cream 2 tbsp (30 mL) white flour ¼ tsp (1 mL) salt 2 eggs 9-inch (23-cm) pie crust
1. Bring the maple syrup to a light boil ( be careful — it boils over easily, advises Butler) and let it simmer for 5 minutes.
2. Remove from heat, add the butter and let it melt. Stir in the whipping cream. (“Whatever you do, don’t taste the mixture at this point — you’ll want to guzzle it all and you’ll never have your pie,” he adds.)
3. Whisk in the flour and salt. Beat the eggs and mix them in. Pour the whole mixture into your waiting pie crust.
4. Bake at 325 F (160 C) for 35 to 45 minutes. Let cool before slicing.