Merlin’s Video Link: https://youtu.be/IJaZprptUWM

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Photo by Katie Desharnais

Icewine got its start in Canada in the early 1980s. With close to ideal climate conditions (warm summers to ripen grapes coupled with not too cold winters), Ontario is where it’s at for creating Icewine. The appellations of the Niagara Peninsula, Prince Edward County and Lake Erie North Shore boast mostly limestone-based shale, and clay loam. Again, pretty ideal conditions. While about 60 local wineries produce it, grapes for Icewine comprise only about 15% of Ontario’s annual crop.

Photo by Katie Desharnais

In preparation for Icewine season, the grape vines are netted in the autumn when the grapes are ripening to protect them from being snatched by birds. In November, the grapes must be registered with VQA (Vintners Quality Alliance) inspectors, whereupon the grape variety, acreage and estimated tonnage are verified. The grapes are then left on the vine until a sustained temperature of minus 8 degrees Celsius or lower is reached. Depending on the season, this could happen anytime from December to February. (Here, the writer braves the cold for about 20 minutes of fake harvesting for a photo op.)

Photo by Katie Desharnais

During Icewine season, wineries and grape growers like Trevor Falk of Falk Vineyards, keep a careful watch on the weather forecast, looking for a stretch of temperatures between -10 and -12 °C. This specific range will produce juice in the range of 35 to 39 ° Brix (roughly equivalent to the percent sugar in the juice). Typically, a period of at least 6 hours is needed to harvest and press the grapes – and it’s usually an overnight job. Still, Trevor keeps on smiling.

Photo by Katie Desharnais

During the time between the end of the growing season and harvest, the grapes dehydrate and the juices are concentrated and develop the characteristic complexity of Icewine. The typical varietals used for Icewine in Ontario are Vidal, Riesling and Cabernet Franc. They thrive here.

Photo by Katie Desharnais

Once the grapes are harvested, they are pressed in small hydraulic presses under higher pressure than is normal for grapes harvested during the regular season. That’s because these grapes are frozen; most of their mass is water and is left behind as ice in the press. Only a small amount of concentrated juice is extracted.

Photo by Katie Desharnais

Pressed while still frozen, the grapes yield a sweet concentrated juice that is incredibly flavourful; almost like a nectar. Look at how thick that looks.

Photo by Katie Desharnais

Imagine if grape juice tasted like cotton candy, sunshine and rainbow ponies all wrapped into one delicious gulp? That’s what this freshly pressed Icewine juice tastes like. “Enjoy every drop,” says Falk Vineyards patriarch, Bill Falk. “That glass is worth about $8 of Icewine,” he winks.

The post Here’s What Icewine Harvesting in Niagara Wine Country Looks Like appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“We’ve lost an enormous amount of intelligence in the past 50 years,” says McMillan. “And we’ve lost a lot of skills. My father and most of his friends came from subsistence farming. Growing up they all had chickens, they knew how to slaughter a pig and pick apples and make applesauce. They also knew what it was to understand literature. They read Steinbeck. They read Dickens. They were well versed in fishing, hunting and music. They were even great at getting the information they needed without the Internet. It was called going to the library and studying.”

“Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse”, is an opus of a cookbook where you learn how to do everything from making a chaga mushroom stock to delicious smoked nuts, and even your own bouillon cubes. (Note: for that one you’ll need a hashish pipe.)

Still, we wanted to learn more so asked the Joe Beef gang a handful of quick-fire questions. For the sake of space, we’ve edited their answers together.

The Apocalypse is here…we have 5 questions:

MODERN FARMER: City or country?

JOE BEEF GANG: The country. We can feed ourselves in the country. There’s fresh spring water. Less competition. No climbing over dead bodies. If you want to be around the most resourceful, knowledgeable and the best environment to survive, go to the first nations reservations. They’ve persistently kept these skills alive.

MF: Below ground or above ground?

JBG: Above ground. Solar panels. Longer viewpoint so you can see danger coming. Vitamin D. Apartments at ground level don’t sell. It’s better being rained on while high than being flooded in a hole.

MF: Fresh food or canned food?

JBG: We have a cellar centerfold in our cookbook preparing for the fact that the fields and food will be gone. Canned peaches. Canned milk to be able to make ice cream. Good canned is great. Or how about dried food? Potato flakes, lentils, chickpeas, a good steady store of dried vegetables. Spices. Salted foods.

MF: Day or night?

JBG: People get manic around too much light. But a long winter? That’s hard too. But we choose darkness.

MF: Fight or flight?

JBG: To paraphrase Bruce Lee, “It’s not how strong you can withstand the fight; it’s how strong you can avoid getting into the fight.” This is not about surviving. It’s about thinking about not getting there in the first place because we’ve all acted like idiots.

The post 5 Questions for the Brilliant Minds Behind “Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse”, On How to Survive the Apocalypse appeared first on Modern Farmer.

I recently ducked into an unassuming worn-wood strip of a restaurant where I ate a table full of Japanese izaykaya such as quivering Hokkaido scallops sauced with yuzu, koshu and nuoc cham, matchless nigiri, and super-crunchy chicken skin chips topped with nitsume, scallions, mayo and bonito. I probably ate a dozen dishes or more, all of them complex, nuanced and fanciful. Chef Darren MacLean and his small brigade created these plates at Shokunin, in a tiny open kitchen in downtown Calgary.

After tasting his food, the first surprise was realizing the chef is a white guy from landlocked Alberta. The second surprise came when learning that this relatively unknown chef – even by Canadian standards – was invited to compete on Netflix’s “The Final Table”. And the third surprise (spoiler alert) was that he makes it to the finals.

After tasting his food I just had to sit down with Darren MacLean to find out if he’s got more surprises up his sleeve. It turns out, he does. A new restaurant on the way, and a fish-aging program.

Chef Darren MacLean at his Calgary restaurant with an aged fish.

“We age fish,” says MacLean. “We butcher them and keep them on the bone, heads off, guts out, and we scale them but leave the skins intact. Then we vacuum-seal them and keep them in the fridge in really cold ice water — we constantly change the ice so that it ages at almost one degree for four-to-five days. It breaks it down and gives it a wonderful texture.”

At his restaurant I discovered it’s especially great for nigiri. You know how sometimes you can have a bite of sushi and it almost snaps? Too rigid, with an off-putting chew. At Shokunin, they kill the fish by running a wire through the spines so the fish don’t go through rigor mortis. “With the aging it allows the fish to go through a bit of necessary decomp in order to bring out the sweetness of the flesh,” explains MacLean.

The chef traveled through Japan for eight months before opening Shokunin several years ago. He also visited Japan in his early twenties and every year thereafter four or five times a year to solidify his knowledge and to learn new techniques. He says that Google is also a hell of a thing.

“We’re also developing a dry-age fish program for larger hiramasa [Japanese yellowtail].” It’s a process by which you remove the scales and keep the skin intact. The skin ages in a static environment at about one degree. “You can’t have air circulating,” says MacLean. “You basically build a fridge within a fridge.” He says you hang the fish and the skin tightens up. The fish develops and begins to age, not unlike a piece of red meat. “In Japan I had a 14-day aged tuna belly,” he says. “It tasted like a medium rare steak.”

The post This “The Final Table” Chef is Doing Something Amazing with Fish appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The isolated people here lived and died by the sea ever since this land was settled by the English and Irish (plus some Scots and French, hence the warbly accent) who came to fish for cod. Everything was going as well as it could here until factory fishing trawlers appeared on the horizon in 1951, devastating the once plentiful cod stocks and, for the most part, the Newfoundlanders’ way of life. In 1992, the Canadian government imposed a moratorium on East Coast cod fishing, thinking the depleted stocks would rebound. This turned out to be the final blow, as 30,000 families from 500 small communities dotting Newfoundland were left with empty nets and a likewise future.

But on Fogo Island, things were different. The fact that they voted against the provincial government’s offer of resettlement in the 1950s ended up saving them. Instead of moving, the islanders decided to stay and adapt, forming a fishing cooperative and switching gears to pursue crab, lobster, and shrimp, waiting for the day that the cod would return.

I’m in Roy Dwyer’s Chevy pick-up driving around for a tour of Fogo Island. Dwyer is a born-and-bred Fogo fisherman – he brought in 3,000 pounds of hand-lined cod last summer, most of which he filleted and froze, some of which he salted – and is explaining the can-do culture of living on an island in the middle of the ocean. “You break it, you fix it,” he says. “You haven’t got it, you make it.” Dwyer, who is also a storyteller, a poet, and plays a pickup game of hockey three nights a week, lives in the small community of Tilting, with his wife, Christine. They’re happy here, and you would be, too, if you could see the views from their home. “We’re on the edge of the North Atlantic,” says Roy. “Beyond that ice is Iceland, Greenland, and Scotland.”

Fogo fisherman Roy Dwyer shows off some of his cod catch, dried for winter, in his home.

Christine is frying up cod in the pan, along with their tongues, and the mashed potatoes are good to go. “Roy caught the fish and, of course, the tongues came with them,” she says, “and the potatoes are from our garden.” A color burst array of canning jars lands at the center of the table: homemade pickled beets, tartar sauce, and million dollar pickles. It’s all just too good.

A color burst array of canning jars lands at the center of the table: homemade pickled beets, tartar sauce, and million dollar pickles.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada’s easternmost province, hospitality is practically a contact sport, where dinners turn into kitchen parties full of song, fiddles, and dishes that reflect the warmth of the locals. But always, at the heart of it, is cod.

It’s also always on the menu at the 29-room Fogo Island Inn, a beacon for luxury, sustainability and community building. The inn was imagined and built by the Shorefast Foundation, a multifaceted local entity that includes micro-lending to business-minded islanders, helps support the Fogo Island Fish program, and created the Fogo Island Arts program (four modernist studios are occupied by international artists on months-long residencies). The studios were designed by Newfoundland-born, Norway-based architect Todd Saunders, who also created the largest Shorefast prong – the inn itself, a stunning statement on stilts overlooking the Atlantic.

At the inn’s cozy little theater where I’m lounging in my plush recliner with one eye on the candy cart, I’m eagerly waiting to watch a documentary about Fogo. Alan Cobb, who helped found the Shorefast Foundation, gives me some context to go along with my popcorn.

“Way back in the 1950s, when I was a young boy, we had about 6,000 people on this island,” he says. Fogo was home and fishing was everything. But through the ups and downs of politics and overfishing, the population has flat-lined at around 2,400. After having fished sustainably for 400 years, by the time the 1960s rolled around, there was just about no more fish to catch. And this place needs fish. “Staying here at the inn, it’s not just about the nice view, the food, or the soft bed,” explains Cobb. “It’s not enough. Without a culture or a community, this island dies.” The good people of Fogo would not, could not, let that happen. So they stayed put, and did what they’ve always done. They fished.

“We use our old method of catching fish, one by one, the most environmentally sustainable way possible,” says Cobb. The fish is caught with a hook and line; the fishermen only catch the cod in small quantities, about 500 or 600 pounds per day. Once back on land, the cod are filleted and then frozen with special technology to bring the fish to market in the very same condition it left the plant. It’s the most pristine cod I’ve seen, and has already made its way onto 30 high-end menus across Canada. In fact, I’ve eaten Fogo cod at many of the best restaurants in Toronto and Montreal, where it is a prized catch.

Back in the theater at the Fogo Island Inn, upon learning about the fishers of Fogo, the National Film Board of Canada dispatched a team and shot a documentary about the island and its fish. It’s called, “Hand. Line. Cod.” and it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. It’s a wonderful short doc by filmmaker Justin Simms, about a gritty island holding steadfast to tradition; a culture based on the burden of survival.

It’s a place for which I’ve fallen, hook, line and sinker.

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