Don Genova's Blog

Anyone who uses a fireplace or wood-burning stove across British Columbia is no doubt hauling, splitting, piling and yes, burning their wood these days to keep warm.  But there’s a different kind of wood-burning device out there gaining in popularity, a very efficient device that is being used all year round, and that is the wood-burning oven.  I checked out some of these devices, both commercial and private, for this week’s edition of Island Artisans.  I’m aware of commercially used wood-burning ovens at places like Merridale Cider, the James Barber Memorial Oven at Providence Farm, a wonderful bread oven at Salt Spring Island Bread Company, Wild Fire and Fol Epi in Victoria and there’s even one now at the Vancouver Island University Nanaimo campus, so students in the culinary program are being trained in how to use them.  On the personal side, I’ve visited friends with wood-burning ovens on Salt Spring Island, Fairburn Farm, Glenora and this beautiful oven in the photo at left in Cowichan Bay.  My wife is clamouring for one in our back yard, so I’m declaring it a delicious trend.
This photo to left shows the Le Panyol oven owned by Nick Versteeg of DV Cuisine, a beautiful French-made oven.
They are really multi-purpose units.  When you get them stoked up you are looking at 700 or 800 degrees Fahrenheit of heat, ideal for baking a thin crust pizza in minutes.  But good wood-burning ovens really retain their heat for hours and hours at a lower temperature, which makes them ideal for baking bread after the pizzas are done, and after the bread you can do long braising dishes like baked beans or short ribs, anything that likes a nice low and slow cooking.  But I have to say that a pizza straight out of a wood burning oven is just amazing…

Now with two locations, Pizzeria Prima Strada in Victoria is churning out pies at a rate of up to six every two minutes.  I’ve eaten their pizza at their first restaurant on Cook Street, and from their great little mobile wood-burning oven at Feast of Fields, but I hadn’t been to their new location on Bridge Street, tucked into what’s being called the Rock Bay neighbourhood.  There I met up with Cristen DeCarolis-Dallas, who owns Prima Strada along with her husband Geoff.

Prima Strada came along when Geoff decided to get back into the restaurant business after he could no longer find the great thin crust pizzas the couple enjoyed when they lived in the San Francisco Bay area in California.  They did plenty of research and came up with the perfect pizza oven for making crispy slash chewy thin crust pizzas. But Canadians are known for loving those giant-sized thick crust pizzas piled high with gooey toppings…Cristen says they knew they would have to embark on some education of the pizza public. "I had a customer the other day who was starting to load up the pizza with toppings in their order and I had to calm them down and say you don't need all of that.  In fact, most thin crust pizzas are just tomato sauce and cheese, or sauce and some meat.  There's nothing wrong with putting on good quality toppings, but on a thin crust they can make the pizza soggy, and the nice thing about our pizzas is that they don't necessarily taste the same with every bite!"

(to the right, the special flour used for the pizza dough at Prima Strada)

I got to get up close and personal with the oven at the Bridge Street location, which was fired up for the lunch service.  To give it an extra bit of heat, they just have to toss a few pieces of wood onto the coals where they burst into flames. This one was imported from Italy from a company that has been making them since the 1950's. I stood there and watched as Tomoko, the woman who makes the dough and maintains the oven, cooked a couple of pizzas.  I timed them with my watch, almost precisely 2 minutes from the time they went in to the time they came out.

If you're interested in learning more about wood-burning ovens, visit this Brick Bake Oven page where there are plenty of links to keep you busy.  If you're not interested in building one yourself, the Forno Bravo people in California have pre-assembled ovens you can purchase one online and have it  delivered to your door!

Today on Island Artisans the blistering truth came out:  Vancouver Island artisans make excellent hot sauces!

Our palates are wonderful things.  They can taste the sweet, plummy undertones of a red wine, the saltiness of an olive, the sour in a dill pickle, and of course, the heat of a hot pepper.  How much we like that heat, or even stand the heat, is very much a matter of personal taste.  The idea of capturing the heat of a pepper in a hot sauce condiment has been around for a long time, but people keep on inventing new versions of it for us to try, including some discovered recently on Vancouver Island.

Dad’s Westcoast Wildfire Awesome Sauce, made in Lake Cowichan.  The name is a mouthful, let’s take it apart.  The Dad is Jon Newton , father to teenager Emma.  Jon wanted West Coast in the name.  The Wildfire comes from the heat of course, but also from a wildfire the family witnessed when driving back to Lake Cowichan from Port Renfrew when they were discussing the name of the sauce.  And the ‘awesome sauce’ part?  Emma.  Apparently that’s what some people (read teenagers) say when something is really great.  Put it all together and you get  Dad’s Westcoast Wildfire Awesome Sauce.

Although Jon is the real hot sauce fan it’s his wife Liz who developed the formula and does all the cooking of the sauce.  Visiting the kitchen of their Lake Cowichan home reveals the hard work and care put into the making of the sauce. The sauce is made in small batches, jarred and labeled completely by hand. 

Jon says they got into making the sauce when the economy went into its recent downspin:
“I’ve always loved hot sauce, and when we were thinking about another way to make money it seemed like a natural; people love to eat, they love good food, a gourmet hot sauce that is local and different should work.”

Liz Newton didn’t really like hot sauce, so it’s a little ironic to watch her carefully stirring the pot and ladling sauce into the jars.  “It’s the fresh peppers, ginger and garlic that make the difference in our sauce, I think.  We don’t use any preservatives and there are 18 different herbs and spices in the mix.  I grind many of the spices myself, such as the black peppercorns, just before they go into the sauce so you get the full pungency.  And I never liked hot sauces because they were always too vinegary and salty, so I decided to use balsamic vinegar instead of ordinary white table vinegar to smooth it out.”

Jon and Liz are very committed to keeping this a local Island enterprise, from the source of the peppers(a hothouse in Chemainus) to the people they hope to be able to eventually hire as the business grows.  And they do need it to grow so they can make a living at it, they aren’t right now.  When purchasing the hot sauce at one of their supermarket outlets, the cashier had to check the price on it and she seemed to think it was a little pricy at $7.99 for 250 millilitres.  But Jon and Liz say price has not entered into the equation when it comes to customer satisfaction. Jon: “The response since we started selling this nine months ago has been singularly favourable.  I think we’ve maybe had three people who said they didn’t like it for some reason or another.”  Liz: “We sold 1200 jars over the summer and people keep coming back for more.  And it’s not really expensive compared to other gourmet hot sauces I’ve seen online or in the States, which can be up to $12 a bottle, and it’s usually a smaller bottle than ours.  I think that cashier must not eat very much hot sauce!”

If you try the sauce and find it a little too hot for your taste, you’ll be pleased to know Jon and Liz will soon release their Westcoast Rain Forest version of Awesome Sauce, which will be milder version of the original, and they also sell a barbecue rub you can try on all sorts of foods for grilling as well.  For retail locations click here.

I’m aware of a couple of other lines of hot sauces that are made here in BC but I’d love to hear about more, so feel free to tell me about your favourites in the comments section below.

Awassi Ebesse Zozo Hot Sauce was developed by Edmond Segbeaya, an immigrant from West Africa who is now based in Nelson.

Denzel’s Hot Sauce is based in the Okanagan…they grow great hot peppers there!  I haven’t tasted any of these sauces, but I have tried Denzel’s BBQ Sauce collaboration with my barbecue guru, Ron Shewchuk, and if the hot sauces are of the same quality as the barbecue sauce, then you’re in for a sizzlin’ experience!

If you have any favourite hot sauces please tell me about them!

Somehow it took 25 years to get started, but now that it’s going, it can only be labelled a delicious concern.  Today on Island Artisans, I told the story of two women who started a business in a small home kitchen, but are now reaching around the world with their products.

Mind you, they weren't trying to get the business going all that long. In fact, Maureen Drew and Judy McArthur of Artisan Edibles in Parksville were old friends on different paths of life that just happened to get together again after 25 years.  The now-momentous meeting took place at the Filberg Festival in Comox, and as Maureen Drew explains, they discovered after all these years they had developed common interests: "I had a product that I was getting ready to market, marketing is my background, and Judy already had these great preserves she was selling, and as we talked we discovered we had so many things in common, gourmet cooking, sustainability, using local products…I told her I thought that maybe we could partner up and rebrand everything.  Six months later, she gave me a call and we decided to found Artisan Edibles."

That was back in 2005, and now they’re just coming up on their fifth anniversary. They started out with just four products, now they are up to a line of twelve.  There are few jellies made with Vancouver Island fruits, but with a welcome exotic twist.  So you have raspberry jelly with cardamom added, blueberry and lavender jelly, rhubarb, sour cherry and ginger jelly as well.  Then they get a little savoury with quince mostarda, which is a traditional Italian preparation with a bit of heat to it, an apple, fig and ginger chutney and two kinds of antipasto:
"Our original is with wild albacore tuna, and it has a real variety of vegetables, roasted red pepper, artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, but we do find that more and more people were asking us for a vegetarian version, so we took the tuna out and put in white Italian cannellini beans, and people are loving it, it's really nice with bruschetta, goes great with pasta, and, well, people are just basically eating it out of the jar!"

Maureen is a little shy about admitting who one of their biggest fans is because she hasn't heard it directly from the source.  But the owner of one of the shops that sells her products in West Vancouver says musician Diana Krall loves the antipasto and serves it at all of her dinner parties.

With fans like Krall, no wonder some of their products have just been picked up for export to Germany by a company there that has a shop full of Canadian products. Maureen and Judy are ecstatic to have cracked the demanding and discerning European market.  Maureen says they are constantly trying to track trends that may help them develop new products. Their rose petal scone mix and champagne rose petal jelly were on the shelves to hit the 'florals in food' trend spot-on and they developed their Meyer Lemon chutney even before Meyer Lemons became hip.  So in a relatively short five years, they’ve come a long way from the weekend they launched the business.

"We launched Artisan Edibles at the Out of Hand Christmas Craft Fair, a really great place to get into, in the 'Gourmet Lane' part of the show, of course we were very nervous," chuckled Maureen. "Taking the product to the public in a bigger way, but it was well-received, and we immediately got an agent after the show and suddenly our fax machine was ringing with orders for over a thousand dollars wholesale and we were elated.  Somebody likes these products!"

For more information about the products and where they can be purchased, just visit the Artisan Edibles website.

***Bonus Offer***  In November I start teaching classes at a new cookware store in Victoria called Cook Culture. On today's show I offered up two free spots at my first class, on Friday, November 12th.  The class is called Pasta 101 and I'll demonstrate how easy it is to make your own pasta from scratch and a couple of all-purpose sauces as well. To enter for a chance to win the spots at the class you need to send an email to the crew at All Points West about your worst cooking disaster.  They'll do a draw to pick a winner.  Send your story to allpointswest@cbc.ca.  Act now, they'll draw tomorrow! (Thursday, Oct. 28th)