Food Matters – Back to School: FoodSafe

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Don Genova

Next week, thousands of Vancouver Island school children head back to school. I was feeling a little nostalgic for the good old days of back to school, so I decided to go back to school myself. But just for one day. 

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I went to school to learn about food safety. I’ve been asked to do a cooking demonstration at the grand opening of the new Victoria Public Market on September 14th. The kitchen there comes under the regulation of the Vancouver Island Health Authority and as such, people cooking there for the public need to have their FoodSafe Level 1 certificate and that means me. This is a course you can do online over a twenty-day period, or you can do it all in one day. So, last Saturday I found myself in a classroom in downtown Duncan to learn more about food safety from the instructors at Safer Food Education and cram for an exam at the end of the day.There were 35 of us in the classroom on Saturday, which surprised me, so I asked one of my instructors, Jennifer Smith, to fill me in. She told me that the owner or operator of any food business in BC needs to have their FoodSafe certificate, as well as at least one other worker while the business is open. The good news, she says, is that many operators have realized the value of having all of their employers learn about FoodSafe food handling and safety practices, so send them for the training as well. 

I thought that I had a pretty good idea of what is safe and isn’t safe in the kitchen, but I was surprised at how much new information I learned over the course of the day. There are certainly a lot of numbers and details I didn’t know about including the ‘danger zone’, and that is the temperature range in which harmful pathogens can thrive and rapidly multiply, and it’s a pretty large range, from 4 degrees Celsius up to 60 degrees Celsius, with the ideal temperature being that of our body temperature, 37 Celsius or 98.6 Fahrenheit. What I was most surprised about was the most common improper food handling practice. I always thought it was cross-contamination, something like when you let raw chicken mingle with cooked chicken, or you use a cutting board to cut vegetables after you’ve used it to cut up some beef, or you don’t wash your hands properly. 

The number one improper food handling practice is Improper Cooling. So we learned about how to properly cool food, and it doesn’t just mean throwing a pot of hot soup right into the fridge, because even in the fridge, it will take too long to cool down to that 4 degrees Celsius mark, so you could have bacterial growth. And if you don’t heat it up hot enough when you go to serve it again, you are not killing off that potentially harmful bacteria.

Other big no-no’s that can happen in the food service industry: Preparing something too far in advance. One example shown to us was what can happen if you cook a turkey the day before you are actually going to serve it. In the video clip, there was a cascade of mistakes piling onto each other. The turkeys weren’t actually cooked all the way through the day before, so that’s ‘inadequate cooking’, they were left too long on the counter before being refrigerated, the meat wasn’t re-heated to the proper temperature before being put onto a buffet line, which is another big mistake. People who are sick, coming into work, also a major cause of food-borne illness, and cross-contamination is on that list. As we all trooped out for lunch, Glenn Smith, Jennifer’s husband and co-instructor, gave us a few drops of a special gel to rub over our hands. When we came back he shone a black light on our hands and any gel we had missed turned up under the light. I was guilty. The heels of my hands still had some glowing gel on them!

I thought that Jennifer and Glenn, both former health inspectors, did a really good job of bringing the concepts down to earth with solid examples and drilled us in the most important issues to remember for our test. They definitely know their material inside and out, but Jennifer pointed out that the FoodSafe certificate is now only good for a five-year period. It used to be lifetime, but she says after five years, most people wouldn’t be able to pass the test, so there is going to be recertification.

For more information, just visit the FoodSafe BC website.

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Food Matters – Sustainable Wine Packaging

Posted on August 22, 2013 by Don Genova

Wine is a big business in BC. Any licensed restaurant sells wine; we have a growing number of wineries in the province, and the quality of those wines is better than ever. Now the wine industry is trying to address some long-time problems affecting the quality of wine and its overall sustainability.

Let’s talk about quality first. There are lots of things that can go wrong with a wine once it leaves the winery. There could be a problem with the cork or even the screw top and the wine can be spoiled. Improper storage could also lead to spoiled bottles of wine. The percentage of corked or tainted bottles varies widely depending on who you talk to but no one denies it exists, from a low of 1 or 2 percent of all bottles up to 10 or 15 percent. The other factor that can ruin the taste of a wine is the practice in restaurants of selling it by the glass. Once that wine has been opened it usually just sits on the bar with the cork kind of shoved partly in. You really only have a couple of days in which to sell it before it becomes oxidized and doesn’t really taste the way it’s supposed to.

But bars and restaurants want to give the customer more selection, or if you are there for a multi-course meal you might want to start with a glass of sparkling wine, then move on to a white for a fish course and then a red for a meat course, for example. Or you just don’t want to buy a whole bottle because you have to drive home and we have pretty tough drinking and driving regulations. So what we are starting to see now are more systems in restaurants designed to cut down on the spoilage. Some systems allow you to hook your open bottles up to a climate-controlled system that will keep them fresher and doesn’t allow air into the open bottles. Not bad, but you still have to fuss with opening the bottles (which may be corked) and putting them into the system, and if you have some top sellers that could slow you down.

FreshTapFreshTap

Last week I checked out a relatively new system being used at the Hotel Grand Pacific called FreshTap. The FreshTap company represents a growing number of BC wineries, near 50 now, who send stainless steel drums of wine to Vancouver, where FreshTap dispenses the wine into steel kegs that hold the equivalent of 25 750-mL bottles of wine. They get installed to a tap system that looks like a beer on tap system from the outside and suddenly you have wine on tap. The kegs get filled with an inert gas as they get drained to keep oxygen from getting in and once you open a keg, the wine will keep fresh for six to eight MONTHS.

Joe Luckhurst is the marketing manager for Road 13 Vineyards in the South Okanagan and they love the FreshTap system. Joe told me it’s very desirable to get on a ‘wine by the glass’ list in restaurants, since it’s a good form of regular sales and great for your branding. But there is the worry of the wine not being served at its best. The FreshTap system eliminates that worry, and he told me that since signing on with the system they’ve had to put more and more wine aside from their bottling line to satisfy the accounts they have with various restaurants. He’s glad they got in when they did and he’s very happy that FreshTap even has a winemaker on staff to make sure all the transfers from tank to kegs are done properly.

Tetra Pak wineTetra Pak wine

Diverting wine from their bottling line for the kegs amounts to a savings in packaging as well, and that’s the other problem wineries are dealing with when it comes to creating a more sustainable industry…bottles are heavy, they’re expensive, and they can take up a lot of room in a landfill if they’re not recycled. That’s why we are seeing more wines being sold in Tetra-Pak style packaging and the larger boxes that hold 3-litres at a time. Here’s what Tetra-Pak says about wines sold in their packaging: wine in Tetra Pak cartons uses 92% less packaging to deliver the same amount of wine in glass bottles; 54% less energy throughout the entire life cycle; 80% less greenhouse gases; and 35-40% fewer trucks.

boxxleBoxxle

There is still a stigma about buying wine either ‘on tap’ or from a Tetra-Pak or big box. Shauna Burry at FreshTap likens the battle for acceptance for wine in a keg to that of getting people to like wine with screwtops, or Stelvin closures as most of them are called. I think people are a lot more accepting of screwtop wines now, especially wines that aren’t meant to be aged after they’ve been bottled. And if you’re concerned about how a box of wine might look on your counter or bar, there is a company out of the States that has invented a swishy looking container called a Boxxle. You take your 3-litre bag out of its box and slip it into the Boxxle, which has a spring in it that keeps squishing the wine toward the spout as it empties, so you never have to tilt it or squish it to get out the last glass, and the spout is at the top, so you don’t have to hang the Boxxle over a counter to get your wine glass underneath it. So as more companies try to reduce their packaging and shipping costs, and as these kind of solutions become more widely accepted, you’re going to get more quality and more selection along with more sustainability.

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Food Matters – Bean to Bar Chocolate at Organic Fair

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Don Genova

Chocolate is a sweet treat that is enjoyed all over the world, but our enjoyment can often come at a high price to the people who grow the source of that good taste, the cacao bean farmers. Now, a Cowichan Valley chocolate company is taking steps to make sure farmers are paid a fair price for their beans, with delicious results.

DSC 2339Bean To Bar Chocolate

Compared to most chocolate, bean to bar chocolate has many differences, some of which you can see and smell and taste; the others you need to go behind the scenes to learn. So that’s what I did a little while ago, as I visited the production facility of Organic Fair, a company run by Kent and Marisa Goodwin, that manufactures certified organic chocolate bars, among other products, on a farm in Cobble Hill. While they have been making chocolate bars for a while, using certified organic chocolate purchased through fair trade sources, these bars are different in that they are called bean-to-bar chocolate.

DSC 2273Raw Cacao Beans

Instead of buying big slabs of chocolate that’s already been made, in most cases by European manufacturers, like Callebaut or Valrhona, and melting it down to add their own ingredients and make it into smaller bars, Kent and Marisa are actually importing the cacao beans directly from farmers around the world, roasting those beans, peeling them and running them through a machine called a melangeur that does a slow grind on these beans for about three days, turning them, with the addition of some sugar, into beautiful dark chocolate. It’s a very hands-on process with many steps. When they get the beans to Organic Fair, they sort through them, remove any bits of rock or twigs that may have got in the sack, and then they carefully roast them in a rotating container.

DSC 2305Cooling Roasted Beans

The roasting is closely timed, and they pull a few beans out so Marisa can pound them a bit in a mortar and pestle and when she did that for me the chocolaty aroma was quite evident in the bean. The beans all have to be cooled and peeled and crushed into nibs and then they are put into a stainless-steel vat with a couple of heavy, granite wheels and a granite base called a melangeur. Kent explains that the nibs may stay in the melangeur for up to three days to get the right texture and flavour, this is where the sugar is also added as well.

In this early stage of manufacturing for Organic Fair, they’ve been sourcing beans from as many different countries and farmers as possible so they can experiment and figure out which ones they want to feature on a regular basis. Today I had guest host Stephen Smart taste a selection from Nicaragua, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and as far away as Madagascar. With this chocolate, you don’t gobble it down. Sniff first, then just chew a few times and let the chocolate melt on your tongue so you get all the flavour. Each of these bars costs six dollars for 44 grams, which is actually reasonable in the world of small producer, fair trade, certified organic bean to bar chocolate. Marisa explained to me they have tried to keep the price attractive for chocoholics, to let people know what real chocolate tastes like, the different flavour profiles you can get from different beans and different countries, and how it is far superior to most ‘supermarket’ chocolate bars which hardly contain any chocolate at all.  

DSC 2326The Melangeur

Kent and Marisa have been watching this part of the chocolate industry grow and grow over the past five or six years, they’ve seen other small manufacturers get into the business and they know there is a population out there that takes their chocolate seriously and wants to explore different countries of origin, different plantations, so they think their business model is sound, and with internet mail orders these days, they’re not just restricted to selling to retail stores, but they can ship their bars anywhere. But they’re not just in it as a profit-making venture, at the root of all of their products, there is a great caring for the environment and the people who grow their raw ingredients and this particular style of making chocolate is very exciting for Kent from that perspective:

“One of the most exciting things about this venture is that it gives us a chance to take part in an agricultural product that can prevent destruction of the ecosystem or actually help remedy it. Take Madagascar for example. That country has undergone some fairly radical and destructive deforestation over the past few decades, but if the rain forest can be replanted, with cacao trees in the understory, then when those trees mature they can provide a year-round harvest for farmers there, give them a living and make sure they don’t have to cut the rain forest for other reasons.”

DSC 2335Ummm…chocolate!

The bean to bar chocolate bars are available on a limited basis at most Organic Fair retailers right now, but there will be a much wider selection in the fall when the Goodwins have chosen their regular bean suppliers and streamline their manufacturing process. If you can’t find the bean to bar chocolate bards where you regularly buy Organic Fair chocolate, try their online shop at this link.

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Food Matters – Summer Reading List

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Don Genova

We are entering those so-called dog days of summer, where it’s so hot you just want to lie around and do nothing. Or at least take on nothing more strenuous than a good book. If you like reading about eating I’ve got suggestions from this week’s edition of Food Matters.

There are a few qualifiers as to what makes a good . Sometimes it’s just about getting to the books that I bought earlier in the year…or even last year, and never got around to reading. If I’m going to read cookbooks, they need to be cookbooks in which the author has written quite a bit about the recipes, how they came about, their inspiration or history, instead of just looking at a recipe collection. I tend to get into more single-subject cookbooks at this time and if my murder mysteries have a protagonist who is into food, then that makes them even more special to me.

Bitter ChocolateBitter Chocolate

This week I’m reading a book that was published back in 2006. I picked it up a couple of years ago but never got started on it. It’s called Bitter Chocolate; Investigating the Dark Side of the World’s Most Seductive Sweet. The author is Carol Off, who most CBC fans know as the host of As It Happens, Monday to Friday right here on Radio One. Before she went behind the microphone at As It Happens, Carol traveled the world as a foreign correspondent and investigative reporter and this book tells the story of how the people who do the most backbreaking work of harvesting the cacao beans get paid the least amount of money in the chocolate process, if they get paid at all. Even the first chapter of the book is fascinating as she describes the journey into the cacao forests of Cote d’Ivoire.

Christine HaChristine Ha

Cookbooks: The first one is Christine Ha, Recipes from my Kitchen; Asian and American Comfort Food. Christine Ha was the winner of MasterChef season 3 in the U.S. That’s remarkable in itself. What is more remarkable is that Christine Ha is blind. She lost her sight in her twenties, but relearned how to cook using all of her other senses. The recipes in this, her first cookbook, take her Asian heritage and blend it with the other flavours she grew up with in Texas. Renowned snarly chef Gordon Ramsay practically purrs over Christine in his forward to the cookbook, he was one of the chefs who judged her efforts as she defeated 99 other contestants in MasterChef.

PastryPastry

The other cookbook is by Richard Bertinet. It’s called Pastry; A Master Class for Everyone, in 150 Photos and 50 Recipes. I have to say that I am somewhat intimidated by pastry. To me it can be a very finicky part of cooking, and I don’t have the ‘finicky’ gene in me. So I’m going to see if he can cure me of my doubts by using his step to step methods that start with basic pastry dough recipes which you then develop into both sweet and savoury dishes. Richard Bertinet was born and raised in northwest France. That gives him a head start in pastry right there. He is also the owner of The Bertinet Kitchen cooking school in Bath, England, and I think he puts his teaching experience to good use in this cookbook.

Marcus SamuelssonMarcus Samuelsson

Now, I have a memoir, an investigation into the world’s greatest piece of cheese, and a food magazine that was elected Best Food Magazine in the World after just two issues.
The memoir is: ‘Yes, Chef’ by Marcus Samuelsson
The investigation is ‘The Telling Room’, by Michael Paterniti
And the magazine is Fool #3 ( (published in Sweden, $16!)

BrunoBruno

The murder mysteries come from the Martin Walker series about Bruno, Chief of Police. Bruno Correges is the chief of police in the small town of St. Denis in the Perigord region of France, where very nice truffles are found. So while Bruno is solving mysteries, he is also cooking and enjoying great food. One in the series is called, ‘The Dark Vineyard’, and delves into experiments with genetically modified organisms, industrial sabotage and a major wine producer trying to buy up little vineyards around the town. In between all of that there is time for proper breakfasts, decadent dinners and a little bit of sex on the side as well. Very juicy.

One Line A DayOne Line A Day

I brought in one more small but very thick book, but you don’t read this book, you write it! It’s called Cook’s One Line A Day; A Five-Year Culinary Memory Book. This book has one page for every day of the year. Each page is split into five equal sections, where you write down what you cooked in year one at the top. The following year, use the section below, write down what you cooked. You could use it as an eating-out diary as well, but it allows you to trace what you cooked and ate for five years in one handy place. You won’t be writing your next autobiography here, you get six lines per year, but it will be neat to compare your habits from year to year and see if and how your cooking was determined by time of year and availability of ingredients.

And the last word this week goes to the I Heart Local awards. Winners and runners-up in each category were announced this week. Take a look at all of them; celebrate those you’re familiar with, and visit the ones that you haven’t been to before to expand your enjoyment of local food.
 

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Food Matters – Island SodaWorks

Posted on August 1, 2013 by Don Genova

We have been blessed with spectacular weather for all of July and no doubt cold beverage sales have been going through the roof. When we think of the word ‘soda’ we usually think about the big manufacturers out there, the Cokes and Pepsis of the world, but today on Food Matters on CBC Radio’s All Points West, I a much smaller sodamaker to talk about.

DSC 2222The Stubbies…

These sodas come in stubbies, and it’s been a long time since I drank anything out of a ‘stubby’ which used to be the bottle shape for 95% of Canadian-made beer. But when I took my first swig out of a stubby full of naturally-fermented and slightly fizzy pickled ginger and lemon soda I was cheering the return of the stubby. This slightly vinegary concoction called Ginger Shrub is sharp and refreshing and rescued me at the end of a very hot day at a night market in Parksville. That’s where I met Mandolyn Jonasson with her wild array of creative beverages from her Island SodaWorks company.

The other flavours I had for Jo-Ann Roberts to taste today were Victoria Lemonade, which has organic lemons along with rose petals and vanilla bean, and then Dandelion Flowers and Citrus, with yes, dandelion flowers, lemon juice, and lemon, lime and grapefruit zest.

DSC 2218Mandolyn Jonasson

Mandolyn is big on fresh, bright flavours, and that’s what helped attract her to making sodas, she started with ginger beer, which was helping with some health-related issues she was having but when she started going to the Comox Valley Farmers Market and discovering all the wonderful fresh flavours and aromas there, she started doing even more experimentation.

This is soda like you’ve never had it before. Mandolyn takes all-natural ingredients ranging anywhere from pickled Japanese plums to those rose petals to dandelions I mentioned and ferments them in the bottle with a very small amount of organic cane sugar, resulting in a low-sugar, good-for-your gut, tasty beverage. The way most sodas are made today is that you mix together a lot of artificial flavours and a lot of sugar and water and then you carbonate it. But while her company is relatively new, the concept is old…we’re talking the Middle Ages here, when this fermenting process was used to kill bad bugs in water and preserve fruits and vegetable flavours.

There were a couple of reasons that helped her decide to make soda as part of a business. One good reason was that the more sodas she made for people the more they wanted it. And it was a flexible business that allowed her to spend as much time as possible with her young daughter. The business could fit around her daughter’s schedule.

DSC 2217Tastes Like Love

Because this is such a different beverage, she had to jump through several regulatory hoops to get the provincial authorization necessary to sell her product in the first place, mostly because she’s calling it a soda. And  it IS a hard sell at first…as I watched Mandolyn in action at the market she had to do quite a bit of explaining to people in describing exactly what her product is and how it is made, every single one of them, and convince them to spend $4 a bottle. However, she says she has the most loyal clients in the world. Once they try it and like it, they come back, they might buy 12 a week for the family. She admits that these sodas are not for everyone, but she laughs that people who do like it are ‘like addicts’.

Bartenders (or mixologists) are also creating cocktails using Mandolyn’s sodas as a base. Her flavours change with the season and availability of local fruits and produce, I think she’s doing a peach based soda right now. So maybe in the future this natural product will start making a dent in the popularity of those ubiquitous, fizzy, high-fructose corn syrup product sales. For now it is only available at the farmers markets she attends in the Comox Valley area.

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Food Matters – Building Sustainable Food Systems

Posted on July 25, 2013 by Don Genova

There’s a lot of talk going on these days in political circles about making our food systems more sustainable. But is there any action? As usual, I’ve been observing the scene and had some thoughts about it on this week’s edition of Food Matters. 

DSC 1848Spot Prawn Festival

Quite frankly, thinking about sustainable food systems gets me kind of depressed. Take the massive kill-offs of honeybees that we’ve been hearing about. Yesterday I read about a new study from the University of Maryland that reveals commercial honey bees are exposed to a wide variety of agricultural chemicals that impair the bees’ ability to fight off parasites. The bottom line is that bee kill-offs could be the result of many factors all acting in concert. So how quickly can you get regulatory agencies to respond to these studies that would better protect the health of bees? No bees, no pollination, no crops. So that gets me depressed, but then I think we need a little doom and gloom to make things work.

FOOD patricia allenDr. Patricia Allen

I started thinking more about the macro nature of sustainable food systems after I attended a keynote address by Dr. Patricia Allen, the Chair of the Department of Food System and Society at Marylhurst University in Portland, Oregon. Her talk about building sustainable food systems was subtitled Dancing With (Not Around) the Elephants in the Room. So first she told her audience what those elephants are before giving them some more hopeful outlooks on dancing with them.

Signs of elephants: These are some of the issues out there that merely indicate the major problems. One biggie is that policy makers just try to fix food systems by making marginal improvements to policies instead of seeking out entirely new ways of doing things. Here’s another big indicator: food related health problems. Obesity, hypertension, heart disease. At the other end of that scale, hunger and food insecurity. And something we hear about all the time, consolidation in the food industry and the distancing of the consumer from the area that their food is produced.

You would think that there is lots going on these days to combat some of these ‘symptoms’, I guess you would call them, but this is where Dr. Allen really sent me for a loop, because she believes that a lot of the programs and practices that we see as getting back to sustainable food systems are merely ‘covering the tracks’ of the elephants in the room. She includes in this list farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture, fair trade programs, food policy councils, even organic farming and urban agriculture!

But you say, ‘that’s a list of things most of us really do associate with changing our food systems, what’s wrong with them?’ Patricia Allen says if you look under the surface of these programs and ideas, they don’t equally help all members of society. She says a truly sustainable food system would enhance equity amongst its members, would be fair to all in the distribution of benefits and give everyone a chance to participate. So some examples of what she means: Organic farmers in California lobbied against a movement that eventually banned the use of a tool called a shorthandled hoe, a tool that created all kinds of ergonomic problems for workers. Then there are the low participation rates of low-income consumers in farmers’ markets and Community Supported Agriculture, and Farm to School programs relying mostly on flexible labour which doesn’t provide enough hands-on care to make the programs work in the long run.

The elephants that she finally revealed to her audience really are big. Exploitation. Oppression, and Privilege versus Powerlessness. She took us through some examples…in Exploitation, you find unequal distribution of wealth and income, concentrated ownership in the hands of the wealthy, who also control the surplus of any commodities. With Oppression, you find not only gender discrimination but racio-ethnic discrimination and marginalization as well. Privilege and Powerlessness? If you want to be a farmer, how do you get land? Maybe you inherited it, or you come from an already wealthy family, you’re not going to be able to afford it, so she says we need to talk about land tenures.

So how do we fix things, is it a matter of going back and doing things ‘the good old-fashioned’ way? Dr. Allen says there really isn’t a great system to go back to. Those kind of original systems, especially in the United States, gave us imported slaves used to export sugar. Her prescription is to first of all bring the oppression into view. Let’s reveal the terrible working condition for a lot of people in the food industry. Farmers markets are certainly going to continue, but use them to educate people about the state of the industry. Get people to look at themselves, she says we want to be fair but we don’t necessarily act on it. Everybody eats, and they think about food every day, whether they have food or don’t have food, and Dr. Allen says that’s a key…get that thinking power going and act on it together, because, as she notes, ‘no one group, no one person, can imagine the scale of change that is needed to stay the degradation of our ecology. And that leads us back to those bees being killed by so many different factors. It’s going to take a lot of people from many different disciplines working together to save our bees.  

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