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Blogs are a part of the recipe writing eco-system

By Joanne Kaileh

Finding a recipe these days is really simple. Add one computer, a dash of Internet connection, a sprinkle of keywords and voila!

The proliferation of food blogs on the Internet means recipes are just a click away. Whether you’re looking for a vegan dish, a gluten-free dish or just looking to cook authentic pad Thai, there is a recipe on a blog out there to help you make that meal. But with this rise of food blogs are people turning away from the traditionally published recipes from cookbooks and magazines and instead clicking away to their taste buds’ desires?

According to Statistics Canada, Canadians love to blog. Almost 27 per cent of Canadians contributed to blogs in 2009, a huge jump from just over 20 per cent in 2007, which is good news for the 63 per cent of Canadian women who spend their time searching for recipes and food related content online according to Market Magazine. What’s more, all five studies found 46 per cent of Americans spend more time engaged with food online than with print media.

Taiba Murtaza owns a dessert catering business called, love, sugarplum, and says she uses the Internet to search for recipes for her personal home cooking. While she does use cookbooks and magazines at times, she prefers online because it’s quicker and there is a larger recipe selection.

“I find online is really easy because in a cookbook I’d have to go to the index or table of contents and look up what I’m trying to find, and then of course not having the same kind of selection because it’s limited to what was printed,” Murtaza said. “With online I can just type in words and Google does the research for me and it’ll bring these options up. It’s just easier and more convenient to go onto a blog.”

Murtaza is just one of the many people who prefer finding recipes online, something Marie Porter, food blogger of Celebration Generation and cookbook author, understands. Porter believes the rise in food bloggers can affect cookbook sales.

“I definitely get far more traffic on my blog than I do in book sales…It’s just that they’re not investing in my paper product because it’s probably ‘why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free’ kind of mentality,” she said.

Porter currently has her fourth cookbook coming out soon called Beyond Flour: A New Kind of Gluten-Free Cookbook and says she’s refraining from publishing anything from the book her blog until after its launch. She feels this will help encourage people to purchase her cookbook.

Cookbooks aren’t the only area blogs might be affecting, it’s magazines as well. Angie McKaig, digital product director for St. Joseph Media, believes that magazines need to be mindful of the impact food blogs have.

“I do think that magazines need to be aware that they have much larger competition nowadays.”

But even with the rise of food blogs, McKaig says magazines are still a tool people use when looking for recipes because she feels they have a more reliable turnout rate.

“One of the biggest things that magazines can offer from a perspective of recipe and food development is the longer testing times. When you find a food blogger who has written a recipe it’s very possible that they’ve cooked that once, maybe twice,” she said.

What’s more, McKaig believes blogs and traditional print publications can actually work together to grow a stronger business.

“Bloggers are a way for publishers to guarantee audience for new cookbooks, rather than testing an unpublished author. Some of the more prolific food bloggers have gone on to have their books published.”

Food bloggers also act as public relations for existing mainstream cookbooks by broadcasting favourite recipes from cookbooks on their blog.

Danielle Johnson, senior publicist for Raincoast Books, has firsthand experience working with food bloggers and believes they’re a big help to the food publishing industry.

She explains food bloggers ask for excerpts from cookbooks to post online, including a link to where people can purchase the book. This way, both blogs and publishers benefit from the exchange of information.

“This is publicity, this is exactly what we want, for bloggers to promote our books. We all work together.”

Johnson, who has worked for Raincoast Books for 15 years, says despite the abundance of recipes found online she hasn’t witnessed a decline in cookbook sales.

“It’s a nice gift. It’s nice to have a collection,” she says. “People love a really good cookbook.”

While the majority of people, like Murtaza, now reach for recipes online, many in the publishing industry maintain that access to free recipes on food blogs is not a bad thing for the recipe publishing industry.

“So when you take all of it together, I tend to think it [blogs] becomes part of the whole eco-system and, if anything, it’s more beneficial than less beneficial,” McKaig said. 

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Akasaka Japanese restaurant talks about what makes the restaurant gluten-free.

Produced by Sun Lingmeng

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Totally unexpected, but this burger at The Whippoorwill was voted the best burger over $10 by NOW readers, and we can definitely understand why! 

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Ontario ginseng: an obscure treasure

By Sun Lingmeng

According to Statistics Canada, millions of dollars worth of crops are harvested from the fertile land of southwest Ontario. Among those successful crops, Ontario ginseng may be one of the least known of all. Still obscure to many westerners today, ginseng has been obsessed over by eastern cultures for centuries, and Ontario ginseng has grown from a niche crop to one of the world’s leading products within a few short years. And because there is so much demand this year, most ginseng has been purchased even before it’s harvested. 

FAMILY HISTORY WITH GINSENG

While conducting a tour at a ginseng farm in Scotland, Ont., Diana Yeh, the vice president of Great Mountain Ginseng Co. Ltd. recalls her first memory of migrating to Ontario and growing ginseng. In 1972, Yeh moved from Taiwan with her husband and their infant son. At that time, her parents-in-law were one of the earliest Chinese growers in Ontario. 

“They worked for the local farmers without charge for three years, to learn to grow ginseng. Eventually the farmer agreed to give them the harvest of one-fourth of an acre,” Yeh said. 

In 1976, the Yeh family founded the Y.E.Ginseng, the predecessor of today’s Great Mountain Ginseng Co. Ltd. in Canada. Today, the company, claiming to be “the first Chinese- owned and operated company to establish a major commercial ginseng agri-business in Ontario”, runs as an Ontario ginseng grower, exporter, wholesaler and retailer, and has nine retail stores across the country. 

PAIN AND GAIN

Although Ontario has fertile soil, growing ginseng is a risky and costly process. In the first year, ginseng grows to about the size of a human finger. Following is two to four years of maturation with flowering once a year. Plucking the flower will leave a hole at the root tip that shows the age of the plant. However, the last thing growers want to see is their years of work damaged by pests and diseases.  

“The red root disease spreads really fast. My father-in-law once stayed up all night to figure out a solution. And he had to uproot a whole ginseng to prevent it from spreading to the others,” said Yeh. The disease will lead to deeper colour of the root. Once the quality gets worse, the price will drop. 

Besides natural challenges, human  behaviour plays a crucial role in the market. In the late 1990s, due to the tobacco-planting decline, many farmers began growing ginseng as the harvest techniques share a similar drying requirement. Unfortunately, oversupply of ginseng and low selling prices phased out many growers. 

This year, Yeh says the ginseng yield continues to shrink due to the atrocious weather in the last three years. There was drought in the summer of 2011 that dried up the plants, and the excess of rain in 2012 flooded the roots. This summer, insufficient sun prevented the ginseng from growing larger. As the yield is expected to be much lower, the price of ginseng will increase significantly. 

OVERSEAS RIVALRY

In recent years, farmers in northeast China began growing Jilin ginseng, which puts Ontario ginseng into a tight spot. “Surprisingly, North America is the biggest market for the ginseng from China,” said Yeh.

Jilin ginseng roots are largely exported to North America. And they are fobbed off as Ontario ginseng and sold at a lower price. Because of this, it is believed that some restaurants that use ginseng as an ingredient in Toronto are using Jilin ginseng to lower costs. 

To cope with foreign imports, Yeh emphasizes the uniqueness of Ontario ginseng, “Once a professor told me, Ontario ginseng has a kind of ferment. When you leave them in the sun, the Ontario ginseng will turn sour but the other kind will not. In this way, you can tell which the real Ontario ones are,” she said.

According to Yeh, it is the ginsenoside of the Ontario ginseng that makes the product stand out. For years they shipped their product to Taiwan and worked with institutes of biotechnology to develop new products such as a face cream that contains extracts of Ontario ginseng launched this year. 

Besides overseas competition, Ontario ginseng is also facing the return of locally grown tobacco. Due to the drain ginseng has on the soil, it can grow only once on each piece of land. John Lessif, the mayor of Tillsonburg Ont., points out that tobacco is making ginseng a less attractive crop for farmers. 

“What is concerning to ginseng growers is that growing tobacco is becoming more popular. So there is a little bit of concern, not so much of running out of agricultural land, but who uses it for what,” Lessif said. 

MORE THAN JUST EATING

Nowadays, Ontario ginseng is more than an ingredient, it has been reinvented in several different ways. Lijuan Wang, a tourist from China, spent over five hundred dollars at Yeh’s ginseng farm tour. Her trophies include fresh ginseng to make soups, bag-packed crumbs for tea, soft and hard ginseng candies and the newly developed ginseng facial cream and masks. 

“Ontario ginseng is a kind of ‘must-have’ souvenir when we visit Canada. And we are excited to see the new developments as a smart way to preserve this valuable plant,” Wang said.

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How Authentic is Toronto's Chinese Food Scene?

By Sun Lingmeng

Many Torontonians take advantage of the city's ethnic diversity and enjoy all the great food our cultural mosaic has to offer. But when it comes to Chinese food, these days authenticity triumphs. 

As a newcomer to Toronto from southern China, finding my favourite comfort foods in Toronto has been a challenge. For example, growing up in a food culture that suggests no dinner should be served without fresh chicken, I was shocked to learn live chickens are not allowed for sale in Toronto. The meaty taste and chewy texture of a freshly butchered chicken is so different from the frozen poultry people pick up in the supermarkets.     

No matter how you prepare chicken—barbecued, broiled or fried— to me nothing compares to the taste of fresh chicken and Torontonians are missing out.  

But Gizelle Lau, a freelance travel and food writer based in Toronto, feels differently. Lau was born in Toronto and her parents are from Hong Kong.       

Over the past few years, she has been busy reviewing newly-opened Toronto restaurants. After her trip to Hong Kong, she thinks Chinese dishes in Toronto are better than those from their place of origin. 

“That’s because the ingredients in Toronto are better than those in Hong Kong,” she said. 

Sam Guan agrees, a cook now working in one of the most popular Chinese restaurants in Toronto. Guan first came to Canada in 2008. About four years later, he graduated from the culinary program of Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ont., and embarked on a career in Chinese food culture. He shares Lau’s feeling that access to better quality ingredients makes Chinese food served in Toronto better than back home, but the overall restaurant experience leaves something to be desired.

“The Chinese foods in Toronto are not bad because the ingredients are much better. But the service and decoration in many Chinese restaurants often lowers the customers’ experience,” he said, adding sometimes Chinese restaurants change the way they cook traditional dishes to try and attract more western palates. 

But it is not just western palates affecting the style of Chinese food being served in Toronto. Guan feels Chinese-Canadians have just as much impact on the quality and style of Chinese food as everyone else. 

“What is affecting the Chinese food culture is more and more Chinese people just want to fill their stomachs. They don’t really care about the food,” he said. In contrast, he went on to explain French cuisine has been highly valued by both the French and the rest of the world, and that’s why you don’t find cheap, low-quality French restaurants.

After one year working in a Chinese kitchen in Toronto, Guan says he’s inspired to bring real Chinese food to hungry Torontonians.

“It is a matter of authenticity. Western food is the authentic here, not Chinese food,” he said. Guan wants to open a fusion restaurant where he can prepare Chinese dishes with a slight western twist.

But to be fair to Toronto, China is another country on the other side of the globe. So how does our city compare to Chinese food served in other cities? Lau says it’s is one of the best.

“My friends from Vancouver and Chicago, they all think Toronto has better Chinese food than where they come from. So that’s something you want to appreciate more,” she said.

So what makes the ingredients better in Toronto? Shirley Lum—Toronto-based culinary historian of Chinese descent—credits forward-thinking Dutch farmers from the Holland Marsh, a rich agricultural sector just an hour north of Toronto, for catering to the Chinese food market. Back in the 1980s, they began growing Chinese vegetables such as bok choy to feed growing demand for these vegetables.  Guylan (“Chinese broccoli”) used to be an expensive dish back in the ‘80s and ‘90s. But today, one can find dozens of different locally-grown leafy vegetables originating from mainland China to Taiwan.

Having experienced the early dismal supply of Chinese vegetables at restaurants and grocery stores, Lum is satisfied with what Toronto now offers.

“It was mostly imported and dried vegetables. Now we can get Ontario-grown Asian vegetables. You can virtually cook to reflect the different cultures that are here: Cantonese, Shanghainese, Shandong, Uighur, and Tibetan.”

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Doughnuts to go nuts over

By Joanne Kaileh

The fluffy dough, the shiny glaze and the crispy contour is enough to make your mouth water.

The doughnut has come a long way since the ’60s when doughnut chains first started popping up in Canada. It has evolved into an intricate dessert with bursts of flavours, unique toppings and surprising ingredients. What was once known as 'petty consumption' because they were so cheap to enjoy, the doughnut has gone from humble to haute and you can now find these ‘gourmet doughnuts’ selling for around $3 a piece—a typical coffee shop pastry hovers around $1.

Ashley Jacot De Boinod, the owner of Glory Hole Doughnuts on Queen Street West, is a pastry chef with a passion for the gourmet doughnut. The artisanal bakery, which opened in 2012, has a welcoming aroma of freshly made doughnuts wafting from racks behind the counter. Tempting signs reading Toast and Butter and Fluffer Nutter line the rows of doughnuts in the glass display. For Jacot De Boinod the rising demand for gourmet doughnuts in Toronto couldn’t be better for business.

“We’ve had months where people are literally lining out the door and around the corner… Still to this day if we don’t have certain flavours or if we run out, people go nuts.”

Food and recipe developer, Adell Shneer, has watched the Canadian doughnut evolve over decades. She says she remembers when doughnuts were a huge hit back in the late ’70s and remembers the popularity died down but maintains they never went away. Shneer believes the gourmet reinvention is a way for pastry chefs to explore new territory.

“I love it…I think just the whole trend for everything is to become more interesting and people are taking chances and trying to be creative. It’s great for our industry,” she said.

Another gourmet doughnut business happy to see so much demand for the unique fried creations is Paulette’s Original Donuts, an online wholesale and order-only business. Devin Connell, the co-owner, says she started the business a year ago because it was missing from the Toronto food scene.

“We wanted to do something different. We saw an opening in the market for a really great gourmet doughnut. There are so many people doing cupcakes…we’re sort of a little more old school.”

So why are people eating the gourmet doughnut?

Connell explains the demand for these gourmet doughnuts is because people want to invest in eating handmade “higher quality” food, much like the artisanal doughnut shops provide, instead of “splurging on a doughnut from an assembly line.” In other words, it's cool to eat a fancy doughnut.

Jacot De Boinod feels it’s also because people aren’t afraid to satisfy their cravings. And what better way to do that than with a fried, flavourful, cream-filled creation?

“People are really into indulging themselves fully. I think doughnuts are a natural pairing to that trend,” Jacot De Boinod said.

There’s another thing that draws people in that both Jacot De Boinod and Connell agree on: it’s sheer curiosity for what some of the unusual flavour combinations will taste like, such as blueberry-balsamic and maple-bacon. And Shneer accredits chefs for putting the magic back into plain old doughnuts.

“Chefs have been working to come up with wonderful flavours and the creativity is something that’s awesome and inspiring to see. To take something that’s fairly standard and it’s sort of been elevated. I think it’s really fun,” Shneer said.

But with all these fancy flavours and ingredients are people reaching for the traditional doughnuts any less?

Tiny Tom Donuts has been around for 53 years. You’ve probably tasted their bite-sized doughnuts at the CNE, Canada’s Wonderland and other fairs across the GTA. The video on their website says, ‘Bite size is the right size,” and for many people that’s absolutely right.

Derek Brazier, one of the owners, says that while the gourmet doughnut is here, it’s not influencing them to change their well-known traditional doughnut.

“We stick with our four flavours [cinnamon, icing sugar, chocolate and apple and cinnamon] that everyone knows and loves. I enjoy all those other kinds of doughnuts just like everyone else…[But] We don’t want to mess with our success that we’ve already got established.”

Brazier says business has not been affected by the gourmet doughnut trend. In fact, Tiny Tom Donuts has recently opened their first year-round store in Markham.

But for Shneer, just because the gourmet doughnut trend is here it won’t mean everyone will get on board. She believes there is an audience for each type of doughnut.

“I’m sure there’s still demand for the regular doughnuts like the honey dip and the staple Canadian Tim Hortons style. I think there are palates for both.”

Whether you're willing to pay a premium for gourmet or are craving more coffee shop classics, it's a great time to grab a doughnut.

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Oysters: Today’s shellfish of choice for all the right reasons.

They’re salty, smooth and creamy. They slide down the throat if you let them and they are hard to ignore. 

by Theresa Spohn

Oysters are red-hot but why should you head out to your local oyster shack for a taste?  Oysters are the ultimate sustainable seafood and who doesn’t want to feel good about what they eat. They are always fresh and go well with a drink but most of all they just taste good.

SUSTAINABILITY

The public often gets confused and thinks oysters are bottom feeders but they’re not, according to Patrick McMurray, owner of the oyster house Starfish. Oysters are filter feeders because they eat plankton.  McMurray explained that the more plankton there is in the water the cloudier it gets and with no sunlight other sea life dies.  He sums up his take on sustainability in one line.

“Save the ocean, eat an oyster,” he said.

Dan Donovan who owns the organically sourced seafood shop, Hooked Inc., says oysters have always been sustainable. He explained how much water an oyster actually filters. 

“An oyster will pump about 70 gallons of water a day which is a lot of water for a tiny little oyster,” he said.

He also explained that unlike other acquaculture production oysters are less demanding on the environment. 

“Oyster growing is a pretty solid enterprise: it takes no feed, no harvest of wild fish to feed oysters, soy or antibiotics,” he said.    

Growers put the oysters in the water and they proceed to maturity in three to eight years, depending on the species. 

McMurray and Donovan both mentioned the Billion Oyster Project  in New York City as an example of what oysters can do for the environment.  The project is designed to clean up the murky waters left by Hurricane Sandy.  These oysters are not intended for eating but their beds will clean out the water over the next hundred years.

Rodney Clark, owner of Rodney’s Oyster House, one of the oldest establishments in the city sources his own oysters through both his international licences and his oyster farm Rodney’s Oyster Depot in his native P.E.I, says oyster sustainability is a “no brainer”. 

But he says stewardship of the water is what often gets missed.  There is no point in having good farming methods if run-off of fertilizers and animal waste ruin the nitrate levels.  A nitrate imbalance stimulates the growth of other forms of vegetation while sucking all the oxygen out of the water and killing the plankton the oysters need to survive.

FRESHNESS

What makes oysters particularly appealing as a seafood choice is that they are always “fresh” although those in the business argue that the word fresh may not be the most accurate term. For Clark, “fresh” means 24 hours out of the ocean.  McMurray states oysters travel so well since they are “technically speaking” still alive in their shell after harvest and have a shelf life of one to four weeks.  All the oyster sellers mentioned in this article have delivery schedules to ensure their establishments receive fresh oyster shipments daily.

FLAVOUR

Each oyster bed has its own unique characteristics and where they come from makes all the difference according to Donovan. 

“In the wine industry there is a term terroir, it is an expression of the earth through the wine, you should be able to taste the mineralities in the wine,” he said.  “The same thing in oysters, we call it merroir because the oyster takes all the characteristics of that place it was in, generally in the last four to six weeks.”

According to Clark the northern oysters can have a more nuanced flavour because of the changes in temperature.   In colder weather the mollusc increases its omega fat growth taking on more salts and sweetness. 

Cress LaFavour, author of Fish: 54 Tasty Feasts likes the big juicy Pacific oysters for cooking because they have a “ton of flavour”.  Her recipe “Kimchi Oyster Dog” calls for frying the battered oysters in hot oil just long enough to get them crunchy.  Her description of the end result is enough to make your mouth water.

“You throw a bite into it and you get this lovely centre that is almost liquid,” she said.

Lafavour feels there is something “deeply elegant” about having oysters with either cocktails or great tasting wine.  Clark, on the other hand, cautions his restaurant guests against drinking liquor with oysters since alcohol is a “hardening” and “pickling” agent, though he does serve beer and wine.

Clark feels the oyster offers an alternative to what he sees as an increased “corporatization of food” and Toronto’s increasing uniformity. He works hard to assure his customers really enjoy themselves when they come to Rodney’s.  But most of all he feels those who love oysters are a breed apart.  To make his point he compared oyster eaters to crayon users.

“People who eat oysters in the urban area are people who colour with all the crayons  in the big set, “ he said. “So much of the city is homogenized into the short pack, the three colours, the beginner set.  The real oyster eater uses the big multipack and they’re not scared to pull out the silver one on occasion.”

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Watch Kyle Debouvrie from our coffice story, owner of the Bickford Flexitarian, talk about how the presence of a laptop can impact the dining experience.