Vancouver chefs preserve summer by canning

It’s official. Canning is hip, no longer grandma’s domaine.

“My grandma recipes have come out,” says Derek Bothwell, a thirty-something chef at Chill Winston in Gastown.

Canning’s making a comeback, and not out of the necessity (to eat in winter) or frugality. You could, perhaps, cerdit the all-too-short West Coast growing season – squirreling away our fantastic summer booty at its prime is the chef’s reprieve.

But that’s not all. With the mantra of local, local, local, chefs have been stuck with root vegetables, root vegetables, root vegetables in winter. To keep in the spirit of local, but exciting food, they’re expanding winter menus with hits of canned summer.

This year’s icky start to summer was further incentive. “The produce was weak and awful,” says Bothwell. “Now at the back-end of summer, we’re taking advantage of the fresh produce. Everywhere I go, people are doing jars of this or that. They’re unique preserves and does a lot for the excitement level.”
He says his [late] grandmother has been an inspiration. “I’m going back to her more and more, remembering fond times as a kid, the smells, her books of recipes. It’s a revival, 100 per cent,” he says.

He’s actually been canning for several years, making pickles, jellies, jams and mustards. “It’s a large component of my food program that most people don’t know about. I just made crab apple jelly and mulberry jam today!” he said. He’s also the chef at Guilt & Co., a lounge, downstairs from Chill Winston. However, it has no oven and he can’t cook with oil due to city regulations so he has a charcuterie menu and his canned chutneys, pickles, jams, jellies and mustards are perfect complements.

Jefferson Alvarez of Fraiche restaurant in West Vancouver, is similarly hoarding summer’s bounty for winter. As well as fruits from farmers’ markets, he’s foraged and canned wild ramps and chanterelle mushrooms. His larder is lined with Okanagan peaches, crabapples, cherries and he’s pickled carrots, blue foot mushrooms, onions and beets.

“I make it up as I go along,” he says of his pickles. “I create all of what I do but I keep the peaches simple and very delicate to keep all that flavour. I’m canning as many cherries as I can. It’ll be good with my foie gras appie.”

Not far from Fraiche on the slopes of Hollyburn Mountain, he’s blessed with blackberries, gifts from nature, which will be made into jams and jelly.

Alvarez plans to start canning meats and fish as well. “Part of the problem right now is finding the cans. If I come across any, I’m all over it.” He’d like to can salmon and Thiessen farm pheasants, for starters.

Growing up in Venezuela, he helped his mother and grandmother can peaches, mangos, green papaya, green guava, banana flowers, green beans and sardines. “I used to love to help. My mother stored them in the cupboard but they didn’t last long.”

He explains the banana flowers: “They’re a bulb at the bottom of each banana tree and inside there’s a little flower that’s so sweet when cut and so tasty.” The green guava, he says, would turn tomato red in the jar. “We’d eat it with cream cheese – it was so tasty.”

Chef Emerie Brine, of Bernardin Home Canning has seen the canning trend reflected in sales. In the last five years, sales of Bernardin canning equipment have been going up 12 to 15 per cent a year and he can’t keep up with requests for workshops, he says.

Canadian celebrity chefs like Mark McEwan, Michael Smith, Jamie Kennedy and Lynn Crawford, he says, are selling preserved goods in their restaurants, cafes and shops . George Brown College’s culinary program is looking at adding canning and preserving, Brine says.

In Vancouver, personal chef Karen Dar Woon, gives canning classes for the Richmond Food Security Society as well as in people’s homes. “I’m noticing a trend in much younger people attending and that’s great,” she says. “When I first started four years ago, most were in their 40s. Now I’m seeing more people under 30.” (Her next classes are on September 20 and 27, at Minoru Place Activity Centre.)

Backyard gardens encourage people to preserve what they’ve grown, she says. “Others are really concerned about what goes into the food they eat.”

She knows of chefs at Salt and Twisted Fork who are canning and feel they influence the community and inspire consumers.

Quang Dang, recently installed as chef at West, says canning is labour-intensive and takes up storage space but worth it for the quality and flavour. “Sad thing is, I had to leave my canning behind,” he says. The pickles, relishes and fruits he’d canned were done for Diva at the Met, where he was previously the chef. “I did 200 pounds of cherries which made up 74 litre-jars. There’s still a little season left. I’m thinking of pickling grapes and quince.” He photo-copied some basic pickling recipes from a free gas company cookbook his mother uses (and will not relinquish). “It used to be a way of eating. My grandma did it instinctively,” he says.

Chef Dennis Peckham, currently of Coast, and soon moving over to Black and Blue (a new steak house with the same company), preserves beautiful tomatoes and cherries from his favourite farmer in Lytton. “The window for great, local product is so small. That’s my motivation behind it,” he says. “Sapo Bravo [the farm in Lytton] started delivering in mid to late July and will go to the end of October.” He was further inspired on a visit to the Mission Hill Winery restaurant this summer. “They were canning massive, massive amounts of cherries – around 800 to 1,000 pounds.”

He’s using Sapo Bravo lemon cucumbers and Russian cucumbers for pickles with a difference and and has 100 pounds of garlic to pickle.

His first and foremost concern, of course, is safety. “You can’t smell or taste botulism so you have to be super careful so I take it quite seriously.”

His canned products naturally follow the seasons. Right now, I’m using heirloom tomatoes with shaved cukes. In summer, it’s nice and light and as the season goes on, dishes become heavier. I’ll be making ragu with the canned tomatoes.

“It’s one of those growing trends of chefs keeping as local and organic as possible,” says Peckham.