How to Use Crème Fraîche

Crème Fraîche can be used just like sour cream…it’ll just be more elegant and rich!  And unlike sour cream, crème fraîche will not break apart, or curdle, when added to hot liquids, like soups or sauces.  Here are some quick ideas on how to use it:

• Add a dollop when serving apple pie, pear crisp, or on top of any fruit!
• Add a dollop to spice cakes, like gingerbread, or to coffee cakes
• Stir into sauces to add thickness and richness
• Add a dollop to soup to finish it
• Stir into scrambled eggs, quiche or a frittatta
• Serve as a side to potato pancakes, or on baked potato
• Top it o a cracker with smoked salmon
• Stir some into tomato sauce to make it a rose sauce
• Use it to make a creamy salad dressing

Crème Fraîche Recipes:

Honey Poached Pears with Crème Fraîche>>>

Gingered Carrot Soup with Crème Fraîche>>>

Potato, Green Cabbage and Leek Soup with Lemon Crème Fraîche>>>

Potato Gratin with Gruyere and Crème Fraîche >>>

Mashed Potatoes with Crème Fraîche and Chives>>>

Roasted Beets with Horseradish Crème Fraîche>>>

Chicken and Leeks with Crème Fraîche>>>

Green Goddess Sauce>>>

The local part is easy—our food is all from Ontario, and it all comes from farms that are within a few hours’ drive from Toronto.  Over the years we have built personal relationships with all of our farmers and artisan producers.  These relationships are mutually beneficial—we get to give you the best of the best that Ontario has to offer, and our farmers have a consistent (and growing!) market for their food.  Having a secure and dependable market for their food helps farmers plan ahead and provide for their families, contributing to a stronger, more vibrant local food economy.

What about sustainable?  The short answer to this is that we visit all of our farms, we know all of our farmers, and we only choose to work with folks that are farming in ways that will sustain the land for generations to come.  Almost all of the farms we work with are either certified organic, or certified by Local Food Plus (LFP).

Organic certification requires farmers to use only organic-approved pesticides, take measures to conserve soil fertility, avoid unnecessary medication for animals, and follow other important principles.  Local Food Plus (LFP) is a relatively recent certifying body in Ontario—they certify farms based on a variety of standards, including labour issues, environmental sustainability, energy conservation, biodiversity protection; and they also require that the farm’s food is sold locally.  LFP regulations are not the same as organic ones—some low-level pesticides from approved lists are allowed when they will prevent crop failure—but farms must use them in conjunction with other methods such as integrated pest management and crop rotation.  These slightly more flexible standards are making it economically feasible for more farms to make the switch from conventional to sustainable agriculture.

In 2010, LFP built stronger relationships with certified farmers and producers, partnered with 42 new restaurants, retail outlets and institutions, and received over 3,500 pledges from consumers who are willing to shift $10 a week of their spending budget to Certified Local Sustainable food.  Together, we can change the way Ontario Eats!

That’s it for a brief run-down on how we stock the shop each week, and why we’re so passionate about good, clean, local food!

I spent an absolutely delightful afternoon yesterday visiting Heather Balogh and her family at their farm near Mountain Grove (east of Kaladar) and, even though I’m on vacation right now in the Ottawa Valley, I just had to share it with you!

I recently ordered several lambs from Heather and, in chatting, realized she was located pretty much en route to my family’s cottage (where my husband and I were headed to spend our week off) and so we arranged to visit.

Heather and her husband, George, daughters Meghan and Caitlin and Heather’s father, Tom live on 105 acres of rocky, wooded land on the shores of picturesque White Lake and surrounded by 400 acres of Crown land. Talk about privacy!!

Before they bought the property, the house had formerly been a bed and breakfast, so it has 7 bedrooms each with its own bathroom, perfect for their family and visitors. Next door is a charming cottage with a huge deck overlooking the lake …great for a year round getaway with snowshoeing and skating or skiing on the lake in winter, maple sugaring in spring, swimming and canoeing in summer, fall colours in autumn and hiking all year round. Called Stonehaven Chalet, its available to rent and I would highly recommend it for a couple or small family looking for a week or two of pastoral heaven!

Heather and George bought the property 11 years ago – it started with their girls wanting a horse – and now the farm is home to not only horses, but also goats, sheep, turkeys, rabbits and their 2 dogs (a guard dog to keep the wolves at bay and Gabriel, the “I’ll lick you to death” family Labrador)! Oh, and two kitty cats…snow white Ophelia and a caramel and cream fluffball who was asleep and couldn’t introduce herself.

Actually, I admit I couldn’t keep track of all the names as everyone here has a name, and I mean everyone (that’s Guinevere, the goat, with Heather and I, in the photo)! One of the lambs, snout in a water bucket attempting to poke through the thin skin of ice over top, had a woolly black patch around one eye and so was very appropriately christened Black Eyed Suzie!

One of the things that I love about small family farms is this connection to their animals, who are members of the family in so many ways, though there is obviously the awareness that many of these animals are bred for meat and will one day depart to return as meat to feed the Baloghs and those of us lucky enough to partake of them. These animals truly have, as the saying goes, only one bad day in their lives.

Heather is a registered nurse with the Victorian Order of Nurses and still provides nursing care a few days per week which, given her caring and compassionate nature, was really no surprise. George is a high school English teacher and a certified herbalist, also no surprise given his enthusiastic intelligence and infectious love of learning – their daughters are not only professional photographers (you can see some of Meghan’s gorgeous photos here) but also accomplished equestriennes and fiddle players (the band Meghan plays in, Seventh Town, have a self-titled CD and often play in Prince Edward County – click here for a listen)!

They all learned to farm together, through trial and error, lots of reading and mentorship by the local farmers. As Heather said, “you tap trees for maple syrup in the spring but there are no leaves in the spring, so how can you tell a maple from any other tree?” Well, the local maple syrup farmers showed her and they set up their own sugaring shack. They pored over Storey’s Farming Guides and just did it! Their first turkeys gobbled up so much organic grain they tipped the scales at 38 lbs (they were not beloved by the local abattoir, being rather unwieldy to handle at that size) but now they are a more manageable 12 to 18 lbs – and very tasty indeed.

They started with 4 lambs but now have 15 year round and about 40 at the peak, munching away on alfalfa hay they bring in from other farms as their land is on the Canadian shield and too rocky to grow it. The girls have been trained in birthing the baby lambs and they keep a baby monitor in the barn so they can always hear sounds of distress and go out in the middle of the night, latex gloves on, if needed to help with a birth. They’ve even called in a vet to deliver a lamb by caesarean section when an animal was in distress. Heather’s learned to tube-feed lambs that are too weak to nurse on their own and she told me how they sometimes have to take newborns into the house and immerse them in warm water in the kitchen sink, protected by plastic so they don’t get wet, to help them stay warm.

The Baloghs eat meat mainly from their own farm (a turkey once a month instead of just on Thanksgiving and Christmas like most of us, as well as lamb, goat and rabbit) but they buy their produce….Heather said they haven’t had much luck with growing vegetables, not only because of the rocky land, but also because the goats eat everything in sight!

There is a lot of love evident on this farm and joy in the natural surroundings. When we were there, Meghan and Caitlin were having a good giggle over the goat in heat that was making unwanted advances at the ram they bring in for lamb breeding every November. And their love of place is evident throughout their house in the stunning photographs the girls have taken.
We sat down to tea with fresh goat milk and just baked biscuits with blueberries, butter and preserves (I’m going to ask Heather for the recipe to share with you as they were fabulous!) and talked about everything from farming to the local food movement, to shared memories of places where we’ve lived in Toronto, herbal remedies and even the state of the economy and Canadian and US politics.

The afternoon just breezed by but we had another few hours of driving to get to our cottage so we said our farewells. Heather generously gave us some of her own goat cheese that she makes daily from the gallon of fresh goat milk Guinevere and her kin provide…which I gobbled down on my toast this morning and will mash into my potatoes at dinner tonight –so creamy and tangy fresh! Yumm! And I will be first in line to buy some of that lamb I ordered when it arrives mid-November, that’s for sure!

Cream is simply the higher fat portion of cow’s milk.  Half & Half is an equal mixture of milk and cream at 10% fat. Whipping Cream contains 35% fat, doubles in volume when whipped and is dreamy with berries, pies & mousses and thickens sauces luxuriously! Harmony recently introduced its decadent 48% Crème de la Crème, a thick, English style cream. Too much for bikini season, they’ve postponed production now ’til the fall!

Sour cream is cream which has been treated with a lactic acid culture to give it its tang. Do not let sour cream boil when cooking with it or it will curdle. However Crème Fraiche, a matured, thickened cream with a tangy, nutty flavour and velvet texture, is ideal for sauces or soups as it can be boiled. To make your own Crème Fraiche, mix 1 cup whipping cream and 2 tbsps buttermilk in a glass container, cover and let stand at room temp for 8-24 hours, until very thick; stir well.

My fave form of cream is the iced variety!! I keep 4 flavours of Mapleton’s Organic Ice Cream on hand for quick treats or to dress up desserts. It’s made only from the fresh, organic milk, cream and eggs produced on their own farm – no chemicals, GMOs, antibiotics, or artificial ingredients and the flavours we carry are gluten and nut free. It’s Ontario’s Haagen-Dazs, but better!! Try chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, chai or ginger…my favourite’s ginger, what’s yours?

Few foods are linked with so many soothing epithets … mother’s milk, milk of human kindness, land of milk & honey! And of course the ever famous milk mo0-stache.

Though many think it a commodity, nothing could be further from the truth…the fresher and less processed the milk, the better it tastes. And our milk is fresh!! To quote Phyllis Diller: “I asked the waiter, ‘Is this milk fresh?’ He said, ‘Lady, three hours ago it was grass’!” Okay, so maybe it isn’t quite so fresh as that, but almost. And it brings me to my next point…happy cows make better milk! At Culinarium, we offer milk from Harmony Organic.

Harmony Organic is a group of local farmers dedicated to organic, sustainable agriculture who treat their cows with love and respect.  The cows graze on lush pastures in season and exercise outdoors daily in winter. The taste of Harmony’s milk changes slightly with the cows’ menu, especially when they are first out on grass in the spring. The high clover content of the natural diet enjoyed by organic herds is thought to be why organic milk has higher levels of Omega 3.

But at Culinarium what really excites us is taste – and it tastes great! Harmony uses minimum temperatures during pasteurization to preserve the “fresh from the farm” flavour. And their milk is bottled in charming returnable glass bottles as glass doesn’t alter the true taste of the milk. Harmony Organic milk tastes fresher, sweeter and creamier than conventional brands and we invite you to come in and taste the difference yourself!

But it’s not all about cow milk…for many folks goat milk is the milk of choice! It has a different makeup of proteins and fats than cow milk, and slightly lower levels of lactose, believed to make it more easily digestible and less allergenic.  We have a limited supply of goat milk on the retail shelf but if you are an avid drinker we’re happy to order some in for you, just give us a call to set up your regular order.

And what on earth is buttermilk, you ask? In times past, it was the liquid left over after churning butter from cream. Today, commercial products are made by adding special bacteria to low fat milk that gives it a slightly thickened texture and tangy flavour. You can easily make your own buttermilk substitution by adding 1 tbsp of lemon juice or white vinegar to 1 cup milk and letting it stand for 5 minutes. 

MO’ BETTA BUTTAH!

Speaking of butter…we carry several butters for your spreadable, breadable pleasure…

Local Dairy crafts a tangy, cultured butter in small batches with cream from local dairies and cheese makers using a family recipe more than 3 generations old.  Whipped for easy spreading, our customer Alisa tells us, “This stuff is fantastic…for breakfast this morning I had a bagel and three slices of bread! I’m in big trouble …”!

Stirling Creamery‘s unsalted butter was voted by Saveur Magazine as one of the world’s top 30 butters but it is their Hastings Whey Butter, a dense, rich, salty butter made from the whey from cheese, that we find to be “way better”!

CULTURED COUSINS: YOGURT & KEFIR

Both yogurt and kefir are made by fermenting milk with bacteria, but kefir is fermented with more and different bacteria, in addition to yeast, making it a bit fizzy (some call it the champagne of milk products). Both contain beneficial microorganisms, probiotics and nutrients. We are happy to bring in Kefir for you … just ask!>>> And we always have yummy yogurt!

Pinehedge Farms Yogurt is made with active bacterial cultures and pure organic whole milk – no powdered milk solids, artificial flavouring, sweeteners or pectin here! They were Ontario’s first certified organic yogurt maker and practice biodynamic farming…a self sustaining system which emphasizes the integration & well-being of crops and livestock.  Virtually everything is done on their own farm – they grow their own feed, milk their own cows, and make and bottle the yogurt.

With so many choice ways to get your calcium, isn’t it time to get your milk moo-stache on?