Going Gourmet Gold by Anita Stewart
Canola Digest, Jan/Feb 2007

Mission Hill Winery in the Okanagan is where you’ll find Chef Michael Allemeier who, over the decades we’ve known one anther, has demonstrated creativity in the kitchen and a serious streak of culinary patriotism. Michael was the first to introduce me to Highwood Crossing’s cold-pressed canola oil. He is still serving it exclusively with bread and calls it “invaluable as a finishing oil on salads.”

Cold-pressed canola oil is one of the newest ingredients on the Canadian food scene. Leading edge chefs are embracing and playing with the strident flavours of this oil.

Niagara chef Mark Picone and I both recall the cold autumn day when I made a missionary trip to Vineland Estates in southern Ontario where he was working. I had just received a few bottles of Highwood Crossing’s first pressing of cold-pressed canola oil and I wanted to share the news. Canada finally had a cold-pressed product that could compete head-to-head with the extra-virgin olive!

Picone, then the Executive Chef at the winery’s restaurant, was busy in the kitchen. But there is one thing any great chef loves…a gift of food. He washed his hands and joined me in the dining room. Pouring the sunshine yellow oil into a white china saucer, his eyes widened. Accustomed to the rich colour of the extra-virgin olive oil he’s grown to love, he was mesmerized by the absolute beauty of this oil.

Today, in his role as educator at Niagara Culinary Institute and owner of Chef Mark Picone’s Culinary Studio, he still swears by Tony and Penny Marshall’s Highwood Crossing canola oil. He has never been one to mince words. “This oil is the optimum in sustainability! Its grown organically on the farm its processed on..how can it get any better than that?”

But it takes an educated, sensitive and creative palate to use this rich oil to the fullest. “It’s very intense, so you must be prudent in its use,” Picone advises. “It’s aromatic so I often use it just as a drizzle. It’s amazing on curries.” He describes it as “looking like lemon-colored pearls” on top of his Jerusalem artichoke soup. “It gives the soup a citrus-coloured sheen.”

Another friend, Chef Chris Aerni, from the wildly successful Rossmount Inn in St. Andres, New Brunswick, is experimenting with cold-pressed canola oil this winter. Like Picone, he feels it’s a good match with curry and swirls it onto the autumn squash and apple soup that he’s spices with Indian spices. “It’s an oil,” he says, “that can stand on its own and should be used as European chefs use truffle oil atop risotto.”

Cold pressed canola oil must be packaged in dark bottles to prevent light from affecting it. And the sooner that it’s sold after pressing, the better. However, the negative is easily turned into a positive when one realizes the trend in oil consumption in Italy is to use the oil almost immediately after the olives are pressed. The closer to the press, the higher the price.

If there is a challenge that faces cold-pressed canola oil producers, it was eloquently explained by Toronto chef Jaimie Kennedy. “There is no lexicon to understand this oil and its assertiveness. We’ve been using olive oil for years, understand and recognize it. Its organoleptic qualities are well known. This is such a new, ultra-Canadian product, I know I have to just use it more to understand its possibilities.”

So it all comes back to possibilities…and being limited only by our own imaginations. New types of seeds, new methods of processing, new uses in the kitchen. The future is bright, not to mention delicious.