GALLERY: Canoe Wild, a showcase of Société-Orignal’s weird and wonderful ingredients

GALLERY: Canoe Wild, a showcase of Société-Orignal’s weird and wonderful ingredients

Canoe Wild
(Image: Renée Suen)

Great food starts with great ingredients, and for the past year, many of the more unusual ones have reached Toronto kitchens by way of Société-Orignal, a Quebec business that specializes in turning the raw materials of the province’s boreal region—harvested by small family farms and foragers—into unusual culinary products. Canoe’s corporate executive chef Anthony Walsh and chef de cuisine John Horne have been great supporters (and patrons) of the company’s output, and on Saturday they hosted Canoe Wild, a one-off collaborative dinner to showcase some of their favourites. Société-Orignal founder and partner Alex Cruz and sales rep Vanessa Niewerth were on hand to decode the wide array of wild flavours represented in the tasting menu, which included everything from boar and hare to cow’s parsnip and the much-buzzed-about l’effet papillon (raw Laurentian honeydew). Check out our slideshow for a guide to some of these unusual pantry items as well as the dishes the Canoe team created to feature them »