Foraging in Quebec

This week was Noshette's birthday, and among the many things we did to celebrate was to have dinner at Les Jardins Sauvages, which in English means "the wild gardens", a woodland table restaurant in St.Roch de l'Achigan. (Since I no longer go by the name "Nosher", Noshette will now be known as "Megan".) The 30 minute drive out of the city was nice, allowing us to enjoy the fall foliage. The leaves are usually much nicer than the photo I took, but it was raining that day, an unfortunate turn of events that nixed our original plan of going hiking in the countryside for the afternoon .

I first heard about Les Jardins Sauvages when I was surfing the net, looking for Montreal-based sustainable food sources and websites. I found a blog called soupnancy, written by a chef named Nancy Hinton. Nancy is now the chef at Les Jardins Sauvages and the girlfriend of François Brouillard, a master forager. You should all read about François and his rich history - it is the essence of Ethicureanism before it even had a name.

Our dinner was a seven-course, mushroom-themed banquet, almost completely foraged from the area where Francois lives and also from his foraging excursions all over Quebec. As each course was brought to our tables (there were only 49 diners that evening - and that was above capacity) François did the rounds with a giant tray of mushrooms and showed each table which mushrooms they were eating. He seemed shy and slightly anti-social, which would be expected from a career forager. If prodded, and prod I did, François revealed if a certain mushroom was from Ungava Bay or Rimouski, and also what animals he saw while in the bush.

Here is a list of the courses we enjoyed:

1 - Puff ball and sanglichon sausage with black trumpet mushrooms, porcini duxelles ‘en gelée’, wild ginger mustard. The sausage was terrific - you can read about Nancy making it on her blog. The gelée was not my cup of tea, but it was well executed. The sauteed black trumpets were pure mushroom fantasy.

2 - Shaggy-mane and yellow-brown boletus soup, lemon cream with a hint of coffee. This was a phenomenal soup, possibly the best mushroom soup I'll ever have.

3 - Lobster and lobster mushroom fricassée, sautéed chanterelles and corn, in a cattail flour crepe with sea spinach. I can't believe I didn't get a shot of this dish. Nancy does such spectacular things with these ingredients, especially the mushrooms, but a crepe made from cattail flour that she mills herself is so original you almost don't want to eat it, you just want to stare at it and talk about it. Despite the high level of creativity on the plate, Nancy doesn't let you forget that you're here for the ingredients that François has foraged, so she finishes the dish with a pile of simple sauteed chanterelles, which were dynamite.

4 - Crisp autumn vegetable salad with boletus insignia scented oil, pickled pine mushroom, smoked duck, toasted almonds, Fetard cheese, wild grape ‘balsamic’, oyster mushroom tempura. The salad was composed of root vegetables like parsnip, celeriac, and squash, which added a crunchy bite as a partner to the soft matchsticks of smoked duck. The tempura was divine.

5 - Roasted venison with mushroom salt crust, Delicious Lactarius and lepiota risotto, sautéed hedgehog mushrooms and blewits, morel sauce. Megan doesn't usually eat red meat, but she tried the venison and actually liked it. The meat was very tender and full of flavor, and the risotto was actually an arancini - a ball of risotto that is deep-fried. Once again, to ground the whole situation, a single, luscious morel and a surprise appearance by a gnarly jerusalem artichoke.

6 - Orange Bolete and honey wine milk-shake, Tricholomba and hedgehog mushroom shortbread. This milkshake was so good I wished it was bigger, but then again, I was pretty full as this was the sixth course of our seven-course meal.

7 - Larch boletus frangipane and chocolate tartlet, Fairy-ring mushroom butter-scotch sauce, coconut and meadow mushroom chip. Mushroom caramel candies. 

This was truly a terrific experience, and we will definitely be returning to Les Jardins Sauvages in the future. After our meal, Nancy gave us a tour of their tiny kitchen, which was about the size of my apartment kitchen. It was filled to the ceiling with shelves of large mason jars full of the curiousities that François had foraged and Nancy had transformed into gourmet treats. (I didn't see a single packaged item in the whole kitchen!) How they turned out 49 seven-course meals was a miracle — or just plain hard work and talent. Megan and I then headed home, happy.

 

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