EATS OKANAGAN Signature Chefs’ Recipes from British Columbia’s Wine Valleys DAWN POSTNIKOFF / JOANNE SASVARIOKANAGAN OKANAGAN EATSEATS Signature Chefs’ Recipes from British Columbia’s Wine Valleys Dawn Postnikoff and Joanne Sasvari Photography by Jon AdrianDedicated to the growers and the makers. Without you, there would be no food on our plates, wine in our glasses or words on these pages. Thank you. Copyright © 2023 by Dawn Postnikoff and Joanne Sasvari Recipes copyright © 2023 by individual restaurants Recipes are chef tested. 23 24 25 26 27 5 4 3 2 1 All rights are reserved and no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording or otherwise, except as authorized with written permission by the publisher. Excerpts from this publication may be reproduced under licence from Access Copyright. Cataloguing data is available from Library and Archives Canada ISBN 978-1-77327-180-4 (hbk.) Interior design by Teresa Bubela Cover design by Naomi MacDougall Photography by Jon Adrian, except p. 114 by Sophia Hsin Prop styling by Tara Reavie + Jenny Adrian Food styling by Jenny Adrian Assistance by Candice Wahler Editing by Michelle Meade Copy editing by Pam Robertson Proofreading by Breanne MacDonald Indexing by Iva Cheung Printed and bound in China by Printplus Ltd., Hong Kong Distributed internationally by Publishers Group West Figure 1 Publishing Inc. Vancouver B.C. Canada www.figure1publishing.com Recipe Notes Unless stated otherwise: Butter is unsalted. Citrus juices are freshly squeezed. Eggs are large. Flour is all-purpose. Herbs are fresh. Milk is whole. Pepper is black and freshly ground. Produce is medium-sized. Salt is kosher (not coarse). Sugar is granulated. CONTENTSCONTENTS Introduction 7 Wine Valleys: A Conversation with Naramata Inn Wine Director Emily Walker 12 The Restaurants 15 The Recipes 16 Acknowledgements 199 Index 201 About the Authors 2087 Chefs the world over talk about dining with the seasons. But in the Okanagan, Thompson and Similkameen Valleys, they talk about the micro-seasons—those few short days when cherries or tomatoes or wild asparagus are at absolute peak ripeness, when their fragrance is intoxicating and when their flavour simply explodes on your tongue. Just ask anyone who’s bitten into an heirloom peach plucked from an Okanagan tree in August. It’s so sweet and juicy and quintessentially peachy, it’s practically life-changing. Indeed, it has been life-changing for many of the chefs on these pages. So many of them have relocated from big cities and celebrated kitchens, drawn to this region by the incred- ible abundance of what grows here. That could mean the cattle that graze the grasslands of the Thompson River Valley, the freshwater fish of the Shuswap, the organic tomatoes and peppers of the Similkameen, or the apples and apricots of the Okanagan. And the vines are everywhere, heavy with grapes, because this is wine country, too. The Thompson-Okanagan is a land of varied landscapes formed by cataclysmic events, volcanos, glaciers and raging rivers that carved steep valleys out of rock. It is also a land of varied climates that range from cool, green Lake Country in the north to the blistering desert of the South Okanagan Valley just 150 kilometres away. The region comprises three valleys: two river valleys—the Similkameen and Thompson—and the Okanagan Valley, where a series of lakes travel north from the U.S. border. Some 12,000 years ago, the whole area was buried under ice and that era of glaciation has left behind the kinds of mineral, rock, sand, silt and other depos- its that make soil scientists giddy with excitement. Not surprisingly, then, this has long been farming and ranching country. Even today, while cities like Kamloops and Kelowna grow bigger and bigger, more than 8 percent of the region is still locked in the Agricultural Land Reserve. INTRODUCTIONINTRODUCTION9 Introduction But long before the first orchard was planted, this was for millennia home to the Syilx, Nlaka’pamux and Secwépemc peoples who fished, hunted and foraged here. Europeans began to arrive in the early 1800s, drawn first by the fur trade and later by gold, especially during the Fraser River Gold Rush that began in 1858. These newcomers started farming and ranching and set up shop to supply optimistic prospectors. In 1859, three Oblate missionaries led by Father Charles Pandosy established the first European settlement in what is now Kelowna, where they also planted the region’s first grapevines. By the dawn of the twentieth century, steamboats plied the waters of Okanagan Lake, transporting orchard fruits to the national railway and bringing tourists down to the beaches of the sunny Okanagan. For a long time, this was “peaches and beaches” country, with just a handful of wineries growing mainly hybrid grapes like Vidal and Maréchal Foch. Then, in the 1980s, a series of international trade agreements opened the market for wine. The federal government paid growers to tear out their hybrid grapes and replace them with Vitis vinifera, the noble grapes that go into the world’s great wines. Now there are more than two hundred wineries across the region, with more opening all the time. And as the wineries began to win interna- tional awards and plant more and more acres of vines, the food scene grew alongside. Mission Hill Family Estate Winery (page 166) led the charge, winning B.C.’s first international award for wine in 1994 and opening one of the region’s first winery restaurants in 2002. Owner Anthony von Mandl was inspired by what Robert Mondavi was doing in the Napa Valley, where the patriarch of California wine combined wine, art, music, food and the fine craft of living well. That quickly became the model for the Okanagan Valley, too, as winery after winery opened its own restaurant, more stand-alone restaurants followed and chefs started leaving larger cities for a place where abundance is simply a way of life.Next >