What started as one chef’s desire to modernize Indigenous cuisine has turned into a small collaboration with Chapman’s Ice Cream.
Chef Zach Keeshig, who owns and operates Naagan in Owen Sound says that when he was young, he noticed that when he was around sweetgrass, the fragrance reminded him of vanilla.
He’s not far off, as one of the many nicknames for sweetgrass is “vanilla grass”.
As the owner of Naagan, which boasts a nine-course tasting menu, ice cream was always a component, and he wanted to explore using sweetgrass as the main flavour of his ice cream.
“The idea for the sweetgrass ice cream came about from sort of a memory from when I was younger. When I was younger, my dad would have sweetgrass hanging in his truck and stuff like that. Sweetgrass is normally used as a ceremonial medicine when it’s dried and braided. And I remember when my dad lit it and doing smudging with him when I was younger, smelling faintly like vanilla. So as we started doing these tasting menus, we wanted to get rid of using vanilla because it didn’t come from Canada, and we were focusing on Ontario, local products, Canadian products, and that memory sort of sparked when we started coming up with this sort of stuff and we use sweetgrass quite a bit when we’re using it in our cooking.”
He says that while he’s not the first to use sweetgrass in his cuisine, he wanted to have a source of the plant that didn’t involve using sacred objects, such as sweetgrass braids.
Keeshig says “I don’t really condone it, but other other chefs will use the dried, braided ceremonial sweetgrass to cook with, where[as] we wanted to stay clear of that. We wanted to start growing our own stuff so we could use it professionally in our kitchen, and not sacred, medicinal stuff.”
The solution was to rely on foraging and even growing their own local plants. That quickly turned into sourcing other local ingredients for his restaurant.
“With the food that we create in the restaurant, I didn’t know what my cuisine was going to be when I first started. It felt like at the time, I was just re-creating dishes that I had seen from previous mentors. At the time, I went back to Nawash and I was asking my aunt and everyone for recipes that I could re-modernize, and there wasn’t very much to pass down. I’m not sure if that’s colonialism, or what that’s from. So we decided we were going to try and do a progressive style. We were going to go out and forage things, source things from farms that we dug up that week. Last year, we just got the approval to start getting Indigenous hunters to shoot us wild game. We’ve been serving Canadian goose and young deer and getting fish straight from Indigenous boats and it’s become more full-circle now. It’s more than Indigenous food, it’s Indigenous products too.”
As for working with Canadian ice cream giant Chapman’s, the topic came up rather serendipitously.
A mutual friend of Keeshig and Ashley Chapman was looking for an Indigenous chef to cater an upcoming event, and “they were looking for an Indigenous chef to come up with an ice cream flavour that was totally Indigenous, had never been done before, and they had reached out to me. And that was sort of the idea that I wanted to showcase this ice cream, because it’s more than Indigenous, because this is using local products that have been foraged and different things like that.”
Keeshig’s original recipe does use duck eggs instead of chicken eggs, and in order for any production to be done with Chapman’s the recipe would need to be adjusted.
The main purpose of working with Chapman’s is to produce the treat as part of a catering event. Keeshig’s friend, Jeff Burnett from Seeing Red Media, is in charge of a first-ever fashion show for the company during the Toronto International Film Festival this year.
“My sous-chef and I, we went over to Chapman’s and chatted with Ashley and we took a tour of the Chapman’s facility and I was just surprised at just the high standards and the local products they use at Chapman’s and the overall way they work at Chapman’s is great.”
He hopes that it might be considered for a small production run at the Markdale factory. “People are hoping that eventually it goes on the production line so that they can buy it in stores and stuff like that but we’ll see what happens. If it goes well, maybe Ashley will consider a small run of it or something like that.”
Keeshig used to operate out of the Owen Sound Farmers Market and is preparing to open his first brick-and-mortar location in the old Chicago Building on 10th Street East.
The small, intimate setting is going to be by reservation only but promises a unique dining experience.
When designing his menu, he wanted to put an emphasis on local ingredients including the fresh sweetgrass and maple syrup from Nawash, as well as using locally-grown produce while it’s in season.
“Owen Sound and Grey-Bruce is on traditional Nawash territory, so what I wanted to do was I wanted to start showcasing what Ojibway [peoples] were eating around Georgian Bay at the time. They weren’t eating chickens and pigs and things like that, they were hunting ducks and geese and deer. They were using duck eggs instead of chicken eggs, and using fish and crawfish. That’s been a big thing that I try and incorporate in my cooking today, use these sort of ingredients and the training that I’ve done working at some of the best restaurants in Canada.”
