With so many new food events happening these days, organizers are finding it harder and harder to produce an event that’s truly unique in Toronto. A few weeks ago Foodies On Foot hosted Foodival – Toronto’s First Carnival Themed Food Festival at 99 Sudbury, with proceeds going towards Real Food Forward.
Fire Dancer
Real Food Forward uses the donations they receive to provide free or subsidized meals for kids. The meals are prepared by Real Food For Real Kids (RFRK), a Toronto based caterer. RFRK was founded by Lulu Cohen-Farnell and her husband David. It all began when the couple were looking for suitable childcare for their son. They discovered that all of the locations they visited served some sort of processed meals to the children which Lulu didn’t want her son eating, so she started making his lunches and snacks instead.
Her efforts soon caught the attention of the Director, and the rest, as they say, is history. RFRK has grown from creating lunches for that single centre, to providing thousands of meals to children on a daily basis. Their meals are prepared fresh everyday and the ingredients are all Ontario sourced.
Foodival had many of the attractions that one would expect at a local carnival including, Tarot card readers, fire dancers, food trucks and vendors serving up a variety of foods.
Mixing up a batch of Nitrogen frozen ice cream
One of the food vendors who I thought stuck with the carnival theme the most was Ice Volcano Ice Cream. Not only did they produce some surprisingly delicious ice cream, it was quite entertaining to watch them make it.
They started with milk, cream, sugar and some flavourings in a stand mixer then added the star of the show, liquid nitrogen.
As the liquid nitrogen was slowly poured into the bowl of the mixer, the contents began to freeze almost immediately. After the smoke cleared ( it’s actually condensed water vapour), the contents of the bowl were transformed into some deliciously creamy ice cream.
Donald Tin is the owner and creator of Ice Volcano Ice Cream. He doesn’t have a culinary background but he’s fortunate enough to have a job (mechanical engineer) that gives him the opportunity to work with liquid nitrogen. Many chemistry classes also provided the knowledge base for developing the ice cream making process.
The food grade certified nitrogen that they use in the process is purely for freezing the liquids in the mixing bowl to make sure that afterwards there are no impurities remaining in the ice cream.
Donald uses the freshest ingredients and Canadian milk in his ice cream. After many months of trials and countless tastings he finally got the consistency that he wanted. He has also spent time working with the Dairy Farmers of Canada to get their permission to use their “100% Canadian Milk” logo, which is only found in ice cream made with real dairy.
Randal So & Chef Gavin Gusche
Another popular vendor at Foodival was Randal So and his team from Cut The Cheese. Although they didn’t provide the spectacle that Ice Volcano did, their grilled cheese sandwiches were quite the hit.
Randal is doing what a lot of people, myself included, wish they could do: abandon the corporate life and follow his passion for food. His background is in Business/Marketing and up until May of 2012 he was working for a mobile marketing company in a sales capacity before he was laid off.
Being laid off was actually a good thing for him because he decided to open up his own grilled cheese sandwich and mac & cheese restaurant. Why? These were his two favourite comfort foods that he grew up eating. He, with the help of his Executive chef, aims to raise the standards of grilled cheese in Toronto. Not only is he hoping to elevate the humble grilled cheese sandwich, Randal plans to make all their ketchups in-house. For Foodival he served his sandwiches with a root beer ketchup.
His Executive Chef is Gavin Gusche, who joined the Cut The Cheese team back in September of this year. Gavin brought with him a wealth of knowledge and experience, having worked in some very high profile kitchens in Toronto, such as The Miller Tavern, Fabrica, Bymark, and most recently Barque Smokehouse.
Randal and Gavin actually met each other way back in high school, and only recently got back in touch with each another. Gavin also proved to be an excellent source of information concerning the hospitality industry, something very valuable to Randal.
In the end Foodival turned out to be a fun event at a great location. I was lucky to be invited for the media hour so there weren’t long lines and the vendors served smaller portions thereby allowing us to try more food from more vendors.
