Top Toques' Chef's Table dinner highlights Indigenous ingredients, techniques: Andrew Coppolino

This week, in a collaboration with Kitchener's Top Toques culinary school, chef Destiny Moser served a five-course dinner using two dozen ingredients that spanned cultures and also served as an instructional medium for teaching Indigenous foods and cooking.

"We created a menu focusing on Indigenous ingredients, but we wanted to make sure we weren't too far from the recipes and dishes we're familiar with," said Moser.

That included bannock, an ostensibly Indigenous flat bread which was traditionally cooked on hot stones.

A graduate of Top Toques and Status First Nation as part of the Ojibwe tribe of the Rainy River Band, Moser says bannock is familiar to many people, but it "weighs in" significantly on Truth and Reconciliation as a dish that many assume is Indigenous.

"It's an educational opportunity. I like to point out that bannock is actually Scottish," she said.

Rather, Indigenous people were forced to learn how to make it by the settlers when they were forced off the land and lost access to their traditional food sources.

Top Toques chef-instructors Dean Michielsen, Darryl Howie and Elaina Kourie and teams of students worked over two days to prepare bannock and the other elements of the dinner.

The menu featured iconic, and delicious, Three Sisters soup with its trio of corn, beans and squash, which traditionally are grown together. Corn stalks provide structure for the beans to climb, while mature squash leaves shelter the root area impeding weed growth and moderating temperature. The beans nourish the soil with nitrogen.

Moser, whose mother was born as part of the Rainy River tribe and was also a part of the Sixties Scoop, has used Indigenous food and cooking to highlight and advocate for Indigenous culture in Waterloo Region when she visits area high schools.

Her duck confit main course blended French technique with a 36-hour sous vide that Moser and the kitchen employed to replicate the long braise that early Indigenous cooks would have used.

She noted that the sous vide and the extra confit fat would not have been used by early Indigenous cooks, but rather a long, slow cook over fire which produced similar results to the Gascony, France dish. The resulting duck was very tender and rich.

Also on the menu was seasonal smoked Arctic char, pumpkin, sage, wheat berries, cranberries and verjus (an ancient ingredient made from the juice of unripened grapes).

Wild rice, "manoomin" in Anishinaabe, is a sacred ingredient for Indigenous cultures, and one that has a special place in this country. Moser said that of four wild rice species – actually an aquatic grass – three are native to Canada and is its only native grain. Corn, while plentiful here, was originally domesticated by the Indigenous peoples of southern Mexico.

Once ubiquitous around the Great Lakes, wild rice lends its name to Rice Lake in the Trent-Severn Waterway and other geographical features given the plentiful plants that once grew there.