Post Taste – Gettin’ Greased

What I know about Spanish cuisine, like Southern Soul Food, is that Toronto has a near intolerable absence of prime examples in action. Ask me about Spain’s penultimate culinary contribution and unlike asking me about the French, Italians or Germans, I have difficulty coming up with a decent response. “I think they have some really good ham and…olive oil?” Wavering on any food-related question is never a good move for a food writer. Supposedly, we know everything possible about every cuisine, culinary style, and every obscure ingredient in the world – regardless of whether 90 per cent of us have even seriously eaten outside of our current hemisphere.

So, yes, because of all of the above, I’ve traditionally avoided Spanish cuisine. Revealing my handicap to potentially sacrifice my new career was not my idea of a good time. Luckily I had Waxman. Born, Adam Waxman, Waxman was one of my writers at Dine.TO and like his very famous father, he is an incredible actor. However, of even greater interest to me was that he is also his mother’s son and knows a ridiculous amount about Spanish and Latin cuisine.

After working on his mother’s magazine (Sara Waxman’s DINE), Waxman was ensured several lush press trips to the far reaches of the Spanish empire. He has sampled and learned more than what any press agent would want him to know about the food culture. When prompted, Adam could tell you a catalog of restaurants in Toronto that serve the prized Jamon Iberico, the best tapas, and the nuances of various vintages of Malbec. In short, he is damned handy and a pretty rad guy in all.

However, when Mary Luz Mejia invited me to the Full Moon olive oil tasting, it was time for baby-girl to grow-up and go to a tasting: Go, greet, sit, read press kit, listen, eat, drink, get buzzed, thank, hug, exit. Not even my ego is big enough to keep me from getting a crash course in Spanish olive oil, flavours, and wines with Mary Luz. Yeah: Sign me up.

Full Moon’s tasting was held at Frida’s Restaurant, a spot eponymously named for the images of Frida Khalo that hang inside. Toronto’s quietly-famous Mexican restaurant is known for its haute reinventions of comfort foods, which is exactly how Toronto likes it – different, but not too different.

Once inside, I’m greeted by Mary and after briefing me on the event, she disappears to tend to another task. Mary and I met through Twitter. She always impressed me with her appreciation for most things “cool” which I assume is a consequence of being a journalist and being genuinely informed – at least on the stuff I care about. If Mary was the type of person to brag, she would drop words like “producer,” “Gemini-nominated,” “Christine Cushing,” “En Route,” and “Saveur Magazine’s editor-in-chief named me ‘Toronto’s most dedicated and passionate food journalist,’” but she doesn’t because that’s not how she rolls. I, on the other hand, have already picked the spots on my body reserved for those, however event-unlikely, commemorative tattoos. Clearly, we are two fundamentally different people. Regardless, we are able to make our acquaintanceship work. Currently, Mary manages the communications firm she and her husband are running and Full Moon olive oil is one of their clients.

Five-courses of Spanish food and wine highlight the various colours, textures, and flavours of Full Moon olive oil. A brief pre-dinner tasting with brand ambassador, Dolores Smith, gave us a practical pre-relationship with the products before we ate it “in the field” (aka – on our plates).

Turns out that Spain is the world’s foremost supplier of olive oil with approximately 75 per cent of the world’s olive oil supply coming originating there. Not Italy, Greece or even the holy lands of Israel – Spain. And, the Full Moon olive oils are probably the most novel of them all. With one bottle capable of saying that it was born of shifting tides, moon beams, and gravitational pulls during the shortest scalable window of harvest possible: The full moon.

Dolores mused, during the tasting, that the sensation of pepper in the throat is a desirable trait to olive oil, beyond the 0.01 per cent acidity and being pressed immediately after being picked. Rival olive oil producers will have industry specific “cock-offs” (my words, not Dolores’) to prove whose olive oil is more likely to make you cough. For me, it was that of the Full Moon.

After our olive oil shooters and before each course, there’s a procedure where each of the city’s top Latin chefs step forward to explain their dishes before we are briefed on our wines and then – game on. Jamon Iberico, cuttle fish (I call it “cuddle fish” because it’s cuter), Tamworth pork belly, cod tongues, granitas, gazpachos, and olive oil ice creams. Each course layered tastes and textures that made the evening simply incredible. Food was art, no “meat and three veg” here. There was structure and strategy clearly apparent behind most of the dishes and the pairings were equally as attentive. I didn’t necessarily notice the olive oils featured in each dish, but I did notice the talent on the plates in front of me. Toronto has some great Latin chefs in the city, and we’re not harassing them enough.

We are a multicultural city; we should have the best kitchens for the globe’s national cuisines. For years we said we don’t, but after Full Moon, I have a greater appreciation for Spanish olive oil, Latin-Canadian Chefs in Toronto, and on-demand access to Adam Waxman’s near encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s best Spanish cuisines.

On a side note, Roman soldiers used to bath in olive oil, probably not $60 bottles of it, but I just wanted to leave you with that image.