Annual convention | Cooks learn to cook with hemp oil, seed and milk to offer hemp parfait, granola bars and pork topped with hemp demi-glaze
Canada’s hemp association recently challenged an upscale hotel’s cooks to provide hemp-laden meals and snacks for its annual convention.
They leapt at the opportunity and say they’ll keep using hemp now that they know some of its potentials, problems and quirks.
“It’s extremely versatile,” said Kelly Andreas, the Delta Winnipeg’s banquet chef.
“It was a nice, new innovative challenge, (something) that is always refreshing in the kitchen.”
Some farm commodity associations don’t worry about whether their commodity appears in the snacks, meals and banquets served during their conferences and conventions.
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Others go to great lengths to make sure their commodity is highlighted and inescapable. In the 1990s, some dairy organizations began replacing the “coffee break” with a “milk break.” Coffee was still offered, but buckets of ice-chilled milk were also made available.
Often cheese and dairy spreads would be offered in the snack section.
It isn’t difficult for hotel and convention centre cooking teams to find recipes and adjust menus for mainstream commodities such as beef, pork, canola and wheat.
However, when it’s a fringe commodity such as hemp, cooks first need to learn about the commodity before figuring out what they can deliver.
Andreas said his cooks didn’t flinch when told the Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance wanted hemp products in almost everything that would be consumed during the convention.
They brought in hemp protein, hemp oil, raw hemp seed and hemp “milk” and began experimenting.
The cooks found interesting wrinkles. For example, the oil is deeply coloured, so it can change the look of a food.
“It’s got a very dark green base to it,” Andreas said.
“Depending on what you’re cooking or frying or dressing, you’ve got to be cognizant of the colouring of the hemp.”
However, there were no insurmountable problems.
They made local granola and hemp milk yogurt parfaits, hemp granola bars, hemp butter tossed orange carrots and roasted Manitoba pork loin, apple and hemp demi-glaze.
The regional cuisine movement is huge in North America as chefs and food enthusiasts demand locally sourced, regionally specific food.
Andreas said his cooks’ new hemp skills should help them address this demand.
“Once you expose a culinary team or a hotel to such a product, it just opens the door to creativity and creative minds of what we can do down there,” said Andreas.
“We get a lot of clients who come in and look for regional cuisine, or local Manitoba cuisine, so now that we’ve got this conference under our belt we have … a lot more ideas to pull from.”
