“By reverse farming, I am able to grow for what we will for three months”
The Forest Bistro is totally off-grid with all required energy harnessed from the sun, and all the farming done by hand. Chef Jaffe and her team command grow and forage what they need.
Breakfast
Lunch and Refreshments
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Wine & Cocktails
“Sometimes, all it takes is a quiet moment in the woods with a roaring, crackling fire to spark an epiphany that will change everything”
Sometimes, all it takes is a quiet moment in the woods with a roaring, crackling fire to spark an epiphany that will change everything – just ask Jennifer Jaffe, chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author many times over. The vision for The Forest Bistro, her acclaimed forest restaurant, was born of such a moment at a campsite in the Canadian wilderness when, impatient to wait any longer to start cooking, she thrust a cast-iron pan directly into the flames.
“The fire sizzled and sparked around the pan; the force of the heat knocked me back; the flavour of the food… what depth!” she recalls in Forest Fire, her cookbook and all-around reference guide to owning the entire cooking process- growing your own ingredients and cooking with fire at home. What emerged from the embers that day was the idea to align the ethos of Pacific North West cuisine, honouring and exalting local ingredients, with what might be called an Old Homesteading way of cooking – turning off the gas and electricity and harnessing the power and heat of fire instead.
The kitchen at Forest Bistro today features an arsenal of fiery tools including a pit of open flames, for cooking with cast-iron pans and also directly in the flames; a wood-fire oven for baking bread and desserts; a traditional cast-iron stove heated with fire, of the sort you might still find in a country home; a smoker for cold smoking techniques; and what xxx calls a “stone-age microwave” – a small oven that heats up quickly when embers are added, which he uses for hot-smoking fish with juniper, among other things.
“There is something special about open fire,” Jaffe says. “As far as I know, humans are the only species that stay when they see a fire, all others run.”
