Could Ontarian Cuisine Make It on Netflix Shows About Cooking?

The second episode of the Netflix docuseries Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is all about salt. The show’s host, Samin Nosrat, visits Japan to document the uses of salt and salty tastes in Japanese cooking to make exceptional food. She explores the process of making traditional soy sauce, gathering sea salt from strands of seaweed, (moshio) and making miso soup from scratch.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat gets to the heart of the manufacturing processes that are so important to the food industry and why those processes should be important to everyone who enjoys eating quality food. It puts succinctly what most food manufactures have always believed.

Look at soy sauce: once an ancient Chinese sauce that spread across eastern Asia, it is now an immensely popular condiment worldwide. It’s amazing in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat to see Japanese soy manufacturers making the famous sauce in their traditional wooden barrels (some over a hundred years old) and producing a product that evokes pride, quality, culture, and exquisite taste all in one spoonful.

Now, you may be lamenting the fact that eastern Ontario does not have a booming traditional soy sauce industry, nor does it have many of the exotic ingredients you can see being made throughout Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat or other Netflix shows. But we do have our own food traditions that are popular and revered, and one in particular that is celebrated globally: maple syrup.

Ontario Has The Same Quality Food as Regions Featured on Netflix Shows

It’s hard to understand why grocery stores in Ontario even bother to carry American corn syrups. Once you’ve had real maple syrup, the other stuff hardly compares. Like soy sauce, maple syrup has an ancient past. Indigenous peoples used maple sap in cooking long before European settlers adopted the process. It’s a distinctly Canadian cuisine that’s worth its weight in gold. For example, during the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist, thieves stole $18.7 million dollars worth of maple syrup.

Visit any eastern Ontario sugar bush and you’ll understand why this maple gold is so sought after. Talk to the people who make maple syrup and you’ll see the same lifelong passion that the Japanese soy sauce makers have for their product. Manufacturing quality food products is a contagious passion, and it’s not a foreign concept to Ontarians; it’s shared across the Ontario food manufacturing industry. Some products may not have the international reputation of the maple syrup producers, but many share the same lifelong dedication to craft and perfection.

Eastern Ontario has so much to offer anyone interested in being a part of a powerful tradition as old as the first people to live here. Living and working in eastern Ontario can be a rich experience that contributes not only to the economy, but to the entire culture of this beautiful land.