PEI Tour

After some meetings earlier in the morning, I toured Canada's Smartest Kitchen located in the Culinary Institute of Canada at Holland College. What a cool kitchen! It is a research and development test kitchen used by industry to develop new products. Really impressive technology all set up in a way that is welcoming to chefs, food scientists, and industry people. They seem to do lots of work with native PEI items such as mussels, oysters, and potatoes to name a few.

Speaking of mussels, I went and toured a mussel farming and processing facility. Check out the pics. They are of a massive bucket of mussel seed, basically caught on string in the waters in the background of the picture. The next picture is of mussel holding. The bins are filled with sized and cleaned mussels which are waiting to be packaged and shipped. They are constantly covered with icy cold water from a pure salt water well. The water is poured from a distance above the bins so that the water is constantly oxygenated.

On the way we stopped and spoke with a couple of lobster/tuna fishermen and looked at their operations. They still hand make all their own wooden traps. It was the end of the season, so most of the boats are out of the water and being cleaned.

Next we were off to an oyster fishing company. I was fortunate enough to go out on a boat and "tong" for oysters. The ground is just littered with them. After pulling them up, the smaller ones are separated from the keepers and returned to the water. It was a pretty cool experience to eat an oyster that was literally seconds from the water. After returning from the boat, we did a taste test of four oysters harvested from different areas. It was amazing to taste the subtle differences in them.

For dinner, we went to the Merchant Man Pub in Charlottetown. http://www.merchantmanpub.com/ The guys and I shared the crispy sweet potato fries with malt vinegar aioli and curry mayo as well as the pub nachos with tasty potato nacho chips with barbecue seasoning, onions, jalapenos, olives, and cheese. For my entree I had Curry Chips which was a creamy chicken curry served over french fries...wicked good food!

Heading home tomorrow...