Touring Ontario's West Coast

Many Huron County travellers are just passing through, en route to the Great Lake, with its sparkling waters and sandy beaches, but there's every reason to stop and taste the local bounty. You'll enjoy good food, drink and treats in abundance once you shift into park.

Huron boasts it is "the most agriculturally productive county in Ontario." A leisurely drive will lead you through vast swaths of farm fields, sometimes flat, sometimes rolling, delineated by borders of trees. The county is famous for it pork and corn, but you'll find everything from herb gardens to apiaries here. In local food boutiques, fans of chocolate or garlic will discover products to please their palates. Get close to the lake and there's fresh, fish to take home or to enjoy in homey eateries.

Stay a while. Huron's waterfront towns are famous for their glorious sunsets. In Goderich, you can even catch the sunset twice, once from the beach, once from the bluffs.

BAYFIELD-Marlene O'Brien has been described as Bayfield's canning and preserving diva. This makes her blush. She doesn't like it. Sure, she knows her way around a mason jar, but she's a country girl, born and raised nearby, reticent and soft-spoken.

There's no diva in sight as we stroll around examining examine the shelves of jams and jellies at the barn-sized shop at Bayfield Berry Farm. O'Brien runs the place, and it looks as if she keeps busy. Besides browsing for treats to take home, visitors can stop for a bite at the café or indulge in a creation at the sundae bar. There's a lot of action out in the fields, too, for pick-your-own enthusiasts.

The 80-acre farm has been in the family since 2001. They grow all kinds of berries, as well as apples, rhubarb, peaches, plums, squash and asparagus. O'Brien's pet project nowadays is the five-acre swath of Saskatoon berries; she's campaigning to make this fruit more familiar to the public.

The harvests bring in a lot of raw material for baking and preserves.

Pies are baked with whatever happens to be ripe and ready from the fields just outside the door. Talk about a light carbon footprint.

O'Brien's latest project is a line of juices. Saskatoon berries, raspberries or elderberries are blended with apple, pressed and bottled right here.

As for preserves, O'Brien prepares the usual favourites, but also indulges her creativity. You may spot sumac flower or prickly pear jellies, for instance. Bayfield is known for its "butters," she says, pointing out jars of apple butter and pumpkin butter. She also sells gluten-free and no-sugar-added jams and jellies.

"It's a big thing," O'Brien says. "I always try for the niche market."

Prices are $5.75 to $5.95 for 250-millilitre jams, $4 to $5.50 for 500-millitre preserves.

O'Brien says she learned at her mother's knee. She grew up in nearby Benmiller in an industrious German family, where preserving and baking were ongoing kitchen projects.

"That was the norm," she says. "My mom is a big influence."


HENSALL - Interior decorator by day, garlic connoisseur by night - it was a busy life for Jackie Rowe. She had to choose, so she opted to dedicate her life to garlic.

"I eat massive amounts of garlic," Rowe proudly admits.

As you open the door at the head office of The Garlic Box, her business, the delicious scent wafts out. It's everywhere, even in the company's mail. Fresh Ontario garlic is sold here in the showroom, but there's much more, too, from dipping oils to dehydrated scapes.

"We dry it, we freeze it, we chop it," says Rowe, a grandmother of seven. "Garlic is so schizophrenic. It will go in sweet things. It will go into pickled things. You can cook it or eat it raw."

She and husband Jim started farming garlic in 1997 with one acre, then seven, then 100, then 400. They opened The Garlic Box for practical and enthusiastic reasons: to use up the heads that got dinged by the harvester and "to find a pulpit to stand on and preach the merits of Ontario garlic."

Rowe says China produces 65 per cent of the world's garlic and floods our markets with it, but local, hardneck garlic is superior. The "neck" is not soft and braidable, the cloves are big and fat, there's a round basal plate at the root, and the content of allicin (a healthful compound) is five times that of offshore garlic, Rowe boasts.

No longer farming, Rowe expects to process 52,000 lbs. of garlic purchased from growers across the province this year. Her creations - 34 and counting - are sold at gourmet food shops, farmers' markets and, of course, the office in Hensall. "We're cooking non-stop and developing products non-stop," she says.

Garlic steak splash and dry garlic blends for mashed potatoes are top sellers. Pickled cloves may be flavoured with Niagara Chardonnay or local honey. Friends in the maple syrup business prompted the creation of fabulous Maple Orange Garlic Sauce, which is smashing on duck or chicken.

As we browse the shelves, Rowe picks up a bottle of relish with garlic scapes. "This will make a hot dog worth eating," she says.


EXETER-It's hard to believe Huron County's chocolate masterminds learned candy-making by trial and error. They still laugh about the time they ruined their first batch of caramel - 40 pounds of it.

"We carried it and buried it in the backyard," Cherie Earle confesses.

We are in the 3,000-square-foot factory and shop at Sugar & Spice Chocolates. In the back, Earle's partner in life and business, Gerhard Kuhn, is squirting chocolate over nutty caramel Hippos (named after a fan commented she'd look like a hippo if she kept eating them). The caramel is just fine, thank you.

The shop's decor is a glorious jumble, inside and out. Call it country eclectic meets ye olde candy store. You can hardly see the porch for the twig furniture, flowers, antiques, figurines and birdhouses. Inside is a knick-knack browser's paradise crammed with everything from beer bottle tags to candles. And, of course, chocolates, candies and fudge in an antique showcase.

Sugar & Spice goes way beyond old-fashioned boxed chocolate. You can buy bars with labels featuring text messaging symbols, for instance, or order chocolate-covered licorice as wedding favours.

Earle is prone to jumping up in the middle of the night with new ideas. "We try to step out of your normal," says the spiky-haired grandmother of four. "We try to give them something they can't get everywhere else."

It's been 30 years since the Tilbury lady and the doughnut baker from Kitchener got into the chocolate business, and now Earle and Kuhn have five shops in the area. They fill many a custom Internet order, but their regulars are mainly local and loyal.

"I've had kids coming to see me and now they bring their kids," Earle says.

They certainly don't have to bury the Hippos, or the killer toffee crunch, or their signature, melt-in-your mouth Mint Smoothies. Life is sweet.

"We still eat a lot of chocolate," Earle says. "We call it quality control."