Beer and food unite at Harvest on the Hill

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This article was published 10/10/2017 (2381 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Students at Assiniboine Community College are serving up a colourful blend of food and drink on Thursday night.

The college’s Harvest on the Hill event will showcase the work of nearly 100 hotel and restaurant management, culinary arts, horticultural production and sustainable food systems students, and is the first Manitoba Institute of Culinary Arts event of the school year.

“We’ve brought together a celebration of local foods, local beers, along with a large international selection of beer as well,” ACC instructor Kyle Zalluski said.

With 68 different beers, at least 16 of which are local, it will be the largest selection of Manitoba beers at Harvest on the Hill so far, Zalluski said.

He said it is meant to be a celebration of the college’s “Field to Fork” motto and the relationship between the different programs at the culinary arts institute.

The students will have grown the food and prepared it. Meanwhile, each of the 17 tables will feature four hand-picked beers, paired with meals from beer barbecue smoked beef brisket to Yakatori grilled tuna and octopus.

Zalluski said the evening will be a “positive challenge” for the students, having spent weeks preparing for the event. And with upward of 225 guests, he said expectations will be high.

“Certainly it does coincide with the whole college mantra of learn by doing,” he said. “These are pretty monumental, practical exercises that are put on.”

Alyona Lyubytska, a second-year hotel and restaurant management student from Ukraine, said preparing for Harvest on the Hill has been a lot of work, but very interesting.

“For example, I didn’t know at all that there are so many kinds of beer in Canada,” she said. “In Ukraine, for example, people drink only lager beer and I learned about ales. That was a discovery for me, that there were such dark ales, like soya sauce.”

For Kaitlin McCarthy, a first-year culinary arts student, who was helping prepare a spit-roasted pig and sous-vide octopus, she said the work has been fast-paced but everyone has been working well as a team.

“I knew a lot before coming into it and I kind of expected how it would be. There’s always so much to learn here,” she said.

“I’m really keen to see how it goes.”

Harvest on the Hill will be held tomorrow night at ACC’s North Hill campus.

» mlee@brandonsun.com