What’s for dinner? Ricardo has the answer to that

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There’s fast food, and then there’s good food that is also fast. Ricardo Larrivée aims to make food that fits into the latter category.

“Everyone runs. Whether you’re 20, you’re running, whether you’re 75, you’re running. People have busy lives,” he says. “Let’s try to find shortcuts to make life easier.”

Speaking during a cooking demonstration in a Gastown kitchen space last month, the Quebec-based king of cuisine shared a few tips and tricks for his ready-made food selection, which includes frozen items, dips, sauces, sides and more priced from $5.99 to $24.99.

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“We have about 100 different items out East,” Larrivée explains. The introduction to the Western Canadian market, available at Safeway, sees a pared down number of products for consumers to try.

“Sous vide is something that’s really rising,” he explains of a key sector of the local product selection that includes barbecue meatballs or Buffalo Sweet and Sour Carrots. “And, in Vancouver, it’s a place that it’s the most popular.”

The sous vide approach offers flexibility for home cooks, allowing the food to be boiled in the bag, opened and sautéed in a pan, or even cooked in the microwave or air fryer.

Consideration of space saving for small kitchens and apartments, as well as single people or couples, were key considerations for the release of the products in the Western market, according to Larrivée. For example, marinated chicken breasts come in packages of two, allowing for a single or double serving to be prepared with ease.

“It’s easier to cook when you’re a large number,” Larrivée says. “But in large cities — Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver — it’s the same story, everything is getting smaller.”

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Most portions for Ricardo products in this market are for two diners. Family sized portions exist in Quebec, and Ricardo says those larger portion options are expected to arrive here later.

Larrivée kicked off the cooking session with a simple starter of fresh veggies with a Ricardo brand dip.

“Dips are very important in my life. I need dips for vegetables, but I use them also as sauce for sandwiches, for burgers — for all sorts of things,” he explains. “Sometimes, I just take a piece of chicken with a bit of dip around it, put it in Panko and fry it — all of a sudden I have something that tastes incredible but was very simple.”

Spooning dollops of dips into a glass, and topping each with straws of sliced vegetables such as cucumber and bell peppers, Larrivée said it was a starter that could be served at a gathering of family and friends, or as an easy after-school snack.

“You can make one portion, or you can make 15 portions. And you can do this ahead of time,” Larrivée says, turning his attention next to heating a pan and pouring in the sweet-and-savoury meatballs.

Offering options for vegetarian and meat eaters, the Ricardo products are all developed, tried and perfected at the team’s 40,000-square-foot space just outside of Montreal.

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“We do everything from the packaging to the test kitchen,” Larrivée says. “There are always seven people who work on a recipe. Some will be just looking at the French or English. And I even have someone who tries it at home. Her job is not to change anything. Her job is to challenge — you said it was 15-minute boiling and then roast it for five minutes — she challenges all of it so that, when you take the recipe, it works.”

The Ricardo website, Ricardocuisine.com, features more than 7,000 recipes garnering more than 300 million page views per year, mostly in Canada. Safe to say, Larrivée and his team know what Canadians like to eat.

“Because of the website, we know who is eating what in the country in every single region,” he explains. “Do you know what is the Canadian dish, coast to coast? Every province has things that are favourites, but there is one dish that will be the one coast to coast.

“It’s a lasagna. The No. 1 recipe on the web.”

During recipe creation, Larrivée and his team sample a dish dozens of times in order to get it right. During those days, packing a lunch at Ricardo headquarters is definitely optional.

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“When we cook something, we put all the leftovers out for everyone. Sometimes we send an email to the group that we have leftovers of this and we’d like to have your feedback,” Larrivée says. “We ate so much pizza — for weeks and weeks.”

A big part of Larrivée’s approach to food is taking the stress out of making a meal. For this, he recommends taking ready-made products and jazzing them up with toppings. Sous vide carrots were topped with pomegranate seeds and crumbled cheese.

A frozen pizza, with an impressively pillowy crust, was topped with a handful of peppery arugula to brighten the frozen pie. Cooked without a pizza stone and in a regular oven, the crust came out surprisingly delightful, a firm base with a chewy centre.

“The dough is a bit thicker than I would do at home. Because they’re precooked,” Larrivée says. “I tasted lots of pizzas, and I found that quite often, it was more like a cookie when it was cooked. It didn’t have the feeling of dough.”

For dessert, Ricardo popped some cookie dough balls into a cast iron pan before popping it into the oven. A few minutes later, fresh baked cookies were produced.

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Continuing the theme of elevating the ready-made items to the extreme, he scooped vanilla bean ice cream between two warm cookies, adding a layer of fresh raspberry in between. It was decadent and divine.

“You can make just the amount that you need,” he says with a smile. “Otherwise, you are going to eat them all.”

Aharris@postmedia.com 

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