White House Fruit Farm

Today's visit to White House Fruit Farm in Canfield, Ohio turned out to be an especially pleasant one. White House has been a popular destination year-round for the Youngstown-area community for decades. This large farm has provided us with locally grown fruit, and is best known for its many varieties of apples. In addition White House has excellent baked goods including bread, pies, fudge and, perhaps best of all, doughnuts. Try the fresh blueberry doughnuts - even without icing these slightly blue cake doughnuts will be something you jones for late at night. They also stock preserved fruit in jams and jellies as well as brandied peaches, local relishes, noodles, kitchen gadgets, honey, maple syrup, candy, and the previously mentioned Troyer Heat & Serve chicken broth with 65 mg of sodium per cup. In fall they host a pumpkin festival at which they often serve the freshest and most delicious caramel apple you will ever lose a filling in.

In the last few years White House has recently become quite the happening destination, probably as an antidote to Giant Eagle and the mall-type groceries we've become accustomed to. The original building has been remodeled, and they've enlarged both the parking area and the interior of the market. There's a deli and an area where you can get Hershey's ice cream, or extrude-your-own peanut butter, plus the whole produce section. I had gone to buy a pie for my brother's birthday and check out the sweet corn. I was pleasantly surprised to find that White House now produces its own line of salad dressings. Better yet, all of the salad dressings I examined are what I'd consider to be low sodium. All have a sodium content under 300 mg, and most of them are under 200. Many are unusual and lots of them have vidalia onions as the base. I considered peach pecan, lemon peppercorn, green olive tomato, key lime, balsamic herb, vidalia onion and poppyseed, roasted red pepper and blackberry walnut vinaigrette before settling on vidalia onion creamy ranch. Although the vidalia ranch has a little more sodium it is delicious and could easily be used on a pasta salad or as a sauce on meat.

Visit White House in Canfield, Ohio or online. Their website is listed under Sites and Sources in the sidebar. You can find a list of their crops and the ripening dates for those crop on their website, and in addition they also provide a list of the local products they carry. Perhaps White House can be part of our area's answer to buying local and reducing our carbon footprints.