Nourishing Ideas

Cedar Planking

2011-11-20T16:26:00.001-08:00

The aroma of cedar is well known and loved, and its uses are many. One of the most famous and delicious dishes of the Pacific Northwest is cedar planked salmon. Fillets of salmon are laid on soaked planks of wood and grilled over an open fire. The wood not only imparts a rich smokiness, but also protects the delicate fish from direct heat.

In Japan, they have their own traditions of using cedar to impart flavor into food and drink. Their natural resources are less abundant, so their traditions are more frugal. Thin slats of cedar are wrapped around marinated seafood, sometimes accompanied by mushrooms or vegetables, and baked or roasted to impart the flavor of the cedar into the individual parcels. This technique, being smaller, also imparts much less smoke, and more of the wood.

Although the tradition of the indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest is a delicious and effective way of feeding a large group of people, if you're having a smaller gathering, the Japanese technique is an effective way of serving individual portions without using a lot of wood or charcoal.

Croute au Fromage

2011-11-14T12:59:00.000-08:00

In the spring, I started a composed cheese plate at Park Kitchen. For whatever reason, we had never really sold much of the traditional cheese plate you see on menus all over town, fresh or dried fruit, compotes, nuts, crackers, et cetera. It also never really seemed appropriate to the menu at Park Kitchen. I blogged about that first cheese plate, the Tete de Moine. Since then, I have been featuring domestic cheeses, but I am once again returning to the cheeses of Switzerland for the first warm composed cheese plate of the year.

The melting qualities of Gruyere are well known and deserved. It is made from unskimmed and unpasteurized cow's milk, with a fat content of 45%. Aged from eight to ten months in 75 pound wheels, the dense texture and cream content make it one of the perfect melting cheeses, with its fruity aroma and nutty characteristics opening up as it melts. Shaving the cheese on a wooden Swiss mandolin is certainly fun, but you can use whatever you have. The dish is reminiscent of the classic Swiss croute au fromage, which is a sort of open faced croque monsieur. I have added a few elements to the traditional bread, ham and cheese. At the base of the dish are caramelized onions braised in beer. On top of that is a piece of grilled bread covered with melted Gruyere slices. Then we saute some chanterelle mushrooms and toss them with fresh sliced ham, pickled pears and pickled mustard seeds. As with the original croute au fromage, this is a hearty cold weather dish.

Mount Hood Matsutake

2011-11-13T19:47:00.001-08:00

Although we have tremendous bounty of wild mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest, the matsutake is not well known outside the gourmand community. We have a good harvest of tricholoma magnivelare, the white matsutake, around Ponderosa and Lodgepole Pines along the coastline and approaching the higher altitudes of Mount Hood and Mount Adams. I have also found them among Douglas Fir, Rhododendron and Salal. It is a beautiful mushroom to see in the wild, peeking up among the rocks of shallow mountain streams, in mossy groves, and beneath the mosaic of autumn leaves.

The Japanese have a great reverence for this mushroom, which has strong symbolic value in their kaiseki cuisine. For this reason, they will often pay twenty times our local price, and matsutake from around the world are shipped to Japan in October and November. At Tsukiji Market in Tokyo, I have seen matsutake imported from Oregon, Washington and Canada, as well as Turkey and China. The Japanese variety, tricholoma matsutake, has more of the brown markings on the cap that are seen on the stem in the photo. However, the texture and flavor are almost indistinguishable.

The smallest mushrooms are the most highly prized because they are relatively tender, and the veil is closed, making them easier to clean. Larger mushrooms become rather fibrous, sometimes to the point of being impossible to chew. It's firm texture and spicy cinnamon aroma make it ideal for charcoal grilling or poaching and serving in broth. In kaiseki cuisine, it is most often served with fish or vegetables, but I have also liked serving it with meats like duck, beef and chicken. Bourbon has also been a favorite accompaniment in recent years. If you have never tried matsutake, perhaps a restaurant is the first place to taste them. If you feel adventurous, I have seen them at several farmer's markets and at Uwajimaya in the fall.

The Mysteries of Kombucha

2011-11-11T18:22:00.000-08:00

The history of kombucha is hazy and speculative. This intriguing fermented tea is believed to have come from China and migrated to eastern Russia. From there it migrated back to the far east and across the Pacific to the United States. My initial interest in kombucha came from it's mysterious appearance, a large brown vat of bubbling elixir with a large whitish gelatinous cap floating on top. The name kombucha is actually Japanese for "seaweed tea," because the fermenting "mother" floating on top resembles seaweed or a sort of jellyfish. The Japanese do make a tea (actually a tisane) of kombu seaweed which has the same name, but the fermented tea beverage is called kocha kinoko. In Russia it is called grib, and in China it is called hongcha jun.

Folklore surrounding the drink claim it is a health tonic with many healing properties, though this has not been extensively demonstrated by testing. The main claim for this seems to be the presence of glucuronic acid, which is a compound used in the liver for detoxification. This drink received widespread notoriety last year when a national recall pulled the emerging product ($300 million in retail sales) from retail store shelves. It had been discovered that the unpasteurized product contained more than the legal limit of 0.5% alcohol. For more on the story, read this. However, many people who are drawn to the notion of its healing properties claim that the "living" beverage loses many of its magical properties if it is pasteurized.

Returning to my original interest in the wonder drink, I was fascinated by the thick layer of SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) floating on top. This is the same thing you see in raw apple cider vinegar, but it is far thicker, and while living, it always floats. This is the perfect environment for the aerobic bacteria developing on the top of the SCOBY, and the anaerobic bacteria bubbling away from the bottom. Maintaining the pH of the fermentation is critical. Below 2.5 it is too acidic to drink, and above 4.6, it is at risk of contamination by unwanted bacteria and mold. If your grandmother ever made you drink a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar before dinner, you might be interested in trying a more flavorful alternative to healthy digestion. Others just like the taste of a slightly effervescent tea.

Huitlacoche, Black Gold of the Aztecs

2011-09-18T22:37:00.000-07:00

In America, the only people who have heard of corn smut are corn farmers. It is a pathogenic fungus that swells and distorts corn into large blueish-black kernels, and usually gets fed to the pigs. The USDA has spent considerable time and money eradicating corn smut. South of the border, throughout Mexico, the same fungus is an ancient delicacy. Since the days of the Aztecs, it has been deliberately inoculated by cutting the stalks so that the water-borne fungus would infect the corn, promoting the development of the highly valued corn smut. It is called by the ancient Nahuatl name, huitlacoche, which means "raven's shit." Ears of corn infected with this dark colored fungus nearly quadruple the value of the corn. It takes on a rich, earthy flavor, retaining notes of the original sweetness of corn, but with far more complexity. When simmered with garlic and chiles, or made into a mole, the corn smut is often served on quesadillas or tamales. Maybe corn smut and raven's shit are not the most inticing monikers, which is why some American chefs are trying the term Mexican truffle! Whatever you call it, don't just throw it to the pigs, find out what the Aztec kings were so excited about.

McSweeney's Starts Cooking

2011-08-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

In typical McSweeney's fashion, the San Francisco based publishers have entered the world of food writing with a rather unorthodox beginning. The first book from their newest imprint, McSweeney's Insatiables, is Mission Street Food: Recipes and Ideas from an Improbable Restaurant. This book tells the story of Anthony Myint and his wife Karen, opening a cart in 2008 in San Francisco's Mission District.

What is so interesting about that? Thousands of carts opened across the country after the economic collapse. In this case, a talented cook began by offering delicious late night food at dirt cheap prices. They twittered and they gossiped, the buzz spread, and so did their business. They eventually moved out of the cart and into a number of other iconoclastic restaurant formats collaborating with famous chefs in the community and donating proceeds to charitable organizations. Their book not only chronicles their madcap tales of how this all came to be, but shares many of their recipes with step by step photography. This is not a glamorous cookbook, but it is gritty and substantial.

The writing is sincere and silly. There are bold ideas that came from bold actions. Besides the sly commentaries and original page layouts, there is also a comic storyboard about how it all began. It is a very fun book to read or even peruse. At the end of the book, they list the four golden rules of a successful chef, after which you "reap your rewards." Once you complete the four steps, the authors have the following advice:

The night before you open to the public, take a shower and go to sleep early.
This will be the last time your life feels under control. By the time you wake
up, you'll already be a couple hours in the shit, no matter what time it is.
Equipment will malfunction, food will be compromised, and the first-aid kit may or may not be adequate...Congratulations! Your rejection of money, a social life, or any conventional form of happiness is now complete. You are a
successful chef.

There are laughs in many forms available in these pages. It makes sense that McSweeney's would be their publisher. In their own words, the authors had never written a cookbook, and the publishers had never printed one. Cookbooks are a very complex kind of book to produce, requiring not only an interesting story and good writing, but lots of photographs, recipes and recipe testing. This takes a considerable amount of time.

The surprising turn for me is how McSweeney's crew has begun their new genre with such hubris. They have also become the publisher of Lucky Peach, a quarterly food magazine conceived by New York celebrity David Chang and Peter Meehan. David Chang is many things. Like Anthony Myint of Mission Street Food, he is an opinionated, iconoclastic chef who started out by feeding people delicious late night food on the cheap. Like Anthony, he went on to open several other food service operations. Both publications have a collaborative spirit, with contributions from other famous chefs and food writers, and also a desire to bring fine dining concepts down to the proletariat price point.

Chris Ying is the editor-in-chief of both Lucky Peach and Mission Street Food. The $64,000 question in my mind is how this project ended up at McSweeney's. Dave Chang and Peter Meehan had published the Momofuku cookbook with Potter, an imprint of Random House in New York. They had originally conceived of Lucky Peach as a Food Network TV show, then as an iPad app. Somehow it ended up being a magazine from a west coast publisher that had never handled food writing before?!? It could be that a new generation of publishers, like the new generation of chefs, are willing to explore new media.

Oregon Wasabi

2011-08-16T13:34:00.001-07:00

Over the course of this summer, I was introduced to the farmers of Oregon's only wasabi farm, Frog Eyes Wasabi. In fact, there are only four such farms in North America, all of them located on the Pacific coastline. This remarkable plant grows very slowly, taking over a year to mature. It requires the cool and steady maritime climate to stay healthy. This long growth cycle is part of the high cost of fresh wasabi, but as with so many great foods imported from other cultures, Americans have little understanding of wasabi.

The most widely used part of the plant is the rhizome, which we call wasabi root, and which few Americans have ever tasted. Sadly, most Americans have been to sushi bars serving blobs of green paste alongside their nigiri and maki rolls. This is powdered horseradish and green food coloring. It has a simple one dimensional nasal heat and no flavor or aroma. It is very cheap, but it is no substitute for wasabi. Real wasabi does have a spiciness like horseradish, but it also has a very complex vegetal flavor and floral aroma. These compounds are very volatile, and they dissipate within a few minutes of grinding them into paste. This is why wasabi is traditionally ground to order.

Although the cost of fresh wasabi is high, that is partly because supply is low, and supply is low because awareness is low. My friends at Frog Eyes are in their first year of production, and they are already having a difficult time meeting demand. We thought it would be fun for them to come to Park Kitchen and have a tasting menu with wasabi applied in different ways. I wanted to show them the potential of wasabi in cooking, so they could open up new ideas for their marketing.

The meal started with something familiar, oysters on the half shell, trout roe, and a granita of wasabi root. I hoped that the sight of the wasabi leaf, rocks and seaweed would invoke the feeling of being at the farm. From here, they tasted dishes using different parts of the plant, and pairing them with tomatoes, cucumber, tuna salad, beef and mushrooms. The main course was grilled ribeye with wasabi root butter, sauteed chanterelles, padron peppers, potcha beans, and a puree of wasabi leaves, which is a vivid emerald green with a bright spicy herbal flavor.

You may begin to see fresh wasabi on the shelves of Portland grocery stores like Whole Foods, New Seasons, or Uwajimaya. The rhizome is particularly hardy. You can store it in the refrigerator for several weeks and it will not deteriorate. However, once grated, the nuances fade rather quickly, so use it as soon as possible.

A Guide to Summer Berries

2011-08-01T20:11:00.001-07:00

The Pacific Northwest knows some of the finest berries in America. Boysenberries, marionberries, jostaberries, gooseberries, raspberries, loganberries, chesterberries, blueberries, huckleberries, a person could get lost in the lexicon of berries. Here are a few notes on what the names mean.

Strawberry (fragaria) is widely known and loved. There are many cultivars, but are generally divided into "June bearing" or "ever bearing" fruits.

Blackberry (rubus) is by far the largest family of berries with more than 350 species. The most widely known cultivars are the 'Boysen', 'Marion', 'Chester Thornless', 'Triple Crown', 'Logan', and 'Siskiyou', to name a few. Oregon is the leading world producer of cultivated blackberries.

Barberry (berberis) is more widely known as the Oregon grape or mahonia. It is too tart to eat out of hand, and generally used for making jellies.

Raspberry (rubus) generally refers to the European red raspberry, but there are also golden, purple and black raspberries. These fruits are particularly perishable, with its fruit being very soft when ripe.

Dewberry (rubus caesius) resembles the blackberry and is a close relative. It is reminiscent of the raspberry, but ripening to dark purple or black, and not as fragile as the raspberry.

Loganberry (rubus x loganobaccus) is a cross between a raspberry and a dewberry. It is about the size of a raspberry with the color and flavor of a blackberry.

Tayberry (rubus fruticosus x idaeus) is a cross between a raspberry and a blackberry, more resembling a raspberry and being sweeter than the loganberry.

Gooseberry (ribes uvacrispa) is a very tart berry, either green or red skinned, with green flesh. It is very popular in Europe, but not as well known or loved in America. I personally love this berry and use it extensively every year. It has a very short season, usually the month of June.

Jostaberry (ribes nigrum x uvacrispa) is a cross between a gooseberry and a black currant. It is slightly smaller than a gooseberry with a very dark colored skin and flesh. It's flavor is more like the black currant, especially when fully ripe.

Currants (ribes) are small, tart, pea sized berries ranging in color from white, pink, red, and black. The tartness of the berries also varies. They are generally used for jellies, preserves, liqueurs and sauces.

Blueberry (vaccinium) is divided into "lowbush," which are regarded as wild, and usually very small, and "highbush," of which there are many cultivars, and the berries are much larger.

Farmers markets in Portland are bursting with a wide variety of berries all summer long, and many people in the Northwest are passionate jam and jelly makers. People also store the berries in the freezer and use them well into autumn. Although I have always loved berries, I had never seen the wealth of fruits we have here in the Pacific Northwest, so take advantage of them.

Back at the End of the Line

2011-07-26T09:13:00.001-07:00

The cover story of Time Magazine this week asks the question, "Can farmed fish feed the world?" Bryan Walsh makes the case for the future of integrated aquaculture, but it sounds better than it really is. It seems ironic to me that he uses the same title as Charles Clover's 2004 novel The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What we Eat. In Walsh's version, farmed seafood is the latest chapter in human control of the natural world. In Clover's version, modern technology and a growing population have wiped out world seafood stocks faster than we knew they were there. Can they both be right?

Introducing Aquaculture

There is no question that seven billion people eating seafood cannot be satiated by the natural world. In Charles Clover's book, he first talks about the total collapse of the cod population in the once bountiful waters of Newfoundland. He then makes a nearly decisive case for the total collapse of bluefin tuna within the next decade. However, the limits of wild seafood fishing are already being supplemented. People around the world are already eating more farmed fish than they realize. As the techniques and efficiency improve, some of it actually tastes good, too. Over 90% of Atlantic Salmon is farmed, over 1.4 million tons annually, and more than 40% of the shrimp consumed globally is farmed.

Basic Math Skills

If there is one glaring hole in Bryan Walsh's optimism, the math doesn't add up. The United Nations says that food production must increase by 100% in the next 40 years to keep up with current demand. That is a startling statistic for seafood. The studies of professor Daniel Pauly are featured in Clover's book, where he finds that global seafood harvest is several years past its peak. That means next year, we will have less wild seafood than this year. However, even in the best possible examples, it takes 2 pounds of wild fish, ground up and fed to farmed fish, and in the end you only get 1 pound of farmed fish, which leaves the ocean at a net loss. So, as Josh Goldman, founder of Australis Aquaculture observes, "the question of what the fish will eat is central to aquaculture. We can't grow on the back of small forage fish." Indeed, since the more realistic conversion rate is 5 pounds of wild fish to produce 1 pound of farmed fish.

Just Add Water

Clearly, the big question is "Can aquaculture technology develop fast enough to keep up with demand?" It will certainly not be able to do so without using resources from the wild. We are learning rapidly which fish are effectively farmed, such as barramundi, tilapia and carp. They have good conversion ratios and their habitat can be effectively simulated in integrated aquaculture systems. Ultimately, the question will be answered by economics. For example, when I started my culinary career, fish like skate, monkfish and black cod were very affordable because they were relatively abundant and underutilized, selling for eight dollars a pound wholesale. Now, fifteen years later, those numbers have doubled. If that trend continues, in 2025, wild salmon could cost $40 a pound at the retail counter. Most Americans will not be able to afford that. In Bryan Walsh's closing arguments, he concludes "if we're all going to survive and thrive in a crowded world, we'll need to cultivate the seas just as we do the land. If we do it right, aquaculture can be one more step toward saving ourselves." Let's hope that step is taken in stride.

Pimientos de Padron

2011-07-18T00:13:00.002-07:00

Padron peppers have taken America by storm. They originated in the municipality of Galicia, Spain, where they have long been a popular tapas dish simply sauteed in olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt. They were first brought to the Pacific Northwest by Manuel and Leslie of Viridian Farms, and have since been grown by a dozen other farms on the west coast. In Galicia, they have a saying, "os pementos de Padron, uns pican e outros non," a rhyme that translates as "some are hot and some are not." Manuel and Leslie say that only one in twenty is spicy, but I find it to be more like one in seven!

At Park Kitchen, I like to cook them with all sorts of accompaniments, from chanterelles and cherry tomatoes, to gnocchi or octopus. They also make a lovely side dish for a pork roast or braised beef. Their size and mild heat are so versatile that they deserve a versatile presentation. You can find them at many farmers markets from July to late September or early October. They are quick and easy to cook, so give them a try.

Considering Dessert

2011-07-18T00:13:00.001-07:00

I have enjoyed my subscription to Art of Eating for years. It is an opinionated quarterly, and a rare kind of food magazine in today's publishing world, a work of diligent food journalism that has thus far not diluted its content to the full color photography driving most monthly magazines. When I received the latest issue with several articles addressing desserts and pastry, it was as if Edward Behr and his team had peered into my recent thoughts on the sweet subject.

Mr. Behr himself wrote A Point of View in Pastry, describing the talents of Shuna Lydon. In writing about her work history, he is able to discuss the differences between east and west coast sensibilities regarding the final course. I like what he has to say about Lydon, and his observations of the craft. His conclusion particularly resonated with me. "A dessert has to fit the whole of the restaurant. It has to mesh with the savory part of the menu; the waiters have to be able to describe and sell it; the time between order and pickup can't be too long." As usual, his observations extend beyond creativity, and place it within the context of the logistics of a restaurant.

I started my career in cooking as a baker and pastry chef. Now, after many years of savory cooking, I am once again directing the pastry program at Park Kitchen. My perspective has changed, and my approach to desserts are more of an extension of the savory meal. I think this makes my menu more consistent, and the transition from savory to sweet is more seamless. I also set out to make the desserts complete without fussy garnishes and inedible decorations. I was inspired by influential pastry chefs like Claudia Fleming to make desserts as seasonally focused as the rest of the menu. So I was eager to read Mitchell Davis' well written article, Where is Dessert Headed? and see what he thinks of American desserts in the twenty-first century.

Mr. Davis begins by proposing that American tastes have evolved over the last half century, but "our dessert tastes are for the most part stuck at a five year old's birthday party circa 1952." I suppose this is true inasmuch as America loves comfort foods. He proceeds by asking the question "what makes a dessert great?" Is it innovation or is it satisfaction? It really depends on the audience. Mr. Davis describes a recent meal at the James Beard House in which Matt Lightner served his creative seasonal cuisine with mixed responses. Although Mr. Davis enjoyed the meal immensely, "it felt as though half the dining room was in rapture and the other half wanted their money back." This is usually the response to very personal creations. They may seem like a revelation to some, while being completely lost on others.

This is especially the challenge of restaurant desserts and pastry. In the restaurant industry, desserts are a loss-leader. The ingredients cost a lot, perishable fruits and fine chocolates, and the techniques require a lot of time and skill. The price of desserts rarely covers the cost of their own production. This is perhaps the reason why the world's most innovative pastry chefs have abandoned their posts, and in many cities, pastry chefs are becoming as hard to find as sommeliers. In Spain, Albert Adria, former pastry chef at El Bulli is now the owner of a tapas bar. In America, Alex Stupak, former pastry chef of Alinea, now owns a Mexican restaurant, and Sam Mason, former pastry chef of WD-50 is now a bartender. This seems to me to be at the heart of the question "Where is dessert headed?"

America will always love apple pie and cupcakes. The classics endure for two reasons, because their flavors and textures are simple pleasures, and because they are affordable. Fine dining desserts require extravagant bells and whistles to entertain, whether they are the old world spun sugar cages and towering spires of chocolate sculpture, or the new world liquid nitrogen and high tech chemistry. They are less likely to have the endurance of the classics. Mr. Davis recalls his most memorable dessert, a simple "slice of lemon tart served unadorned" at the legendary restaurant of Fredy Girardet. Although that perfect simplicity might exhibit a certain sophisticated restraint, it was the conclusion of a $250 lunch that few can afford.

Outstanding in the Field

2011-07-08T08:23:00.001-07:00

Twelve years ago, Jim Denevan had a vision. As an artist composing designs in sand and earth and ice, his energies are poured into the grand scenery of nature. He turned this creative vision toward hosting dinners at farms around Santa Cruz, California. While growing up, he spent time at his older brothers organic farm, and hosted one of his earliest alfresco dinners there. After a few years of cooking these meals himself, Jim assembled a crew and took the show on the road. He has published a cookbook with photos of their famous bus travelling the country, and recipes of favorite Outstanding in the Field meals.

For the past eight years now, Outstanding in the Field has travelled the country serving these dinners at farms and orchards, wineries, dairies and ranches, bringing people closer to the people and the products they strive to celebrate. Each dinner is now prepared by a chef from the region, and the travelling crew set up the now familiar family table stretched through these beautiful landscapes of American agriculture.

Over the past decade and across the country, this kind of farm dinner has become increasingly popular, and many others have begun hosting similar events. The hard work of our farmers and ranchers, cheesemakers and winemakers are once again being praised. It takes a lot of work to set up these dinners and serve great meals in rural settings, but if the guests take away some appreciation of the beautiful scenery and some insight into the origins of great food, its worth the effort.

This year, I had the opportunity to work with them at Cameron Winery, cooking alongside my friend and OITF alumnus, Troy Maclarty. He had spent the previous summer on the road with them. Our friends John and Teri at Cameron Winery have a beautiful property, and have hosted several special gatherings here, so we felt right at home cooking at the winery, which is all you can hope for at events like this!

Red Fruits of Early Summer

2011-07-08T08:22:00.001-07:00

Sometimes the patterns of nature are a thing of beauty. In the early days of summer, the last of the strawberries and the first of the stone fruits take on a common motif of blushing tones. Raspberries and tayberries, which are a cross between the red raspberry and loganberry, blush with crimson ripeness, and the sweet and tart varieties of cherries come in a wide range of reds. The red currant is the first of the currants to ripen. The fruits of summer do not stay red for long before the berries and drupelets darken into purples and blacks. For a few weeks, the summer landscape is sweetly scarlet.

Calcotada Festival

2011-06-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

I first saw calcots (cal-sohts), these intriguing spring onions at Barcelona's Mercat de St. Josep, also known as La Boqueria. The way they are grown and eaten is a particular specialty of the region. These onions (allium cepa) were originally grown in the city of Valls, in the province of Tarragona. Planted in the spring, then harvested in summer, the clumps of onions are separated and cellared, replanted in the fall, and then the soil is banked up around the shoots, just like growing white asparagus. This makes for a tender green onion with a thick, tall white neck. The onions are then grilled over a flaming fire, not the steadily glowing coals that are usually used for grilling.

For our Portland Calcotada, chef Scott Ketterman of Simpatica grills the calcots grown by Viridian Farms, using vine clippings from them as well. The exterior of the onion is deeply charred, and then they are served from terra cotta roof tiles with a dipping sauce of romesco or salbitxada, made from chiles, almonds, garlic and tomato.

To eat this messy delicacy, hold the onion up by the green tops and peel downward toward the root, wiping away all the charred exterior. Dip the tender, steamed white into the sauce and slurp them down with your favorite Spanish wines. Our celebration included drinking from the festive porron, a wine pitcher designed for pouring wine directly into your mouth, grilled butifarra sausages, and mongetes (Catalan white beans). We happened to be sitting next to some enthusiastic Catalonian's that made it feel all the more like we were in Spain for a day.

Green Strawberries

2011-06-13T23:03:00.001-07:00

What is the idea behind using unripe strawberries, you might ask? Indeed, that is the question my farmers were asking two years ago, when I first started asking them to pick their strawberries after they had fully grown, but before they could ripen into the familiar blushed red jewels so widely known and loved. I first asked Leslie of Viridian Farms, and Dave of Creative Growers. Dave said, "What the hell do you want that for?" Not entirely sure myself, I answered, "Think of it as an early gooseberry."

Guided by the beloved tradition of using green tomatoes at the end of the season, and making verjus from the unfermented juice of unripe grapes, it seemed to me there must be some virtue to unripe strawberries in the days leading up to the summer solstice.

Last year, the green strawberries were glazed in a piquant gastrique and served with duck breast, toasted buckwheat, rhubarb and chard. This year, they are gently poached and pickled, and accompany a chilled salad of squid with raw kolrabi and agretti (a crunchy green plant of Italian origin). The salad is dressed with lemon, buttermilk and arugula oil. It is a nice mosaic of green and white, with textures both crisp and supple. Come try it soon, as green strawberries don't stay green for long.

Chartreuse and other Herbal Tonics

2011-05-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

The history of Chartreuse liqueur is one of France's ancient mysteries. In 1605, the Carthusian monks of Vauvert, near Paris, produced an alchemical formula that had been developed through the Middle Ages, a tonic of medicinal herbs infused and macerated to produce an "elixir of long life." This medicinal recipe was sent to La Grande Chartreuse, the central monastery of the order, near Grenoble. By the year 1737, father Jerome Maubec had deciphered the formula, and production of the "elixir vegetal de la Grande Chartreuse" began. The liqueur was a potent 71 percent alcohol, starting with herbal notes, and a spicy, pungent finish. Conceived as a medicine, people were drawn to its particular flavor. The monks set out to produce a more approachable beverage. In 1764, Green Chartreuse was bottled and distributed at 55 percent alcohol. The distinctive flavor and green color was still derived from the 130 alpine herbs used in the original formula.

The Order of Chartreuse was dispersed in the years following the French Revolution, and production of their magical elixir was disrupted, but the secret recipe was preserved. By 1838, the monks began producing Yellow Chartreuse, a slightly sweeter tonic with an even lower alcoholic content of 40 percent, it's yellow hue derived from saffron.

A relatively recent addition to the Carthusian monks production is the Chartreuse V.E.P., which stands for Vieillissement Exceptionnellement Prolonge, exceptionally long aging in oak casks. The flavors and complexity of the elixir improves with aging, and this liqueur is intended to highlight those qualities.

Genepi and other Herbal Elixirs

Chartreuse is only the most widely known of these ancient medicinal infusions. All the countries of Western Europe produced such elixirs in the Middle Ages, and some have survived, though the recipes and brands have changed over the centuries. Throughout Southern France, many bright green herbal liqueurs exist today under the generic term of genepi (zhe-nay-pee). Genepi refers to any liqueur made of mountain flora or aromatic plants, and are often homemade, with no particular brand name or distribution. Some have no name of any kind, other than the generic term genepi. One of the better known liqueurs I have encountered comes from the town of Le Puy en Velay, a monastic town on one of the ancient pilgrimage routes of St. James of Compostella. It is called Vervain, named after its principal ingredient, verbena. Today, these elixirs are almost always comsumed for their spicy herbal flavor rather than their healing properties, but the stigma of their ancient origins remains intact, as do the magical compounds that gave them promenance to begin with.

Elderflowers

2011-05-07T09:28:00.001-07:00

For a few fleeting moments in mid spring, the elder tree blossoms with huge umbels of starry white flowers. Throughout Europe, this richly fragrant aroma is traditionally preserved in cordials, a simple syrup accented with a variety of flavors. My friends in Switzerland have an elder tree that yields their annual holunderbluten mit zitronenmelisse, elderflower syrup with lemon and honey. In it's simplest form, this is a refreshing spring and summer cocktail with gin, or a splash of soda. The famous French liqueur St. Germain is an elderflower infusion great for many other cocktails.

It can also be used to infuse cream for desserts, from custards, sabayons and panna cotta, to parfaits and jellies that go well with rhubarb, strawberries and other seasonal delights. Do not apply heat to the flowers, which will lose much of their heady citrus aroma and become very bitter. Allow the time for a cold infusion, and then strain and enjoy.

Tete de Moine

2011-04-19T12:46:00.000-07:00

Of the many outstanding Swiss cheeses, there is a special place in my heart for the Tete de Moine. Typically, mountain cheeses are made in large wheels of twelve pounds or more. The Tete de Moine is a small wheel, less than two pounds, made of raw cow's milk, and typically aged two to three months. It's name means "monk's head," and refers to the cheese's resemblance to the shorn heads of the abbey brethren after the first slice has been removed. Today, it is produced by cooperatives surrounding the town of Bellelay, and is sometimes called by that name.

The Swiss have a penchant for gadgetry, which is probably why I am so fond of their customs and traditions. A devise called a girolle is used specifically to cut this cheese into beautiful, thin ruffles. The cheese has a sharp and intense flavor, quite nutty and salty, with sweet fruity notes, so these light curls of cheese are an appropriate means of approaching it without being overwhelmed. I thought this unique appearance would be the perfect way to start serving a composed cheese plate.

Taking advantage of the early spring shoots and wild herbs, I thought it would be fun to imitate the mountain pastures where this cheese originated. The base of the dish is made of crumbled honey walnut cake, which is then covered with an assortment of foraged greens, wood sorrel, lemon balm, watercress, wood violets, miner's lettuces, and dressed with a sherry walnut vinaigrette. A few florets of cow's milk cheese and some fried strips of salsify for crunch, and a pastoral pleasure is ready to serve.

Vegetables for Dessert

2011-04-03T17:30:00.000-07:00

For several years now, it has been my mission to make the desserts at Park Kitchen a natural extension of a vegetable focused menu. At first, this meant that instead of using tropical fruits in my desserts, as many restaurants do, I would utilize the natural sugars of the vegetable kingdom instead. You won't find pineapple and banana on my menu, but you might find beets, fennel, carrots, parsnips, or even sweet peas. As this repertoire developed, and I established a relationship with this new flavor spectrum, I gradually began decreasing the amount of sugar in my dessert recipes, and began adding salt!

I've never had much of a sweet tooth. I don't regard sugar as a flavor of it's own, and I think too much sugar tends to hide the natural flavor of other ingredients. I found that adding salt enhances not only the natural flavors, but also the perception of sweetness, without actually adding more sugar. Most people have experienced an extreme of this in salted caramels, something that has an awful lot of sugar in it, but the salt brings out the richness of caramelization. A salted caramel seems more satisfying because it's not just sweetness we taste anymore.
Now, I can focus on bringing these elements together in pleasing varieties of texture and temperature. This chocolate cake is served with a frozen parsnip custard, which is covered with a warm roasted white chocolate ganache, and sliced parsnips that have been poached in milk and honey. Roasted white chocolate tastes like dulce de leche, with all the caramelization and only half the sugar. It makes a nice bridge for the creamy parsnips and the rich dark chocolate. The alternating layers of warm and cold are refreshing and surprising.

Curds and Whey

2011-04-03T12:11:00.001-07:00

It is always exciting to use culinary classics as the source of inspiration for a dish. For several years, I wanted to use the traditional Italian maiale al latte as a starting point for a spring pork entree. Pork is braised in milk, which provides the dual effect of tenderizing the pork by means of its lactic acid, and rendering the curds from the whey, with the addition of rich, caramelized meatiness. Delicious to be sure, but a sore sight of dark brown curds loose and floating in whey.

For the Park Kitchen version, we strain the curds and form them into gnudi, or dumplings bound with flour and eggs, and softened with some fresh cheese. The whey, which is so rich with umami, is lightened with a puree of leeks and scallions, giving it an emerald green hue. Leek is the primary accompaniment, tender slices of the white portion, the green being pureed, but also used as a garnish. Drawing further inspiration from European traditions, the leeks are charred on the grill, reminiscent of the calcotada festivals of spring, and the ash is then used as a sort of vinaigrette, while the inner portion is made into chips, which I call onion glass. The pork is exceedingly tender, although in cuts like the loin and leg, it is still moist and pink, which for some tragic reason, most Americans are not prepared to enjoy. I highly recommend venturing out. Although it is marketed as "the other white meat," it is classified as livestock, which is always red meat, and indeed, good pork is never white.

As for the Milk Itself

I've recently started buying Holstein cow's milk from Noris Dairy, which does not homogenize their milk, a procedure long known to cause digestive problems. It is distributed by a cooperative company called Eat Oregon First, which supply everything from local meats and seafood, to grains, dairy and produce. Their emergence into the Portland market is helping to bring small producers to a wider audience.

Discovering the Virtues of White Chocolate

2011-03-12T18:33:00.001-08:00

White chocolate is a relatively new confection, first produced in the early twentieth century. I have never felt like it had much of a repertoire. Lacking cocoa mass or cocoa liquor, it has also seemed lacking in character to me. It also lacks the rich aroma of dark chocolate, usually being deodorized because its natural scent is considered too strong and undesirable. Having been stripped of so many of its best qualities, it has taken years for me to take interest in white chocolate.

White chocolate must contain a minimum of 20 percent cocoa butter, but I usually require about 30 percent to achieve the results I prefer. It must contain no more than 55 percent sugar, or other sweeteners. There are many cheap white chocolates on the market, which have tarnished its reputation, but the key to using white chocolate effectively is by controlling the ratio of cocoa butter and sugar to bring out qualities you like.

One of my favorite ways to bring depth of flavor to white chocolate is by roasting it at 250 degrees for about 10 minutes. The cocoa butter caramelizes, and the resulting flavor is like dulce de leche, but less sweet. At that point, it can become a ganache, an ice cream, a powder, a frosting, or grated over other components.

Another useful characteristic of white chocolate and cocoa butter is its high melting point. For example, you could use olive oil as a solid at room temperature by melting it with a small percentage of cocoa butter, and then watch it thicken as it cools. This allows you to create textures that wouldn't be possible at certain temperatures.

I will soon be able to get white chocolate through Classic Foods that has not been deodorized. By also using high fat white chocolate, I have found some ways to make white chocolate interesting by extending it's normal boundaries of fat and aroma. More to come...

The Future of Fresh Fish

2011-02-12T12:32:00.001-08:00

Several weeks ago, Scott and I met with Rick Goche, a local fisherman with a family business centered in Coquille, Oregon, near Coos Bay. He has fished albacore and salmon for over twenty years. Since the salmon fishing has become increasingly restricted in Oregon and California in recent years, he is very concerned about maintaining quality with the albacore catch. We were very pleased last year when Provvista Specialty Foods started carrying Rick's albacore loins quick-frozen in vacuum bags. Why would we be excited about frozen fish, you might wonder? Let me explain.

Ever since I moved to Portland in 2002, I have been confounded by the seafood supply here. I was dazzled by our abundance of remarkable farm produce, orchards, vineyards and ranchers raising everything from rabbits and lamb, to beef cattle and buffalo. Yet here, a mere eighty miles from the Pacific Ocean, there was a bleak supply of fresh seafood. Year round, we all see the same limited supply of salmon, halibut and Yellowfin tuna. Yet these are not fished year round, and rarely from local waters, unless Alaska and Hawaii are to be included in our locale. Most people, especially sushi lovers, don't realize that they have been purchasing previously frozen fish for years.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. In the world's largest fish market, where a single Yellowfin tuna can average over $30,000 (a new record set in January was $396,000 for an enormous Bluefin tuna), the frozen-at-sea trade is by far the largest and most consistent was to maintain quality. When a single fish can fetch that much money, you'd better believe they are going to protect their investment. Despite our romatic notions of a fish that has just been pulled from the ocean waters, pristine red gills and deep clear eyes, what more often happens is that it takes a day or two before that "fresh fish" even makes it to the market in Portland. But why? It's not just the ninety minute drive from the coast!

In today's world, seafood can only be considered in the global market. Unfortunately, what this means is that if the currency exchange is better in Asia, they will likely buy most of our Dungeness Crab, or if the demand for salmon and king crab is greater in Japan than it is in America, they will buy most of Alaska'a catch, as they have for decades. Portland is not a big city, and it is not a coastal city. It is much easier to deliver large quantities of seafood to San Francisco or Seattle or Vancouver, and that is often what happens.

This problem is compounded by the ignorance of the consumer. If you go to the fish counter of Whole Foods or New Seasons, you will find far more seafood from the Atlantic than the Pacific Ocean, if they even bother to label its source. For all of these reasons, the question you should ask when buying "fresh fish" should be how well has it been handled in its fresh and highly perishable, highly vulnerable state. Is it better than that of seafood that has been frozen at the peak of its freshness, and delivered with no further handling damage to its final destination?

Back to our meeting with Rick. Rick is working with Provvista to be proactive about seafood. They are gathering quotes from restaurants to determine how much albacore they might buy this summer. Most of Rick's albacore is canned by his company, Sacred Sea. This is a high quality product, but we'd like to get more fish in the raw. Whether we can get it fresh or frozen, we are trying to find a way to keep the quality high, even when the supply is low. I have a feeling that the marketing stigma of frozen fish is going to change in the next few years, and where seafood is concerned, the handling of the product from the ocean to the kitchen will have to be better understood by the consumers.

The Jerusalem Artichoke, a Troubling Misnomer

2011-02-07T16:39:00.000-08:00

From Thanksgiving to Easter, these delicious tubers are waiting to be discovered by many hungry Americans. Delicious as it is, Helianthus tuberosus suffers from an image problem that has lingered for four hundred years, a bad name. If there is a reason more people aren't cooking them, it can only be the ridiculous name Jerusalem artichoke. Being neither from Jerusalem, or in the family of artichokes, or having a "choke" of any kind, this is the name most often used. Centuries ago, when this plant first arrived in Europe from its native soils of North America, it spread in popularity, especially in Italy and France. The Italians called it girasole, meaning sunflower. After all, helianthus is a wild sunflower with edible tubers produced in its root stalks. Sometimes, the plant was called girasole articiocco, an archaic word for artichoke, whose taste it resembled.

When the Jerusalem artichoke was introduced to England, the British felt the need to "correct" the name from girasole (gee-rah-so-lay) to "Jerusalem." That name spread throughout the English speaking world, and back to its native land, where it has been called Jerusalem artichoke for centuries. The French made the same mistake, naming the tubers topinambour, after the Brazilian Indians, the Topinambas, who had never even seen the plant. Gratefully, after all these years, the name is changing. I call them sunchokes, and this is a name that chefs are using more and more often. Perhaps the better name would be sunroot, if only people knew what you were talking about!

Whatever you call them, grow them, cook with them, eat them. They are a very productive plant, needing little care, producing a pretty summer flower and a delicious winter food. Like potatoes, there are many varieties that all cook slightly differently. There are red skins and brown skins. The globular, protuberant Stampede is an early harvest variety, while the more tubular Fuseau varieties are somewhat easier to use. They are starchy with a nutty, even mushroomy flavor to me, and a touch of sweetness. Also like potatoes, they make marvelous fried chips, they can be baked or roasted or poached. Sunchokes are delicious with simple accompaniments like nut dressings or salsas. On the menu at Park Kitchen right now, we have one of our simplest soups. We roast them with their skins on, and puree them with vegetable stock and olive oil, then pass the puree through a fine sieve. The soup is rich and creamy, complimented with honey poached pears and hazelnut crumble.

Incredible Ice

2011-01-22T15:21:00.000-08:00

Ice cubes don't normally catch my attention. A few years ago, I was in a shochu bar in Japan with my boss, and we were served some mugi shochu on the rocks. I guess I should say, on the rock!! Glistening in our highballs was a single, perfect cube of ice, chilling the shochu and only slowly melting into it. We were very impressed. At the end of our meal, we ordered a whisky, which this time was served with a perfect sphere of ice. This is exactly the kind of thing we like to take away from our culinary trips and bring back to our own restaurant.

We found the clever plastic molds they use to make these show-stoppers. Since then, Portland bartenders have continued to impress me with their innovative ice. This time, it is by incorporating flavors into the ice that become released into the drink as they melt. Laurelhurst Market's bartender, Evan Zimmerman, has a cocktail with smoked ice cubes melting into Tennessee whisky and sherry. Beaker and Flask owner, Kevin Ludwig had a clever coconut milk ice cube melting into tropical splendor. Next time you're making cocktails at home, don't overlook the ice.

Understanding the Fifth Taste

2011-01-21T18:46:00.000-08:00

Last week, I was asked to give a lecture at Young's Columbia on food pairings with sake. One of the topics that I discussed was the presence of umami in sake. This portion of the lecture evoked the most interest, and I was surprised that even among professionals, this term may be recognized but little understood. I decided to describe umami and try to clarify some of its elusive magic.

The Primary Flavors

There are five primary flavor profiles of taste. Two of them are metabolic, salty and sweet. We need these compounds for our bodies to function. Two of them are protective, bitter and sour. These tastes were originally used to determine whether our food was safe to eat. Many bitter flavors in nature are toxic, and sour often indicates a high presence of bacteria. We've learned to overcome those primordial associations, and these flavors are now a part of a more sophisticated palate. The fifth taste has always existed, but we've only come to recognize it in recent years. This fifth taste became a buzz word in the media about ten years ago, but it is still poorly understood. It is called umami. This term was created from the Japanese words umai, meaning "delicious," and the suffix mi, meaning "to taste." So, this new flavor profile that we just identified after thousands of years of civilization is termed deliciousness! It seems incredible that we could have overlooked that as a primary flavor profile.

There is a reason for this long-standing oversight. This delicious flavor is not as simple as the other primary flavors. We know that an apple or a pear is going to be sweet, and we know that a lemon is going to be sour. This is obvious to us. Umami describes a flavor that we are genetically designed to crave. These flavor compounds are called glutamates, and they are the most abundant amino acids in nature. (Technically, glutamates are the salt compounds of glutamic acid, which is the root of umami. I am going to use the terms interchangeably.)

This compound is present in everything from tomatoes and cheese, to mushrooms and seaweed. Even a mother's milk is abundant in glutamates, which should give some indication of how deeply rooted our genetic disposition is. When our taste buds detect glutamates, an electric impulse goes straight into our brain, and our brain says, "This is delicious. You want to eat more of this." The reason for this is that these glutamates are rich in amino acids that are ready for our bodies to metabolize. They are ready to use, and they take less energy and facilitate more of our biological functions than other compounds.

Synergistic Effects, or Sodium and Salinity

Without getting too technical here, the strength of our disposition toward glutamates becomes even stronger in the presence of other compounds. Inosinates in proteins, and guanylates in cellulose make the effects of glutamic acids and succinic acids even more desirable flavors. This is where sake comes in. Sake has a special relationship with umami rich foods. These flavor compounds create a synergistic effect. We all know this when we grate cheese on our spaghetti with tomato sauce, or when we make miso soup with mushrooms. The reason sake resonates so well with food is that it has a link to umami flavors, which are the most abundant amino acids in nature.

Of course, tasting is always subjective. We all like what we like for different reasons. However, next time you are going to have some barbequed pork ribs, instead of just opening a bottle of pale ale, try a rich junmai instead. The next time you are going to have a bowl of spaghetti alla carbonara, before you open a bottle of chianti, try a good yamahai. When you want to shuck some oysters on the patio, before you chill your muscadet, chill a gingo instead.

Wine in particular has a much higher acidity and sodium level, which inhibits these synergistic effects. This is one of the reasons why you don't drink wine with caviar. It tastes too metallic and salty. Vodka is the traditional accompaniment for a good reason. It has no acidity or sodium. For the open minded oenophile, try a blind tasting, and let your tastebuds surprise you.

Animal Husbandry

2011-01-09T13:41:00.001-08:00

I take great pride in sourcing our products at Park Kitchen. This will be our third year of buying pork from Chris Roehm at Square Peg Farm in Forest Grove, Oregon. Chris pulls up in front of the restaurant with his pick-up truck on Wednesday morning, and we carry in a split hog to our wooden six foot work table. Last week's half pig weighed in at one hundred fifty two pounds, counting the head. This is the first pig from Chris' latest breeding cross between Berkshire and Chester. The meat is a proud burgundy red, as good pork should be, and the fat marbling makes this pork worth the premium price we pay for it.

I have a lot of good things to say about the animal husbandry at Square Peg. Chris has some happy pigs on his farm. They have open pasture most of the year, a diet of certified, local organic feed, and something you don't find on many small pig farms these days...piglets!! Chris breeds his own pigs rather than simply buying weaners from a commercial breeder. Of course, it's hard work mating and farrowing large animals. He has tried both methods, and found that breeding allows him to keep his animals in a steady and sustainable manner. He has more control over their heritage and their health from beginning to end, and a constant herd of animals keeps his income steady as well.

I could say more about why I like doing business with Chris. suffice it to say, it feels good when you collaborate with people who share your philosophy about responsible agriculture. It takes time to build relationships that work for the restaurants needs and the farmers means. Finding that balance and forming great relationships is worth the wait. If you'd like to know more about the life of Square Peg Farm, go to Chris' blog and see for yourself.

The Art of Farm Living

2011-01-09T13:11:00.001-08:00

How rewarding is it to render the labors of farm living into works of art? Of course we all appreciate a well made wine, a delicious pork shoulder, fresh eggs and cream. At Big Table Farm, the art of these products goes a step further. Thanks to Clare Carver, we can see the art of farm living in their creative wine labels and various paintings from scenes on the farm, from chanterelles foraged in their wooded hillside to the birth of a new calf. Thanks for sharing a glimpse of the farm with us.

Ideas in Food

2010-12-30T18:27:00.000-08:00

After many months of waiting, the new book by Aki Kamozawa and Alex Talbot arrived in the mail today. For those unfamiliar with the authors, they have diligently maintained daily entries in their blog for years. Their first book, a photo collection of their culinary creations, shows their ingenuity and skill, particularly in developing innovative cooking techniques. They also teach classes and offer consulting. These are enormously creative people.

Their second book, entitled Ideas in Food: Great Recipes and Why They Work, is filled with all the things I love about their blog. In everyday cooking, they often discover clever ways of making pickles, or melting cheese, and in more technical professional cooking, their innovation is cutting edge. Their courage to constantly challenge convention and ask, "Why do we cook like this?" is rewarded with sometimes surprisingly simple answers.

Almost any serious cook is going to have a copy of Harold McGee's great tome of food science, On Food and Cooking. The great advantage of Ideas in Food is that Aki and Alex are chefs. Mr. McGee is a talented scientist, and his applications of chemistry to cooking operations have had a tremendous impact on modern gastronomy. However, he is a scientist, not a professional chef, and that is how his book reads. When Aki and Alex get technical (and they are very capable of doing so), it is only moving towards the recipes, and illustrating the principles behind them.

In their introduction, their purpose is clearly established. "It is our job to illustrate why a deeper understanding of food and the ways in which it works are so important. Knowledge allows us to improve flavor, efficiency, and functionality in the kitchen. It a nutshell, it enables us to cook better." And cook better you will. There are ideas for everyone in this book, which is the truly beautiful thing about it. My mother could take a few clever tips from it's pages, and yet some of the most creative chefs in the world, like Grant Achatz in Chicago, and Johnny Iuzzini in New York, have been inspired by their ideas. It's worth the twenty five dollars you'll pay for the hardcover.

How Wine Became Modern

2010-11-24T21:23:00.000-08:00

I happened to be in San Francisco for the opening of the How Wine Became Modern exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit focuses on the year 1976 as the beginning of modern winemaking. The photograph above is a section of the piece titled The Judgment of Paris, 1976. It depicts a parody of The Last Supper. A blind tasting of French and Californian wines was conducted with shocking results. Even French experts found New World wines being made of superior quality. This scandalous scene was depicted in the 2008 film, "Bottle Shock." With this as the starting point of modern winemaking, the exhibit displays the diversity of wine stemware and exotic decanters, aroma samples and various fads of descriptors and flavor adjectives, soil samples from different winemaking regions and definitions of terroir, and a collection of different wine labels and marketing appeals.

There were two parts of the exhibit that I most enjoyed. The design of wineries and modern architecture was inspiring in both form and function. Perhaps the most relevant part of an exhibit entitled "How Wine Became Modern," was left strangely understated; the actual techniques and technologies of truly modern winemaking. Paul Draper, the chief winemaker at Ridge Winery, describes the scene. "In California for at least the last ten or fifteen years we have heard that the wines are now made in the vineyard. What is not mentioned is that in most cases they are then remade in the winery."

The technology Mr. Draper refers to includes not only the architectural facilities, with precise controls of temperature, sophisticated pumps and presses, but also the chemistry of winemaking itself. What that means for today's winemaker is more precise control by means of a wide array of additives, from powdered tannins, yeast superfoods and nutrients, to oak chips, advanced fining and filtering agents supplied by companies like Laffort and Lallemand, Gusmer Enterprises and Scott Laboratories. These companies can also provide analytical services to measure your titratable acidity versus volatile acidity, malic acid, pH levels and whatever else you want to know. Today, many great winemakers use additives to some degree, like the often called "Viagra of winemaking," diammonium phosphate. DAP is a nutrient that supplies yeast with the nitrogen it requires get the job done, and one of many common nutrients used to control modern fermentation.

These are the techniques rarely advertised by wineries. It seemed to me as I was leaving the museum that this portion of the exhibit could have run away with the show, but instead was left as secretive as by the industry itself. Perhaps they want to maintain the romance of nature in a bottle, or perhaps they fear the notion of cheating. Whether that means cheating nature or cheating the consumer may be reason enough to let the juice speak for itself. Like any great tool when used properly, it only enhances and not merely imitates, the fundamental work of the artisan. Maybe one day, the public will be ready to know more about the product.

What to do with a Medlar?

2010-11-13T12:01:00.001-08:00

What is a medlar? It sounds like some creature from Harry Potter's adventures. Few people have heard of these esoteric fruits, much less tasted them. They have fallen out of fashion over the past century, perhaps because they aren't very easy to eat. In centuries past, they were more common, with remnants strewn about in English literature. Shakespeare alludes to medlars in "As You Like It," when he says "...you'll be rotten ere you be half ripe, and that's the right virture of the medlar." Before they can be used, they must be bletted. What does that mean? There are a few fruits that are terribly astringent in their immature stages, most of them are Asian fruits like the durian, loquat, hachiya persimmons, quince and hawthorns. The flesh must be completely mushy before that astringency is transformed into sweetness and acidity.

Tremaine Arkley sells his quince to Park Kitchen, and we ended up in a conversation about medlars, which his wife planted after reading about them in a Victorian novel. He gave me twenty five pounds of fruits to develop recipes this year. Once the medlars have bletted, they are very soft and oozing with juices. They have a very large seed pod and thick skins, much like rose hips. In fact, it was the rose hips that brought medlars to my door. I was watching the squirrels in my yard as they foraged for food. They were nibbling on the rose hips, high in vitamin C and other nutrients. Suddenly, I though of our conversation about the medlars, and I pictured the birds and squirrels feasting on them in the trees. So I called Tremaine, who had forgotten about our conversation, and he rescued the harvest for me.

I have stewed the medlars into a paste, which can then be used for a number of applications both savory and sweet. I've made some medlar frangipane for apple tarts, and simmered them with bourbon as a glaze for braised pork belly. I just put up a batch of medlar bourbon, a simple infusion of quartered medlars, sugar, vanilla bean and bourbon. It should be ready to taste by New Year's Eve.

Chestnuts, Le Pain Des Pauvres

2010-11-11T08:19:00.000-08:00

Chestnut season arrives as the night falls quickly, the evening air becomes chilly, and the geese begin their flight south for the winter. By October, the nuts begin falling from the branches. Their fruit is ripe when the fuzzy, spiky outer casings turn from lime green to straw gold. Harvested when the farmer's fields become more sparse, time allows for forest gleaning of autumn nuts and mushrooms. The chestnuts are gathered from the orchard or forest floor and often ground into flour for baking through the winter months. In the old days, chestnuts were regarded as le pain des pauvres, the poor man's bread. Since the chestnut has a low oil content, theree was little worry of the flour turning rancid.

Peeling them from their shells is the kind of chore that would have been done by the family around the evening fire. The European method is to score the shells along the concave side and roast them briefly in a hot oven or skillet. The shell will begin to curl away from the meat, and they must be peeled off while still hot. While they are warm and pliable, the inner papery skin will rub right off, but once cool, this bitter husk clings tight to the nut. The papery husk also comes off if the nuts are dried after peeling the shell. As the nut contracts, the paper separates from the meat much easier. Then the meat need only be reconstituted before eating.

The French regard the chestnut by two names, the marron, in which the nut is one whole piece, and the chataigne, divided into two or three pieces by the husk. The more attractive marron commands a higher price, and is used in ways that show its attractive appearance.

The nut has a strong seasonal charm and fares well in soups and purees, where its rich, woodsy flavor is uninhibited by it's dry and crumbly texture. Usually eaten with wild game, mushrooms, truffles, and roots and fruits of the season. Pumpkins, potatoes, parsnips, celery root, cabbages, apples and pears are great combinations. It has also long been a favorite winter confection in breads, cakes and puddings, or the coveted confection, marrons glacees (pronounced glah-say). Marrons glacees are gently simmered with honey until it becomes translucent, tender and sweet.

Gather some chestnuts for the cold months and try some of these simple French recipes, but if you are gathering them from the forest rather than the marketplace, beware of the horse chestnut. Terribly bitter and toxic, it has a similar leaf and shell appearance, but the nut casing is a fleshy green outer husk instead of the spiky straw husk.

In the northern Willamette Valley, there are several chestnut orchards. Ladd Hill Orchards in Sherwood is owned by Ben and Sandy Bole, and they sell all sorts of chestnut products from their website. In late winter, their whole dried chestnuts are wonderful.

Pumpkin and Chestnut Soup
Soupe au Potiron et aux Chataignes

Slice two onions and place them in a pot with a few spoonfuls of duck fat. Simmer gently while you peel a pumpkin and remove the seeds. You'll need about two or three pounds of flesh, roughly chopped. Add the pumpkin and about twenty peeled chestnuts to the pot along with one quart of duck stock, and a bouquet garni. Bring the liquid to a boil, then lower the heat to a simmer, season gently with salt and pepper. Cook the squash until tender, about twenty minutes, then remove and discard the bouquet. Puree the soup in a blender, and if you want a little more richness, add a little cream at the end.

Chestnut and Cognac Puree
Puree de Chataignes au Cognac

Simmer about two pounds of chestnuts in one quart of milk with a little salt and white pepper. After about thirty minutes, once the nuts are tender, puree them with the milk and return to the pot. Stir in about four ounces of butter and four ounces of cream. Once you have the consistency that you like, stir in two tablespoons of cognac. This is a great holiday accompaniment to roasted venison leg.

Venison Leg with Pears

Cuissot de Chevreuil roti aux Poires

Trim the venison leg and tie the muscle groups with butcher's twine and season with salt and pepper. Cover the venisoon with milk and marinate overnight. Set the oven at 325 degrees. Drain and dry the venison and sear the meats in a pan to achieve some caramelization. Place the meats in a roasting pan. Peel the pears and toss them in a bowl with a little butter and cinnamon, and add them to the pan. Baste the meats with beurre montee, melted butter emulsified with a little water. Baste and rotate the meat as it cooks, and roast for 20 to 30 minutes depending on the size of the roasts. When the roast reaches medium rare, allow the meat to rest before slicing. Slice thinly against the grain of the muscle, and spread the slices over chestnut puree, on a platter surrounded by the roasted pears.

The Sake Professional Course

2010-11-11T08:06:00.000-08:00

Many times when I'm talking about sake with people, I get the impression that they are interested in sake, but feel intimidated by it. The labels can be intimidating when all you see is kanji, so you just buy something based on how pretty the label is. It can be intimidating if you are unfamiliar with terms like tokubetsu honjozo or junmai daiginjo. In the same way that you don't have to speak German to enjoy drinking a trockenbeerenauslese riesling, you don't have to speak Japanese to feel comfortable buying the perfect sake for your palate. If you have ever been curious about sake, whether you are already an enthusiast, an industry professional, or simply want to know more about sake, the answers await in John Gauntner's Sake Professional Course.

Mr. Gauntner has been an educator in all things sake for the western world. His Sake World website is the gateway to an enormous wealth of knowledge and resources. He also conducts advanced classes aimed at understanding sake production, sake culture, and most importantly, sake tasting. Mr. Gauntner is the only non-japanese Certified Master of Sake Tasting in the world. I had the honor of taking his three day intensive Sake Professional Course in Portland earlier this month. As someone who has been studying sake for over a decade, I left this class with a greater depth of understanding on all things sake.

The course is comprehensive, and covers all the basics of brewing methods, terminology, business, tasting and pairing with foods. His knowledge of the industry extends deep into the sakagura, the kurabito, and the business of buying, selling and tasting this special beverage. The greatest advantage of taking his Sake Professional Course is in his astute selection of vertical tastings. A lecture about rice varietals is followed by a tasting of several sake brewed with different rice, a lecture about yeast and its impact on aroma is followed by a tasting of sake with different yeasts. If you wondered about the difference in flavor between pasteurized and unpasteurized sake, you can taste them side by side and draw your own conclusions. All the books and articles in the world will never add up to the knowledge of tasting the sake in your ochoko and knowing why it tastes that way. This class is definitely worth the time and money, and as John likes to say, leaves no sake stone unturned.

A Small Footnote with a Large Imprint

There are two men who have been outstanding educators of sake for the western world. Ironically, both of these men, John Gauntner and Philip Harper, arrived in Japan independently on exactly the same day in 1988. Mr. Gauntner has focused his years on education through teaching, writing and consulting, while Mr. Harper has focused on brewing, the only non-Japanese toji (brewmaster) in Japan. Their efforts have greatly improved the availability and enjoyment of sake in the English speaking world.

An Introduction to Sake (Part One)

2010-10-10T10:54:00.000-07:00

Although sake has been brewed for centuries, it has been known in the western world for little over a hundred years. Sake distribution has greatly improved with the export and popularity of sushi culture, but only recently has high quality sake become available in the United States. The rich variety of styles and increased availability add to the appeal of this truly unique beverage, and extend its appraisal far beyond the sushi counter.

Drink of the Gods, a source of purity

In Japan, drinking sake has long been considered a way to get closer to the deities, in both ancient and modern culture. As a symbol, it is intimately connected with social and religious ceremony. The essential elements of sake brewing are rice and water, both powerful symbols in Japan. Rice has long been the staple food of Japan, a symbol of fertility and even a form of currency, while water is a universal symbol of purity.

The water used in crafting sake is perhaps the most defining element of its character, since water makes up at least eighty percent of its final volume. The ideal spring water contains traces of phosphates, potassium and magnesium, which assist in the brewing of sake. Water with these elements is sometimes called goshinsui, "holy water." The presence of iron and manganese hinder the process. The Kansai area has long been regarded as a brewing center because it has ideal water. Whether the water is hard or soft also determines how the sake will be crafted. Kobe is well known for its kosui (hard water), which favors full flavored brewing, while nearby Kyoto has nansui (soft water), allowing for a light and fragrant crafting.

Rice for One Purpose, polishing diamonds of starch

The best rice for brewing sake has a high starch content at its core. In fact, it is too starchy for human consumption. There are over one hundred varieties of rice in use today, some with formidable names like gohyakumangoku, tamazakae, miyama nishiki, and the most widely used yamada nishiki. The climate in Japan varies from region to region, and different varieties grow in these different climates. However, unlike wine, sake is not categorized by rice varietal, but by the amount of polishing the rice undergoes. By milling away the outer layers, which contain the bran, fats and proteins, the brewer reaches a more abundant layer of pure starch.

This high starch interior is called shinpaku, the "white heart." The impurities in the outer layers produce undesirable flavors. The more the rice is milled, the more expensive the sake will be. This is not unlike the higher prices commanded by low yield, high quality fruit on the vines of premium vineyards. The effect of milling the rice has a similar effect on the yield of production. It takes a lot of rice to make sake, since the water to grain ratio for brewing sake is 1.3 to 1 (in contrast to brewing beer, which has a water to grain ratio of 9:1). Obviously, if you are milling away half of this special rice, you will only have half of the final yield.

Koji, the Magical Mold

The polished rice is then washed and soaked in very exacting times, often with a stopwatch in hand. The size of the milled rice grain will affect the soaking time, so that the steaming of the rice can be as consistent as possible. This process is called gentei kyusui, "limited water absorption." The steaming is also carefully monitored, since overcooked rice will ferment too quickly for flavor development, and undercooked rice will only ferment on the outside.

A small portion of the steamed rice is inoculated with a special mold called koji. It takes about two days to complete the inoculation, which then resembles puffed rice with an aroma of roasted chestnuts. This miraculous mold is not a dark mildew, but rather a fragrant white mold that will later break down the starch molecules of the rice, and convert them into glucose, a process known as saccharification. Koji also provides its own unique flavor and aroma to the sake.

Once the koji is made, sake brewing can begin by making a yeast starter called shubo, colloquially known as moto. Shubo means "sake mother." It is formed by combining koji, water, steamed rice and yeast. In the modern sokujo method, lactic acid is added to hasten the development of the shubo. It creates a sour, high acid environment that inhibits the development of unwanted bacteria and wild yeasts. The koji begins to make the mash thick and sweet. the shubo is ready in about two weeks. The old-fashioned yamahai and kimoto methods allow the natural development of lactic acid, which acquires flavor from ambient yeasts and bacteria, and takes twice as long to develop shubo.

The Craft of Brewing

The shubo is now used to create the main mash called moromi. This is one of the most fascinating and unique processes of sake brewing. In order to maintain the temperature and acidic environment for the yeast culture, the volume of the mash must be gradually increased over a four day period. This process is called sandan shikomi, "three stage brewing." The moromi is doubled in size on the first day, then allowed to rest for one day. This is called the oroshi, the "dancing" of yeast cultures as they recover from the culture shock. Then the moromi is doubled on the third day, and again on the fourth day, when it reaches its final volume. With the yeast healthy, fermentation and saccharification happen simultaneously. This process is unique to sake brewing, known as multiple parallel fermentation.

The fermentation happens at low temperatures, a harsh environment for yeast. This stress on the yeast creates the desired fragrances and flavor of sake brewing. After about 25 days, the fermentation is completed between 18 and 20 percent alcohol. There are two classifications of sake in the market today. For honjozo sake, an addition of brewer's alcohol is added in order to extract some of the volatile fragrances that would otherwise remain with the solids that are to be pressed from the sake. No additions are allowed for junmai sake, which means "pure rice."

The sake is pressed to remove the kasu, or sake lees. Sake lees are used for pickles and soups in Japanese cuisine, just as the grape lees were once used for traditional coq au vin in French cuisine. This pressing of sake is achieved by means of a drip method for the highest grade sake, and usually by air pressing machinery (Yabuta press) for the vast majority. At this point, the sake is ready to drink.

Bottling and Sake Styles

There is an expression in Japanese, "sake zukuri ban ryu." They say that sake is the school of 10,000 ways, and this is certainly true throughout the process of making it. In the second part of this article, I will describe the various ways sake may be finished before and during bottling, which highlight different parts of its character. Terms like genshu, namazake, hiyaoroshi and nigori all describe how it is finished in these final stages. A beverage with 10,000 ways has a sake style for everyone.

Interactive Bar Codes reach America

2010-10-01T23:52:00.000-07:00

Park Kitchen hosted an interesting business lunch this week. Cellar Key is launching a marketing application for wine which employs an interactive bar code. The 2d bar code are relatively unknown in America. You may have seen them before. Maybe you thought it was one of those holographic images that you have to stare at really hard before it comes into focus, and you just didn't have the time. Not knowing what it was, you didn't give it another thought. I was the same way until I began travelling in Japan, where they are absolutely everywhere. They were invented by Toyota back in 1994, and now they are on everything from posters and billboards to magazines and product labels.

These 2d codes are like a traditional (1d) bar code, but it has URL's embedded into it. Anyone who has a cell phone with a camera and internet access can utilize the interactive content. In this case, you can learn about Argyle Winery, their products and winemaking principles, see a video about the vineyard, and suggested pairings for the wines. If this ever catches on in America, the marketing sector should be the first to emerge from the economic crisis! And if we wanted to throw a really tech savvy luncheon, we would have printed these menus with soy based ink and edible paper, so you could eat the menu after surfing the web!

Cheers for Sake Day

2010-10-01T23:46:00.000-07:00

The first day of October is Sake Day. In Japan, this day is called Nihonshu No Hi. The kanji symbol for sake is very similar to the tenth month of the asian lunar calendar, the rooster. This is also the traditional beginning of the sake brewing season, when the brewmaster goes to the shinto shrine to pray for a good brewing season. When the sake brewing culture emerged in the Edo period (1604-1868), the shogunate decreed that sake could only be brewed between the fall and spring equinox.

The traditional labor force was composed of farmers and fishermen, many of whom would be finishing their own trades for the season. After the rice was harvested, effectively a measure of currency, economic stability was determined, and the sake brewery could commence with their season of brewing.

Sake is extremely complimentary with many foods, and the entertainment of sake culture is perfectly expressed in the robust and rustic flavors of izakaya fare. In the vast metropolis of Tokyo, when you pass through the noren curtain of these small, often impossibly cramped, loud and bustling pubs, with every wall covered by hand-painted menu selections of food and drink, the spirit of celebration is captivating. There may be charcoal grilled skewers of chicken or beef, marinated seafood, tofu, pickles, sashimi, or even a few selections of naizo, old-fashioned dishes of innards or organ meats. This may include braised boar intestines, shark heart or fermented sea cucumber guts. The right sake can bring any one of these diverse offerings into an acute focus.

The best way to celebrate Sake Day is a night out at the local izakaya, and Portland is fortunate to have several great pubs to celebrate. Raise a glass at Zilla, Biwa, Tanuki or Yuzu, and offer a toast to the brewer's. Kanpai!

Oregon Chanterelles

2010-09-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

There is a very good reason why the Pacific golden chanterelle is the official State mushroom of Oregon. With over 500,000 pounds of mushrooms harvested annually, cantharellus formosus is a thing of beauty and abundance in the Northwest. On a foraging trip this week with one friend, we harvested forty pounds of mushrooms in two hours! The chanterelle is one of the most diverse mushrooms in cooking combinations, pairing well with grains, fruits, beans, peppers, tomatoes, summer and fall squashes, poultry and wild game. For those that forage their own mushrooms, the chanterelle is one of the most delightful funghi of the wild, a field of bright orange buttons in on a carpet of green moss is a beautiful sight to behold, and a certain sign of the joy of autumn days.

I know that some restaurants, especially in the New England states, prefer high altitude bouchons, or high latitude chanterelles, such as the chanterelles of Saskatchewan. The Oregon chanterelle does grow quite fast in our climate, and can often become huge ragged trumpets. They aren't always as pretty as the cute little buttons of higher country, but I find the fragrance of our chanterelles to be the finest of its kind.

The Chester Story

2010-08-07T11:37:00.000-07:00

It is always a delight to read the newsletters from Anthony Boutard of Ayer's Creek Farm. Equal measures inspiring farmer and scholarly historian, his work is a blessing to our agricultural community. This weeks newsletter shares the story of the Chester Blackberry, which I am passing on to all of you:

In the spring of 1968, Robert Skirvin, a student of the small fruit breeder, John Hull, emasculated blossoms on the blackberry selection SIUS 47, carefully removing all of the stamens to avoid self pollenation. The SIUS prefix indicated the plant is a product of the breeding program at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Each breeding program has a specific prefix that helps keep track of a variety's ancestry. Later he dusted pollen from the blackberry variety "Thornfree" onto the receptive stigmas. "Thornfree" is a USDA selection of the legendary English blackberry "Merton Thornless." Unlike many early thornless varieties which were chimeric and unstable, the absence of thorns in "Merton" was a stable trait and useful for breeding purposes.

After the fruits ripened, the seeds were extracted and planted. Out of the many dozens of 1968 seedlings, three were noteworthy for their flavor, yield and thornless canes. Two would be released as named varieties, and a third wound up as the maternal parent of a named variety. Skirvin completed his masters and then moved on to Purdue where he studied geraniums and earned his PhD.

In 1973, the Southern Illinois Fruit Station was closed. Hull had the most promising plants moved to other experiment stations. The blackberries were sent to Profesor Zych who ran the small fruits program at the University of Illinois in Urbana. Zych died shortly afterward. Fortunately, Skirvin joined the small fruits program at Urbana and discovered that the blackberries he had bred many years earlier were still growing and producing fruit. He decided SIUS 68-6-17 was worth releasing as a named variety. As John Hull already has his name affixed to one of the 1968 progeny, "Hull Thornless," they decided to honor Professor Zych who acted as guardian of the berry. We were spared a berry named "Zych Thornless," because the breeders had the good sense to use his first name, Chester. SIUS 68-6-17 was formally released in 1985 as "Chester Thornless," and earned the honorific of "Outstanding Fruit Cultivar" in 2001.

Another selection from the 1968 breeding work of Hull and Skirvin was SIUS 68-2-5. That plant was pollenated with a blackberry from Arkansas, AK 545, and one of the resulting seedlings was released as "Triple Crown" in 1996. Its flavor bears the distinct signature of berries from the Arkansas program.

The Southern Illinois Fruit Station operated from 1959-1973. During that short time, four named blackberry varieties were released from its breeding program, in addition to several other small fruits. "Black Satin," "Dirksen Thornless," "Hull Thornless" and "Chester Thornless" remain highly regarded blackberry varieties. The great Senator Everett Dirksen, the master of eloquent barbs, had picked berries as a youth. Dirksen was a champion of the center, and it thrived under his patronage. When you hear people decry "pork barrel spending," and "earmarks," savor a fresh "Chester" and maybe that will soften any rising indignation.

Over the years, we have told the "Chester" story many times. Plant breeding is a craft unto its own, and we greatly admire people who explore the range of qualities available in a crop. The best breeders have this innate sense of how to guide and nudge the plant's unseen genetic qualities. Like other artists, they need patient patrons as well as inspiration.

The Things I Love About Switzerland (Part Three)

2010-07-28T00:16:00.000-07:00

The world's greatest foods are produced in unique geography, the great hams of Spain, the whiskey of Scotland, the spices of India, and the cheeses of the Swiss Alps. Throughout Europe, the migration of pasturing animals is known as transhumance, and each region has it's particular ceremonies. In southern Switzerland, the ritual of transhumance is at the heart of the outstanding milk used to make some of the world's finest cheeses.

In May or June, when the snows have melted and the vegetation is lush and verdant, it is time for the migration of the black cows toward their alpine pastures for the hundred days of summer. These cows are called stacha in the Swiss dialect (or herens in French), meaning "to puncture," since they must battle each other to establish the hierarchy of the herd. This festival is called the Stachfascht, and determines which cow will be the queen for the season. Then the cows are groomed and decked with flowers, adorned with exquisitely embroidered straps and bells, and paraded up the mountain. This pageant is known as the alpaufzug (inalpe in French), and is commonly depicted in artworks, and painted on walls and facades of the chalets and farmhouses of Gruyere.

The summer days are spent in the pristine alpine pastures, and the cows are numbered to identify their various owners. My friends in the canton of Der Wallis (Valais), the Treyer family, have a summer cabin in the high Alps, and they often lease their mountain pastures for grazing. The luscious milk produced during these summer days in the high Alps is very rich in butterfat and herbal nuances, and has established the worldwide reputation of Swiss cheeses. In September, as the days grow cooler on the mountain, the herd is brought down before the snows return, and the celebration of alpabzug (desalpe) begins. For their triumphant return into the valleys, the cows are often immaculately groomed for beauty pageants, and twelve foot trumpets are sounded in their honor.

Regrettably, the variety of Swiss cheeses is little known in America. Generic "Swiss cheese" is often a cheap imitation of emmantal, a firm, sweet and nutty, unsalted cheese whose famous eyes or holes are created by carbon dioxide given off by the bacterial cultures during aging. Gruyere is also quite well known, a little more firm and intense than emmantal. Fresh cheeses like quark resemble the fromage blanc of France, and the outstanding double cream Vacherin Mont D'Or is creamy, with a washed rind, wrapped in a strip of bark for structure and aroma. One of my favorites is the tete de moine, which is a semi-firm, salty and sweet cheese that is made in small cylinders, and shaved into delicate curls with a clever tool called a girolle. The ancient Schabzieger had been made since medieval times, a thousand year tradition. The curd is powdered and ground with herbs like fenugreek and ziegerklee (shepherd's shamrock) before being pressed into little three ounce cones called stockli. At this point, it is a very shelf-stable condiment to be grated over any number of dishes and casseroles.

Most Swiss cheeses are best appreciated soft and warm. The croute au fromage is a rustic lunch of sliced toast and ham smothered with melted cheese, and if you like, a fried egg. It is a deep dish version of croque monsieur. The raclette holds a special place at the Swiss table. A half wheel of cheese is heated near the fire, or under a special grill, and scraped from the rind, served with warm, boiled potatoes, pickled vegetables, a few turns of the pepper mill, and a few glasses of the local fendant.

Undoubtedly, the quintessential cheese preparation is fondue au fromage. Fondue is served over a flame in a glazed earthenware or metal casserole called a caquelon. Grated cheeses are melted with white wine, garlic and kirsch, and eaten with skewers of cubed country bread, which you dip into the molten cheese and pop in the mouth while piping hot. The cheeses used are usually a blend of two or three, gruyere and vacherin, with additions of appenzell or bagnes according to your taste. The age and ripeness of the cheese is crucial to obtain the necessary smoothness in melting.

After the cheese has been devoured, there is often a brownish orange crust of caramelized cheese on the bottom of the caquelon. This is not some dreaded dishwashing chore, but the coveted pinnacle of the fondue experience. Use the skewer to peel the crust from the pot, and enjoy the slightly chewy, deep rich caramel snack the Swiss call the religieuse. It is named after the color of a nun's handmade garments, which it resembles, or perhaps the reverence with which it is eaten.

Dew Magic

2010-07-16T00:59:00.000-07:00

Last year was my first season making nocino, the beloved digestive elixir made of green walnuts. In Italy, the walnuts are traditionally harvested on June 24th. This is mid summer's day, the day of San Giovanni by the Catholic calendar. They say there is something magical in the morning air, the nuts are covered with dew magic. Well, this year mother nature was moving things a little slower than usual. The nuts were less than half their mature size on mid summer's day. I waited another forty days before harvesting. I didn't know if there would be any dew magic lingering in July, but I was willing to give it a chance.

I wanted to try some variations inspired by Jim Dixon. I would make my traditional nocino, but instead of flavoring it with cinnamon and clove, I would try cinnamon and vanilla. The first stage of making nocino couldn't be easier. You pick the nuts before their hard shells form, slice or smash them, and macerate them with alcohol. If you want to add flavorings, throw them in the jar as well.

Then you wait. I usually just set the jars out in the garden, exposed to sunlight for about sixty days. At this point, you need to dilute the alcohol level with sugar syrup. If you start with 95% alcohol, you will want to cut it at least 50%, but be careful of the balance of sugar and alcohol. It should be bitter, not sweet, and it should be a sipping drink. I like the balance at about 75 proof, but many people like it a little more mellow at 60 proof. It's up to you. After the flavors have fully developed, you'll need to strain it and discard the solids. There will also be a good amount of sediment, so filter or decant, or both. Then bottle it and finish a hearty autumn or winter meal with a nice digestif.

I had heard of another green walnut liqueur, but hadn't tried vin de noix until this year. As the name implies, this is a French variation using both distilled alcohol and wine. I was surprised at how smooth it was, and the flavors were very pleasantly balanced. I was expecting it to be very astringent and tannic, but that wasn't on the palate at all. The method is even more direct, since you use wine instead of the sugar syrup, you can mix everything in one stage. In fact, some people make their nocino in one stage using a lower proof spirit like vodka instead of hard alcohol, but the walnut infusion is not as good. The recipe is very similar, but the leaves are also used in vin de noix.

Now the jars are sitting patiently in the garden, soaking up the sun and the walnut's power. Although San Giovanni wasn't blessing the process this year, I hope I've captured a few drops of the dew magic.

Setting the Field on Fire

2010-07-15T22:32:00.001-07:00

Chefs are always looking for great ingredients, whether they are new or unusual varieties of produce, or unique methods of cultivation that will entice their guests at the restaurant. For the farmer, it is a little more of a challenge to grow something little known or understood. First, they have to learn the particulars of how to grow it, often without guidance or counsel, and second, they have to inspire people to try it, use it, and buy it.

I feel grateful to work with a community of such creative farmers who are able to bring new products to market, and take chances year after year. Such was the case in 2006, when I first tasted a mesmerizing whole grain called frikeh, from Ayer's Creek Farm in Gaston. The story begins a few years earlier.

In 2003, Anthony and Carol Boutard bought a small thresher for their dry bean business, and decided to buy some concaves and screens for grains as well. Their dried beans are widely loved, and they had been considering growing some specialty grains. Although grain crops are aesthetically wonderful, the economics are often very difficult for a small farm. Wheat prices usually fall between $4 and $6 per sixty pound bushel, not nearly enough for a small, diversified farm. The Boutards are always looking for exciting new prospects, but they are very conscious of the fact that there must be an economic reality in the market for their enthusiasm.

Anthony and Carol are diligent in their research. Because they come from that ilk of farmers who actually eat from their own crops, they are often inspired by cookbooks, and had read about naked barleys in Jenni Muir's "A Cook's Guide to Grains." These hulless grains do not require pearling of their fibrous exterior for digestion, and are thus more nutritious and delicious than the hulled types. Specialty grains like farro have regained popularity in recent years, and command a higher price than durum wheat or barley, but the Boutards had become interested in harvesting green wheat. In the fields of Europe, they harvest hard wheat in its green stage, called grunkern. In the Middle East, they have an ancient tradition of parching the green wheat harvest, where it is known as frikeh, or farik. The Boutard's had read about frikeh in an online discussion of Paula Wolfert's "Mediterranean Grains and Greens," and they were hooked on the idea.

Anthony determined that "for a small farm, it was a perfect crop." With a harvest window of about three days, and being labor intensive with no domestic producers, the market price was feasible at $6 per pound! The grain must be parched during the transition between the milk stage and the soft dough stage, halting the conversion of sugars to starches. The grain at that point is still green, with enough moisture to withstand a flame. Despite this advantage, there is still an art to burning the awns all the way down to the tip of the grain, and then cooling the head before the grain gets scorched. Properly done, the crop is uniquely smoky, yet still sweet, grassy and nutty, with a pleasant toothsomeness.

Frikeh is traditionally used in salads like tabbouleh, or fried in minced meat croquettes called kibbeh. I like using it with delicious summer flavors, a grain salad with cherries, cucumbers and feta, or a late summer salad with grilled corn and chanterelles. My thanks go out to Anthony and Carol for bringing an ancient delicacy to life here in the Willamette Valley.

Family Traditions

2010-06-23T08:12:00.001-07:00

Some of the most precious food memories are connected to family traditions. I remember my grandfather showing me how easy it is to make his favorite apple crisp, the many casseroles surrounding the Thanksgiving day table, and my grandmother's Christmas cookies of all shapes and textures. I recently inherited my grandmother's recipe collection. It is filled with more than Aunt Ruthie's sweet potato casserole, or Wilma's swedish meatballs. Thumbing through her recipes is like remembering every family holiday and every summer picnic. Even more than that, it is like looking into the refrigerator of an era of American cooking. The recipe folders have sections like chicken, hamburger, casseroles and crock-pot favorites. There is a salad section with hardly a trace of lettuce, mostly chunky compositions covered with mayonnaise or cool-whip. The pages are made up of cute little index cards from the kitchen of Betty Graeff, and clippings from magazines and soup labels. As a chef, looking through my grandmother's recipe book is as reminiscent as a family photo album. My grandmother, being as efficient as she was, bound her recipes in a fantastic binder with a folding cover, so you can prop it open on the counter at the recipe you want to use. It's fun enough to read her instructions.

A Deeper Relationship with Garlic

2010-05-30T11:44:00.000-07:00

The world is divided over garlic. It has been cultivated by humanity since the dawn of civilization. It has long been a valuable crop, being particularly resistant to both pests and diseases. Despite this, it is long been regarded as a force for both good and evil. Because it repels rabbits, gophers, and insects, European folklore claims that garlic also repels werewolves, vampires, and the forces of evil. Older Christian folklore claims that when Satan left the Garden of Eden, garlic sprung from his left footprint, and onion from his right. It seems that the ancient Asian religions agree with this perspective. Devout followers of Hinduism, Jainism and Shintoism do not consume any plants from the allium family, yet the rest of the world regards garlic as a natural health food.

I can't imagine a diet without the alliums. I eat them raw, cooked, and pickled, chopped, sliced, pureed, marinated, emulsified, roasted and fried. These are also plants that I like to eat and cook at every stage of their life-cycle. This is my first year of growing garlic myself. Armed with enthusiasm, and a copy of Ron Engeland's "Growing Great Garlic," I planted sprouted cloves in early winter. The earliest harvest of garlic, before the bulbs have fully developed, is known as green garlic. In Oregon, we use green garlic in May and June. It looks like a young leek, and you can slice through the entire plant from root to leaf tip. It has a fresh and delicate flavor, very aromatic, and lends a soft touch to the end of a long winter of cooking root vegetables.

Next come the garlic scapes of the hardneck garlic varieties (the rocambole's). This is the young flower stalk, as it curls up from the center of the leaves. If cut before the bulbils begin to form in the spathe, it has a deeper green flavor, not of garlic to me as much as long-cooked peppers and braised kale. By June and July, it is time to harvest the garlic and make way for other crops. This garlic is not cured, but still fresh, soft and moist. It can be sliced and mashed with ease, and it is moister and more aromatic than cured garlic.

Curing garlic takes about two weeks in a warm place with good airflow. The softneck garlic varieties are often braided into long, fancy pigtails during this process. If you want to display these garlic braids, you can weave flowers or decorative ribbons into the braid. I don't go that far, but it looks nice when it is well done. After this stage, the garlic is storable for fall and winter use. This is what most Americans use year round, and most of it comes from China. Also coming from China and Korea is the relatively new tradition of fermented garlic, which is now also produced in California, called black garlic. This garlic is cured over a longer time and at a higher temperature, which results in a deep black flesh that tastes of balsamic, tamarind and molasses. The sweetness and potency of the garlic is very concentrated.

I've always liked using different stages of the same plant in a dish. With garlic, you have a diverse palette of flavors at your disposal. This summer has yielded several garlic entertainments. I really enjoy an appetizer of octopus poached in garlic oil, served with new potatoes and seaweed on a puree of black garlic, and garnished with braised garlic scapes and calendula flowers. It's a nice juxtaposition of delicate flavors with the force of garlic kept on the sweet and earthy side.

Rooftop Gardening

2010-05-22T16:49:00.001-07:00

I've been jealous of the rooftop garden above Noble Rot since its early days, when it was little more than kiddie-pools filled with dirt and a few small, struggling plants. This morning, I saw how far they have come, with large raised beds filled with garlic, radishes, herbs, kales, peas, strawberries, turnips, young lettuces and a plethora of other delights.

This project was developed by Kevin Cavenaugh, the architect and designer of the Rocket Building, and assisted by Marc Boucher-Colbert of Urban Agriculture Solutions. This rooftop garden is reinforced to transform a normal roof, which can hold 20 to 30 pounds per square foot, to an ecoroof which can support 50 to 60 pounds per square foot. That means the rooftop can withstand the additional weight of 6 to 12 inches of soil bustling with healthy plant life. Sous-chef Greg Smith, on the roof looking northward over Portland's east side from the fourth story rooftop. He's been cooking and gardening with chef Leather Storrs since they were at their old address a few blocks away. Keep up the great work, guys!

Leaves and Rice

2010-05-22T16:21:00.000-07:00

Japanese confections are usually quite simple. Seasonal fruit is often the final course of a meal. However, the Japanese take delight in snacks of all kinds. I love the seasonal mochi snacks that arrive in spring. In the photo above, there are two kinds of rice snacks rolled in leaves. The round snack is called kashiwa mochi, pounded nonglutinous rice wrapped around a sweetened bean paste, with an oak leaf wrapped around it. The slender snack is called chimaki, sometimes a mixture of glutinous and non-glutinous rice wrapped in a bamboo leaf. As with so many Asian treats, these are textural pleasures.

Perhaps my favorite of these mochi snacks comes in the earliest days of spring when the cherry blossoms decorate the parks and hillsides. Sakura mochi, also known as domyoji, is much like the kashiwa mochi, although it is wrapped in a cherry leaf that has been salt cured, and the rice is often colored pink to resemble the cherry trees.

Strawberry as a Vegetable

2010-05-16T21:48:00.000-07:00

What happens when you can't wait for all your strawberries to ripen? What happens when you simmer, saute, poach or pickle unripe strawberries? Does their firm, tart flesh seem more like a vegetable or a gooseberry? Would you pair it with seafood, poultry, nuts or cheeses?

Mycorrhizal Symbiosis

2010-05-16T21:46:00.000-07:00

One of the most prized edible mushrooms is boletus edulis, also known as porcini or cep. This mushroom has a mutualistic relationship with the trees that it grows near, especially spruce, pine, and fir trees. Biologists call this relationship mycorrhizal symbiosis, which means that both the tree and the fungus benefit from the relationship. The mushroom absorbs sugars and carbohydrates from the tree roots in exchange for the mineral salts, nitrogen and water absorbed by the mushroom from the environment.

I've always liked using natural pairs in a dish. In the spring, evergreen trees like fir and pine send out fresh growth from the tips of their branches. These tips do not yet contain the resins that would make them bitter, but instead they have a subtle sweet, grassy forest flavor. They can be used to infuse alcohols, or make a simple sweet tea called "branch water." It's flavor can also be extracted into essential oils or infused in vinegars or creams, and used as a culinary ingredient.

For several years, I have been pairing fir tips (I have several Douglas Firs in my yard) with porcini. This year, the dish is composed with a fir tip custard surrounded by a salad of grilled porcini, toasted pine nuts, blanched celery hearts and leaves, and a frothy vinaigrette made of mushroom stock and fir infused white wine vinegar. How often can you taste a mycorrhizal pairing?

Modern Cookbooks, Modern Techniques

2010-05-09T21:18:00.001-07:00

The emergence of more technical cookbooks has become a testing ground for a more technical approach to publishing. For the past few years, publishing houses have been looking more seriously at online and interactive book formats. I remember the first e-book I downloaded in 2005. It was an online book that was never printed, only ever a pdf file.

In 2008, the release of two highly polished cookbooks filled with large, exotic photographs, and promising special online features. Alinea (Ten Speed Press) and Quique Dacosta (Montagud Editores) are both books utilizing modern cooking techniques, sometimes called molecular gastronomy, and both books draw recipes from the famous restaurants of their authors.

The Alinea book was published with extensive recipes, editorials and photos of completed dishes and the processes of creating them. The website for the book, http://www.alinea-mosaic.com/ became interactive the following year, describing the development of new dishes and the ideas behind them. For example, you can read about the idea and development of a new presentation on the spring 2010 menu, of squab with charred strawberries, served on a birch log. Book Cost: $50.

The Quique Dacosta book takes a different approach. At the time of publishing, it has already assembled a website, http://www.quiquedacosta.com/, filled with exclusive photographs, archives and essays describing dishes created at El Poblet restaurant over the past decade. There is not much actual recipe content, mostly full page photography. More substantial content is withheld on the website only for those who purchase the book. Montagud Editores even printed the website along the spine of the book, and promoted the website as part of the sale package. Once you buy the book, you get a special access code. Then you can view a dish from the 2005 menu, sea barnacles with zucchini and stevia. Book Cost: $199.

Even though I understand the high costs, both ecologically and economically, of printing books with ink and paper, I hope publishers continue to actually print books, even if some, or most of the content moves online. The media business is clearly changing, but I plan to keep my bookshelf.

Scenes from La Boqueria, the Mercat de Sant Josep

2010-05-09T21:07:00.000-07:00

The main entrance to La Boqueria from La Rambla. This is one of Europe's largest and most famous covered markets. It's a great place for breakfast starting a day of touring the city, or if you're a chef shopping for the restaurant.

In Spain, mushroom foraging is a beloved pastime. Several stalls have an impressive selection of foraged and cultivated mushrooms, morels, hedgehogs, chanterelles, russulas and truffles!

Salt cod has long been one of the staple foods of Barcelona. Spaniards can order specific cuts of bacalao, with or without bone or skin, from the tail or fillet, collar, whatever you want! The price is reflected in it's popularity.

Percebes, the sea barnacle is not pretty, and it's not cheap: a special delicacy for seafood lovers.

Any chef would be envious of the seafood quality and selection, from shellfish to snails, barnacles to cephalopods, small fin fish and their organs, and large titans from the sea.

You can order tapas at the bars right inside the market. Most of the foods for sale at the stalls are served up in their simple glory at bars like Pinotxo and ...

The calcot is one of Catalonia's most celebrated ingredients of spring. These onions (allium cepa) are a specialty of the nearby city of Valls. They are planted in the summer, harvested and cellared, then replanted for the winter. The onion sends out several sprouts, usually four to eight per bulb, and the soil is banked up around them to create a tall, tender white-necked spring onion. Their name comes from the verb calcar, which is an agricultural term for banking soil over the growing vegetable. They are usually char-grilled over wood, peeled and slurped with a spicy romesco sauce, or salbitxada. This year, we are lucky enough to have calcots in Portland, from Leslie and Manuel Recio at Viridian Farms!

The Things I Love About Switzerland (Part Two)

2010-04-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

Swiss Craftsmanship

I don't think most Americans are aware of the high level of craftsmanship that seems to flow through the veins of the Swiss people. For those who have ever known any Amish folks may have an idea of what I'm talking about, since the Amish are of Swiss origin. I'm referring to people who have been using skills from the seventeenth century to make their way in the world. This may not sound terribly romantic to those of us deeply entrenched in our modern gadgetry...but any craftsman would appreciate the skill of making a barn from a six-foot sawblade and a wood plane, or fixing the wheel of a horsedrawn carriage. I grew up in Missouri, so maybe I had more exposure to the Amish community than some, but as a kid, I thought their way of life was pretty cool.

Over the Easter holiday, I was preparing dinner at my friend's home in the Swiss Canton of Valais. They have a fairly modern kitchen, but my eyes lit up at the sight of their mandolin. I always appreciate seeing kitchen gadgets, since a good gadget can make my life so much easier. This was a charming tool made of three pieces of wood, an adjustable blade, and no glue whatsoever. It's a lot like a wood plane, upside down, with a notch in the front leg to wedge against the counter, and a finger hole for ease of moving or hanging. The simplicity of the design and the building materials was a marvel for me, and it was the tool I used more than anything else except the stove.

Of course, there are other designs for the mandolin. The French model (Matfer) shown is all stainless steel, also with an adjustable blade, and can be folded for storage after use. That's nice enough, except that it's heavy and quite expensive. Then there is the plastic Japanese model (Benriner) that has dominated the professional market because it is small and cheap. It also has an adjustable blade, but the plastic parts tend to bend and perform unevenly with sustained usage. So, if you have the space, for the best performance and the most charm, I recommend the Swiss model.

Cool Tools Modernized

One of my favorite things about cooking in another country is finding these special tools. Yes, their mandolin is cool, but I'd used mandolins before. I was pretty excited to see one of their many specialized waffle irons. This dandy is an electric appliance that makes a pressed cookie like something between a tuile and a Belgian Waffle. The Swiss call these treats bricelets or brezeli, and they can be made either savory or sweet. While they are warm, they can be shaped like a tuile, light and crunchy! You can shape cones or cigars, make tile shapes or just leave them flat. The original waffle irons were pattern-engraved cast-iron plates on the end of long iron handles, so they could be warmed in the fire.

You pour the batter into the press and close it. The batter cooks very quickly, and stays crisp as long as they are dry. I wanted to use them as a kind of tartine covered with sweetened ricotta, poached rhubarb and mandarins, not a traditional preparation, but tasty nonetheless.

The Swiss Betty Crocker

If there is one cookbook author that is universally recognized in Switzerland, it is Betty Bossi. She has collected and published extensive recipes from across the country. Taken as a whole, her works are much like a Swiss Joy of Cooking. I found a nice bricelet recipe, but perused another hour through the culinary repertoire.

The Things I Love About Switzerland (Part One)

2010-04-11T21:52:00.000-07:00

Foraging in the Alpes

Several years ago, I was working at a small chalet in Switzerland. As the Spring snow began to melt, the chef would take me into the wooded hillsides to gather young shoots he called "l'ail des ours," or bear's garlic. As the name indicates, this is one of the first foods of the bear's coming out of hibernation. I had never heard of them before. They were very fragrant, and patches were abundant. We would gather large bags full of the leaves and make them into pureed sauces or pestos with a flavor and aroma of leeks and green garlic.

On a recent visit to Switzerland this Easter, I saw them again at the farmer's market in Zug. This beautiful lake town is in the German-speaking region, where the plants are called "baerlauch," or bear's leek. What I did not know of until then was the two toxic look-alikes of baerlauch, the herbstzeitlose (colchicum autumnale), and maiglockchen (convallaria majalis). I thought about how carefree I used to gather them with my chef. He didn't seem too concerned about the toxic imposters.

Every year, as the season approaches, newspapers and televisions show pictures of the three plants to minimize the annual incidents of food poisoning. If this sounds unfamiliar to most American cooks and foragers, it is because the bear's leek, ramsons (allium ursinium) as they are known in English, do not grow in North America. Instead, we have ramps (allium tricoccum), whose name comes from its European cousin. Ramps have fewer leaves and a handsomely developed bulb. To my palate, the flavor of ramson is more like wild garlic, whereas a ramp tastes more like a wild spring onion. The ramps pictured below are the first of the season. As time goes on, the bulb near the roots becomes more pronounced.

Both plants offer an early taste of spring in these fresh, green and fragrant plants. It is a fleeting harvest with a season of usually less than a month. In Switzerland, we were canning ramson sauces to extend the season into summer. We'll be pickling ramps in the next few weeks. Unfortunately, my foraging friends and I have finally accepted the fact that ramps do not grow in this part of the country. What we have comes to us from the Great Lakes and the Appalachians, but we'll enjoy whatever they send our way. We often yearn for distant flavors, and the memories that come with them.

The Noble Spring Vegetable

2010-03-21T19:12:00.001-07:00

Asparagus has a long and proud history. It was cultivated by the ancient Romans, and brought into prominence in the French and Italian aristocracy around the sixteenth century. Today, asparagus retains its noble character, while being available to the everyday citizen. It is a vegetable we love for more than it's own virtue, but what it represents. It announces the end of winter roots, and a new season of colorful vegetables and variety.

Asparagus spears do not come from planting seeds. They are the young shoots of a perennial fernlike plant in the lily family. It thrives in cooler climates with sandy soils, especially along riverbanks and valleys. The "crown," or root mass stores its sugars and energizes the rapid growth of spring shoots. The eight inch spears we buy at the market are usually one days growth.

In Europe, especially France, Germany and Belgium, they cultivate white asparagus by gradually banking the soil over the shoots as they grow, or covering the beds with plastic. This technique protects the plants from the sunlight that triggers photosynthesis, yielding the prized pale blanched spears. White asparagus is very brittle, since it lacks the more pliable chlorophyll cell walls. If you manage to find it, handle with care. They are gaining popularity in American markets and restaurants, but the extra labor involved makes them considerably more expensive. Those who prefer white asparagus swear it is worth the extra effort. So beloved is this vegetable in Alsace and Western Germany, the entire spring season seems to revolve around it. When I was working in Switzerland, where they simmer the spears in water with salt and a little sugar, they even drink the cooking liquid with a squeeze of lemon juice as a digestif. It seemed to me like an asparagus hefeweizen.

When buying asparagus, pick out smooth, brightly colored spears with tightly closed, firm and nascent tips. Fresh asparagus is sweet, and has the feel of squeaky, wet rubber. Old asparagus will begin to look wrinkled at the base, where it is dehydrated, or the tips will have begun to bolt, or flower. The leaves will have elongated, opening and spreading apart. These spears will be tougher, more bitter, with a fainter sweetness. Asparagus spears continue to grow even after they are cut. They are usually stored and transported lying on their side. This is why you often see the tips curving sideways, still trying to grow toward the sun until they run out of energy. Like most vegetables, the natural sugars begin converting into starches the moment they are harvested, so the fresher the better.

The stalks vary in size, from pencils to cigars in thickness. As for a preference between thick and thin spears, it depends on what cooking method you intend. The thin stalks are ideal for grilling, stir fry or saute, which gives them an earthy, caramelized depth of flavor. I prefer the thick spears, which have a higher ratio of tender inside to fibrous outside, and have a more pronounced grassy, herbal flavor. Some people don't like the extra step of peeling the skins from these larger stalks.

When preparing asparagus, the root end needs to be trimmed of its tough, woody base. Hold the stalk in the center, grab the root end and bend it sharply. It will snap off the woody stem at just the point where it is too tough to eat. Of course, we rarely use this method in the restaurant, because we are working with a higher volume. We usually cut the spears evenly to about six or seven inches from the tip for speed and uniformity. To peel the thick stalks with a swivel peeler, pinch the tip and peel off the fibrous layer, starting one or two inches from the tip to the root end.

When cooking asparagus, eggs have long been considered the perfect compliment, whether in an omelet, baked in a quiche or frittata, poached or fried over easy with some mushrooms. They are especially good with spring morels and verpas, if you can find them. The Europeans prefer their asparagus with an egg sauce, a cool mayonnaise or aioli, or a warm hollandaise or maltaise, a special hollandaise sauce finished with blood orange juice. My grandmother used to serve it over toast with a cream sauce, and on warm spring days, my friends always look forward to my chilled soup, a sort of asparagus vichyssoise.

Asparagus shines in simple presentations as well. It can be thinly sliced raw, dressed with a nice, grassy olive oil and sprinkled with grated parmigiano reggiano, or toss them with some olive oil and salt and simply throw them on the grill with some chicken or sausages, and drink a hefeweizen.

The Color Purple

2010-03-14T11:55:00.001-07:00

As soon as the cold nights give way to warmer days, nature begins her vibrant show of purple blossoms. They often start before the first day of spring and continue into midsummer. This year, rosemary blossoms have come quite early, to be followed by a parade of purple lilac and chive blossoms in April, borage, thyme and gentian sage in May, then anise hyssop and lavender in early summer.

In these last days of winter, I like to use them to bring a little color to my cooking. I decided years ago to bring savory herbs and vegetables into my desserts rather than use tropical fruits. This way, I can stay local and the dishes offer more than just sweetness at the end of a meal. I like them to offer a little reflection on the flavors used throughout the meal. At the moment, Park Kitchen serves a rosemary infused panna cotta, with a sweet and sour huckleberry sauce, and garnished with salted pine nuts and rosemary blossoms. The blossoms bring more than just a pretty color. It has a slight earthiness and of course, a bittersweet floral note. It creates a nice bridge between the herbal cream infusion and the rich sweetness of the huckleberry puree.

The chef who first inspired me toward this idea of savory ingredients being used in the final course was Pierre Herme. I remember the revelation of his desserts in 1996, particularly a cake accompanied by strawberries, red beets and a black peppercorn syrup. I had been thinking about a dessert of chocolate and red beets ever since. This year, it finally came onto the menu with a rich chocolate cake covered by a beet flavored ganache and beet chips, and served with pistachios and a pistachio puree. Okay, so beets aren't exactly purple.

Part of the pleasure of tasting these flavors in a sweet context is that they create entirely new associations for our taste buds. By adding the earthiness of beets to the bittersweet chocolate, you taste something unexpected, like a hint of coconut or berries. In the panna cotta, the rosemary and salty pine nuts make the cream taste sweeter against the huckleberry. I've never had a sweet tooth, so I had to find a way to make dessert more exciting for myself as well as the guests.

Where the Wild Things Are!

2010-02-19T07:38:00.000-08:00

Gleaning the First Flavors of Spring

The warmth of this month has many of our food plants in a state of confusion. A mere three weeks after Groundhog Day, we have nettles on the menu at Park Kitchen. This is the earliest I've ever seen so many foods we normally associate with the coming of spring. The Spring Equinox usually arrives without much fanfare in the garden here in the Northwest. Our first local peas and rhubarb are still some weeks away. We have to find other means of bringing some color and vibrancy to the table.

This is where Oregon shines. Foraging here is a wonderland of wild edible plants. Most climates provide a few edible weeds, like nettles, dandelion, miner's lettuces and chickweed. We really have it all, our forests filled with wild mushrooms year round, fiddlehead ferns and wood sorrels, rivers and streams lined with ramps and watercress, and on and on...

Here is a winter bed of treviso radicchios, surrounded by a wild ground cover called chickweed (stellaria media). It is one of the early wild greens I use to bring some freshness to a dish while we wait for the first spring produce. These nutty flavored leaves garnish a dish of egg, artichoke and leeks with a nettle puree and grated grana padano.

Of course, stinging nettles (urtica dioica) are a well known weed, sometimes more cautionary than culinary. Their tiny stinging spines contain an irritating toxin that dissolves rapidly with cooking. They are usually plunged into boiling water, then pureed or chopped before use. Their flavor to me has always been like a deeply flavored spinach with a resemblance to seaweed. Like those greens, it is very high in vitamins and nutrients.

Another early wild edible plant is the dandelion (taraxacum officinalis). The name comes from the French term "dent de lion," meaning lion's tooth, describing the sharp ridged leaves. When I was working in Switzerland, we made the famous Salade Lyonnaise of egg, bacon, croutons and dandelion, and in that archaic region, we called it Salade Dent de Lion. Today, most of the French speaking world call the dandelion "pissenlit," which means "piss the bed," because of the diuretic nature of the root. It is a very nutritious weed, albeit a bitter one. It must be gathered before it begins to flower or it becomes irretrievably bitter. The young plant can be tamed by pairing it with flavors rich in fats, like cheeses, eggs, bacon or duck confit, and the acidity of citrus or vinegars. It is perhaps the most widely known and loved edible weed.

Another wild edible weed I enjoy is miner's lettuce (claytonia perfoliata), also known as claytonia or spring beauty. It has two types of leaf shape, the cordate basal leaves, and the petiolate head leaves shown in the picture. As with most wild plants, the eating is good until the flower develops too much. This plant has a delicate texture and a subtle earthiness that I like to use with mushrooms and seafood.

Another nice way to bring some life to a late winter dish is by sprouting beans or nuts, and using them in salads as you would any hearty grain salad. Shown here are bean sprouts with miner's lettuce, pickled elderberries from late autumn, and a puree of nettles. I have a dish on the menu at Park Kitchen right now that uses this format, although it is composed of sprouts, sunchokes and radishes, and garnished with the tartness of wild wood sorrel (oxalis acetosella).

These are the first tastes of spring that nature offers here in the Northwest. With our extensive transportation agriculture, we see the early signs of spring in the grocery store long before they are local, asparagus from Mexico, peas and favas from California. These are often good, but not great. In the days before spring begins in earnest, greatness comes from the little things.

A Reason to Love January

2010-01-06T09:15:00.000-08:00

There is something I always look forward to in the New Year, and it's not a new winter reading list, or a new batch of New Year's resolutions. It is a new edition of the Ayers Creek Farm calendar. Everyone who knows Anthony and Carol Boutard, the keepers of Ayers Creek Farm, appreciate more than just their wonderful grains and roots and berries. With each of their harvest newsletters, they share their keen observations of life on the farm, and this has been extended to the photos and captions of their calendar. In years past, they have shared the beauty of speckled eggs camouflaged in a killdeer nest, or the wonder of wild watercress on the banks of the canyon where water drains from their fields. One of my favorite photos came from the 2008 calendar, a deep burgundy head of Rossa di Chioggia radicchio covered with frost, which increases the sugar content of these bitter winter greens. In their own words, the Boutards introduce this years calendar:

When we published our first Ayers Creek Farm calendar in 2005, the text merely identified the various crops shown in the photos. Over the next three years, this simple caption evolved into a short essay about the photo's subject. Last year, we balked at the increasingly formulaic approach of scenic farm pictures, and put together a thematic calendar exploring the various legume crops we grow. This 2010 edition takes us to a level of the farm most people never see.

At heart, we are naturalists as well as farmers. No, we are not that type of naturalist; we remain fully clothed on the farm befitting our straight-laced New England upbringing. We grew up with Golden Nature Guides and the nature writing of Jean Henri Fabre, Rachael Carson, Edwin Way Teale and others. In that spirit, this edition of the calendar will provide a glimpse of the natural history of the farm. We will show you life beyond the fruits, grains and vegetables we sell, the non-monetized and usually unseen world of the insects, spiders, slime molds and fungi at Ayers Creek Farm.

In The Life of the Ant, the Belgian naturalist and playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck, calls these "pastoral ants." They tend flocks of aphids like sheep, protecting them from predators such as syrphid fly maggots. In exchange, the ants draw honeydew from the aphids to sustain the ant colony. One of the ants on the left has collected some honeydew in its mandibles. The aphids are parthenogenic and viviparous through much of their life, that is, producing live young asexually. Like nested Russian dolls, you can open a large aphid and find smaller ones inside, open one of those and yet smaller ones will be found. They molt periodically to increase in size. These aphids have colonized the husks of late ripening corn ears, rich in available sugar and minerals. The last generation of the season's aphids, winged and sexual, will mate and lay eggs. Some of the pastoral ants collect the aphid eggs and store them in their nests, setting them out the next spring to generate a new flock.

The slime mold, fuligo septica, starts life as individual amoeboid creatures, visible only with a microscope. A chemical stimulus brings the individuals together and they fuse to form a new organism. The slime molds aggregate and sally forth in July and August, moving across the ground consuming yeasts, bacteria and fungi. Their movement is determinant, not random, guided by chemical cues released by their food sources. Research has also shown they develop memories, even keeping track of time, and can navigate mazes, wrinkling some of our measures of intelligence. Despite the name, they are completely unrelated to fungi. In fact, there are three major categories of slime molds that are unrelated to one another. These ephemeral colonies are harmless in every respect. As the food supply dwindles, the slime mold produces spores and collapses.
No, we are not lapsing back into the old plum-in-September formula; the creature upon the violet ovoid is the object of this snapshot. The Pacific Tree Frog, hyla regilla, is found throughout the farm, more often heard than seen. Here one awaits the evening upon a Seneca Prune, over a half-mile from the nearest pond. They need open water only for reproduction. The frogs' coloration is variable, and changes with habitat. Those living in the sweet potatoes assume a distinct purplish hue, while in other crops they are pure green or brown. Less frequently encountered are the Red-Legged Frogs, rana aurora, that live in the canyon bisecting the oak savannah at the heart of the farm.

These are not merely indulgent diversions unfolding like an episode of Planet Earth. At the simplest level, every gardener knows what benefit or harm comes from bugs and critters. Every organic farmer knows that living with these insects and micro-organisms makes up the complex biosymbiosis of a healthy farm, and a way of life that chemicals and fertilizers have not been able to supplant.

James Beard Foundation

2009-11-22T22:54:00.001-08:00

The James Beard Foundation was born in 1986, when Peter Kump bought the late James Beard's Greenwich Village brownstone at 167 West 12th Street, now the host site of guest chef dinners and classes to benefit the Foundation. It has since been a non-profit organization seeking to promote American culinary arts in wine and cooking, service, hospitality, writing and scholarship. Emerging in the same period as The Food Network, the Foundation has been enormously successful, with the exception of the embezzlement scandal of 2004 and 2005, which shook the reputation of the JBF. It has since taken steps to improve it's management and the scope of it's promotional purposes. The Park Kitchen team took to the streets of Manhattan to give New Yorkers an impression of what we do here in Portland. We set out to pair a five-course Oregon-focused meal complemented by crafted cocktails and wines. Our cocktails were prepared using House Spirits, and our wines were provided by Soter Vineyards. Many of us who labor in the craft of food and drink in the Pacific Northwest share the sentiment stated on House Spirits home page, "We are in good company."

The greatest challenge of an event like this, executed in another city, is that you are not using your familiar equipment, or the full resources of your staff and purveyors. At the Beard House, you also have no access to the facility until the day of the event. In order to execute a quality five-course meal, you need more than one day's worth of cooking, even if you are shipping finished products from your own restaurant to New York. In other words, planning is everything!

You are also serving eighty portions of each course all at once, so timing is crucial. Dinner started at seven o'clock. We served four hundred plates over the course of a three hour meal, which means cooking and plating a dish, mixing and pouring a cocktail every two minutes for three hours straight! The team that pulled it off tonight consisted of Shane Feirstein, our bartender at Park Kitchen, Scott Dolich, the owner of Park Kitchen, myself, Ethan Snyder, a Park Kitchen alumnus, currently sous-chef at Locanda Verde in New York, and Reed, our assistant bartender from Savoy in New York. Cheers!

Food Documentaries

2009-11-22T22:00:00.000-08:00

The documentarians have finally turned their lenses toward the food system in America. In the last five years, there have been over a dozen well distributed documentaries about our complex food industry. In 2004, two films hit the theaters addressing different portions of today's agricultural system. "The Future of Food" focused on genetically modified crops, and the power of corporations over farmers, while the film "Super Size Me" focused on the consumer end, how the nutritional content of processed foods makes people sick, which is good for the economy! In 2007, a small independent film "King Corn," focused on subsidized corn, and the empires that have been built around this virtually free (through heavy subsidies), shelf-stable commodity. This year, three more films have been released, building the momentum of consumer awareness, but how much does the audience want to see?

Food, Inc. hits the Box Office Mainstream

Of all the food related documentaries, this year's "Food, Inc." directed by Robert Kenner is the most ambitious project of it's kind to date. The film reached more theaters and had a more far-reaching message than it's predecessors. It was greatly indebted to contributors like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, whose work has made them celebrity spokespeople for food reform. When I saw the film on Labor Day (several months after it's release), the theater was still packed! Robert Kenner set out to interview the powerful companies that run America's agricultural industry, only to discover an airtight lid of secrecy and intimidation covering up the details of how and why we spend less on food, but more on health care, than any other nation on Earth.

The film starts with marketing, showing how todays large companies advertise their food products using a pastoral brand image, the farmer with a red barn and animals outside, when this is not at all the scene of the massive factories where these foods are produced. Then we move toward the chicken industry, where some of the best questions in the movie are asked. A spokesperson for the National Chicken Council describes the origin of these enormous facilities, which is to grow a lot of food on a small amount of land, at a low price. "Now can somebody tell me what's wrong with that?"

Indeed, that is the question explored throughout this film. A Kentucky chicken producer named Vince Edwards has a small part in the film. He seems like a good-ole boy, everyday American, as he describes how Tyson has the process all figured out. "If you could have a chicken in 49 days, why would you want one that takes three months?" he asks. That's a good question. What he doesn't say is that these chickens live and grow in a place so unhealthy, many of them die of suffocation or stess, and if they didn't slaughter the chickens in 49 days, they would die soon anyway. Because they've been specially bred for large breast size and rapid weight gain, they have become mutants both physically and genetically, that eventually can't even stand on their own two feet.

It is amazing what science has done for the efficiency of growing chickens. In 1935, the average chicken at the market weighed 2.8 pounds (versus 4.9 pounds today), and took 112 days to raise (instead of 49), but how do we achieve that, and at what cost? Later in the movie, we hear from Joel Salatin in Virginia. As he butchers chickens in his open air processing facility, he tells the story of how the USDA tried to close his plant because it was unsanitary. After lab analysis, Joel's chickens had 133 CFU (colony forming units), while the USDA approved processing plant had 3,600 CFU, and that was after their chlorine bath!!!

The film talks about crops like corn and soybeans. Corn is another scientific success story. Back in the early 1900's, a farm could grow 20 bushels of corn per acre. Today, a farmer expects 200 bushels, and being so heavily subsidized, we have a lot of corn to sell. It ends up being used for things God never intended. We feed corn to animals like cows and farmed fish, who need certain cocktails of antibiotics and hormones to digest this food. We convert the sugars in corn to sweeteners that the body can not process in large quantities. One of every three children born in America today will develop type 2 diabetes!

Another portion of the film talks about the exploitation of labor, focusing on the world's largest pork processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. This enormous facility is owned by Smithfield, butchering and processing 32,000 pigs every day!! Smithfield also operates the enormous plants in Veracruz, Mexico, where the swine flu epidemic outbreak began this year. For a closer look at how Smithfield emerged to control more pigs than its nearest eight competitors combined, read Jeff Tietz' article in Rolling Stone from 2006, entitled "Boss Hog," in which Mr. Tietz welcomes you to see the dark side of the other white meat. Food, Inc. focuses instead on the workers at these plants, many of whom are illegal immigrants, or workers shuttled from great distances to work here. The reasons are obvious. These are low wage, very dangerous jobs with high risks of illness. People simply can't work here for long.

For me, the most distressing part of the documentary is the exposition on politics. You really feel like the foxes are guarding the henhouse when you learn that many of the government agencies regulating these large companies are run by employees of the same companies they regulate. The film asks how Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice, could be objective in writing his decision to prevent farmers from saving their own seed, when prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1991, he had been a former attorney for Monsanto, who stood to gain millions of dollars by this ruling. Another Monsanto attorney, Michael Taylor, advised his company on GMO labelling before being appointed as FDA Deputy Commissioner for Policy. He now works for Monsanto again as a Vice President. These are far from isolated incidents, these companies have infiltrated every level of government. For a great article on Obama's appointments, read this.

The refreshing portion of the film doesn't take place on Capitol Hill, or Tar Heel, North Carolina. It takes place at Wal-Mart. One of the few large corporations to participate in the documentary, Wal-Mart realizes that public opinion matters. Their chief dairy purchaser decided to purchase rBGH free dairy products because the market demand was there. Gary Hirschberg tells the story of his company, Stonyfield Farm (organic yogurt), and his realization that he couldn't change the world by preaching to the choir. Wal-Mart is now one of the largest buyers of organic yogurt in America. How you spend your money may be more powerful than the vote you cast at the ballot box.

Ingredients puts roots into Local Soil

Ingredients, a well made film based here in Portland, examines the fifteen year resurgence of the farmer's market in America, and the re-establishment of direct relationships between restaurants and farms to increase the awareness and demand for quality ingredients. There are a lot of personal stories here, and the tone of this film stays refreshingly positive. Rather than scare the audience with horror stories of business-as-usual, it shows how courageous, intelligent people have overcome the obstacles of corporate economies-of-scale. There are stories from our recent past, when chefs like Jean-Louis Palladin and Alice Waters approached their farmers with new demands twenty five years ago. They wanted higher quality instead of lower price, and they were willing to pay the difference.

The film struggled a little over what to include and what material was simply too much. The food supply is an incredibly complex topic, and often hard to humanize. We have the good fortune of having a relatively healthy local agriculture. Oregon is recognized for its strong organic agriculture and farmer's markets, but even here the laws favor large scale industry that is lobbied for by a handful of powerful companies. One of the most personal themes is summed up by local chef Greg Higgins, "You can pay the farmer now, or you can pay the doctor later." As long as we have no common regulation between health and the food supply, the U.S. government and its agencies will never be able to keep the market healthy.

Let's not forget the Ocean's, though it seems everyone else has!

I saw "The End of the Line" during its opening week, the first major documentary on the depletion of the world's seafood. My girlfriend and I went to the only theater showing it in town, and we were the only two people there, a sad indication of awareness on this, the most vital front-line in the global war for resources. It was based on the book of the same title, by Charles Clover. This is the story of the globalization of fishing, and how technology that was developed since the Second World War has made the global seafood industry "a race to catch the last fish and name it's price." It is a heartbreaking indictment of wreckless capitalism across international waters and with complete disregard for legal catch limits.

The film opens with the collapse of the cod industry in Newfoundland, 1992. From there, it examines Professor Daniel Pauly's research about the decline of the global seafood catch. Most studies indicate that the complete collapse of global seafood is a mere 40 years away at our current rate of consumption. The inevitable extinction of the Atlantic bluefin tuna is another large part of the film. It covers the same material as the National Geographic special report, April 2007 "Saving the Sea's Bounty." As in their story, Mr. Clover interviews courageous whistle blowers who give their testimonies about corruption, secrecy and greed.

Some of the fishing techniques used to catch our seafood are brutally exposed. The destruction of bottom trawling, the enormous gill nets and purse seiners. "We are really too good at killing, " says biologist Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University. Unfortunately, we aren't very good at using what we kill. This picture shows a Mexican shrimp trawler dumping eighty percent of its dead by-catch back into the ocean. Only the shrimp will come to port.

Since I moved to Portland eight years ago, I wondered why the variety in the seafood market was so limited. I thought being on the west coast would bring the bounty of the Pacific Ocean within reach. I've come to learn that the leading cause is a lack of interest among consumers. Here in the Northwest, people love salmon. Most consumers are buying salmon, whether fresh or farmed, halibut and tuna. People think they are still buying local salmon, though our local habitat has been destroyed. The halibut is from Alaska, and no one cares where the tuna comes from. The price is still relatively low on Oregon's only sustainably harvested fish, black cod and albacore tuna.

In 2007, I gave an interview in Portland Monthly promoting anchovies. I always try to promote seafood that is underutilized. Education is very critical at the restaurant level, which Mr. Clover points out in both the film and the book. Throughout this year, I have struggled to buy anchovies for Park Kitchen. It is not because anchovies aren't being caught, it is because they are worth more as fish food than they are as anchovies. That is one reason why all the anchovies caught on the American coastline are sold to salmon hatcheries and tuna feeding pens in the Mediterranean and South America. If anchovies are worth $2 a pound, why sell them? They can be fed to farmed salmon and tuna which can be worth $15 per pound or $60 per pound respectively. Even though you must feed wild seafood to farmed fish, and it takes about five pounds of wild fish to get one pound of farmed fish, the market demand for these species is so high that these economies are actually possible.

Is there a Happy Ending?

Although these stories and images are often disturbing (probably because we realize that we have somehow participated, perhaps unknowingly, in a crime), this year's documentaries all point out that we have the power to change the system. However powerful the companies are, however large the system, profits can only be made when people choose to buy. As in the case of Wal-Mart and it's dairy purchasing, corporations are making decisions based on what you want to buy. McDonalds is one of the leading buyers of Marine Stewardship Council seafood, and they have increased their standards of sourcing humanely raised meats (much to the dismay of large scale American pork and beef producers, who rarely meet the standards). The FDA is even preparing to set limits on "nontherapeutic use of medically valuable antibiotics in agriculture." Seventy percent of the nation's antibiotics and related drugs are used on animals, to promote growth and prevent diseases caused by overcrowding conditions in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations). The Obama administration would be reversing decades of agency policy, and would change the way animals are raised for consumption.

These are decisions that come from awareness and demand for change. Secrecy helps prevent the awareness, and low cost helps prevent change. People often say that they can't afford to make responsible purchases. The truth is that the cheap alternatives are an illusion that is making very few people very rich. Responsible purchases aren't making anyone rich except perhaps Mother Earth. They reflect the real cost of food, health and happiness.

Pig's Blood

2009-11-02T16:38:00.000-08:00

When the weather turns toward the darker days of autumn, and the colder, wetter nights require more substantial fare, the menu at Park Kitchen often takes on a higher proportion of charcuterie and offal. My sous-chef, Will Preisch, was working on a creative rendition of grits made by pulverizing raw cauliflower into tiny grains, then simmering it in a puree of cauliflower. It looks like traditional white corn grits, but has the rich, nutty vegetal flavor of cauliflower. After some thought, we decided to pair it with blood sausage. Although I've served a variety of sausages at Park Kitchen in the last five years, I had never put blood sausage on the menu before now. In order to lighten the dish, it is garnished with a raw salad of shaved radish, burnet leaves, ground cherries for a little tartness, and a mustard tuile for crunch (not shown in the photo).

The composition of pig's blood is mostly water at 77%, with 7.2% albumin, 14.5% globulins, 0.3% fibrin, 0.2% fat and 0.8% other odds and ends. It is well suited to cooking, as the albumin and globulins coagulate at around 160 degrees fahrenheit. In traditional blood puddings, the blood is poached with cream and eggs, in addition to other solids for structure, usually cooked onions and bacon (and sometimes fruits or grains, depending on the region). What usually turns people off about blood sausage is the texture, which can be dry and grainy if there is not enough fat added, or loose and pasty if not sufficiently coagulated. To avoid these shortcomings, I decided to add some ground pork to the forcemeat to make it more like a sausage than a pudding.

Now, some people are a little put off by the idea of blood in their food. As is so often the case, fast-paced Americans have become very separated from their own food traditions. I remember hearing the stories from my own hometown of Kansas City, how their famous barbeque sauces were thickened with pig's blood. In fact, for centuries throughout the world, blood has been consumed in various preparations for it's nutritional and symbolic value. Although it is forbidden in Jewish and Muslim cultures, even religious nations have culinary traditions using the blood of animals, especially that perfect culinary creature, the pig.

In ancient sub-Saharan Africa, blood is drawn from wild animals and drunk raw for nutrition, while not necessitating the killing of a valuable animal. The ancient Spartans ate a "black soup" of pig's blood, called melas zomos. The Tuscan dish called roventini is a kind of pancake made from flour, eggs, and pig's blood, finished with parmiggiano-reggiano. Throughout western Europe, there are various sausages or puddings made from pig's blood; the Spanish morcilla, Catalonian botifarra, the French boudin noir, sometimes garnished with apples, the German blutwurst, the Polish kaszanka, usually containing buckwheat, and the Finnish preparation of mustamakkara, a blood sausage with ground pork and crushed rye, usually eaten with lingonberry jam. One of the most famous recipes of France is coq au vin, the Burgundian dish of rooster stewed in red wine, which was traditionally finished with roosters blood that had been stabilized against clotting with a little vinegar. These may not have been found at every dinner table, but they have been popular enough to maintain traditions throughout the generations.

In the far east as well, the Koreans make soondae, the Filipino's make dinuguan, a spicy meat stew with pig's blood and rice cakes, the Thai's have a spicy curry mee, and there is the famous Taiwanese ti hoeh koe, a pig's blood cake made with sticky rice, then rolled in ground peanuts and cilantro, served on a stick!

Pig's blood cookery is nothing new to the world. All that is new is what people are doing with it. Elsewhere in Portland, Xocolatl de David has a wonderful pig's blood chocolate ganache, and Le Pigeon restaurant has served a very tasty pig's blood pappardelle. The well stocked meat counter of Laurelhurst Market often has blood sausage with whisky. Portland's culinary talents are exploring pig's blood. Maybe you should, too.

Counter Culture-Three Meals in Japan

2009-10-31T13:44:00.000-07:00

The open kitchens in American fine dining are a relatively new concept. In order to increase the entertainment of its guests, restauranteurs began designing spaces that expose the action in the kitchen. This has been a long tradition in Japanese restaurants. We are all familiar with the sushi bar, but the Japanese ryotei seats guests at the counter of kaiseki tradition. On my most recent trip to Japan, I had three memorable meals at the counter, where the intimate interaction with the technique driven chefs exposes another layer of their skills.

Yoshihiro Murata received international recognition with his beautiful book, Kaiseki, the exquisite cuisine of Kyoto's Kikunoi restaurant. I always visit Kikunoi when I am in Japan. The service and style of the cuisine are very special. A kaiseki meal often begins with a course known as hassun (八寸), which is a presentation of many appetizers in a seasonal theme. The end of September hassun is presented in a cricket cage, with a sprig of hagi, Japanese bush clover. The cricket cage symbolizes the passing of summer's chirping insects. Removing the cage reveals the fall delicacies of barracuda sushi, ginko nuts, eel roe in mousse, grilled chestnuts, and other hors d'oeuvres, presented on a leaf of kuzu (arrowroot).

The kaiseki meal follows a certain progression, with appetizers followed by a clear soup, then sashimi, grilled foods, steamed foods, and so on. The beautiful lacquerware and seasonal motifs on the plateware are all a part of the experience. About half way through the meal, the chef uses a dish made by one of the greatest masters of twentieth century ceramics, Kitaoji Rosanjin. The dish imitates a painters palette, and facilitates six individual variations of texture and flavor. Here, the selections include (clockwise from top left) a terrine of mushrooms and ayu roe, duck breast with negi, braised satoimo (taro root), glazed scallop on a leaf of shungiku, asian pear and salmon stuffed with egg yolk, and a salad of shiitake and marinated shungiku (edible chrysanthemum).

This is the season for hamo, a seawater eel from Osaka Bay and the Inland Sea. It is larger and leaner than the freshwater eel unagi, but it is more seasonally celebrated. The many small bones are impossible to remove, so they are cut into tiny, edible pieces by a heavy knife known as hamokiri bocho. The sous-chef, Maruyama-san, told me his hamokiri cost about 400 dollars. He uses the hamo no honekiri technique to make the proscribed twenty cuts per inch (issun ni nijyuyon hocho).

A proper Japanese meal consists of shokuji (食事), serving rice, pickles and miso soup, which come at the end of the meal. Maruyama-san presents the rice course in an okama, an old fashioned earthenware pot that fits into a charcoal stove. Of course, a kaiseki restaurant will enhance these simple dishes with their own style. On this occasion, the rice has been garnished with uni and nori, and the white miso soup is pureed with yurine (lily bulbs).

The next meal would be my first time dining at Hisao Nakahigashi's famous restaurant, Sojiki Nakahigashi. It is a very small restaurant, and the seats are often booked several months in advance. Although the Michelin Guide only rates the restaurant with one star, it is one of the hardest reservations to get in Kyoto. The clever name of his restaurant is an indication of the chef's tsumigusa (foraged, or freshly picked) cuisine. The word sojiki is a creation of the chef, but it suggests "eating leaves or grass." There is a more subtle suggestion that it is an apothecary cuisine, of sorts, and it was this inclusion of wild and bitter flavors that I found fascinating.

The chef presents his hassun course on a leaf of satoimo, and garnished with a shaft of susuki, one of the seven flowers of autumn. In the glass dish is a wonderful salad of figs and white miso, a variety of nuts include chestnuts, a ginko nut stuffed with egg yolk, and broiled mackerel stuffed with walnut (amazing). There were also some tsukudani-style dojo, a small eel-like freshwater fish often caught in the rice paddies!

The chef's dishes are often composed of contrasting textures and sensations. He always offers seasonal variations of his koi zukuri, carp sashimi served with a salad of dozen vegetables and herbs, toasted sansho peppercorns, the famous natto made at the nearby temple of Daitoku-Ji, and a sherbet made of daikon! Alternating bites of the fish and veggies, dipped in the spicy sansho, the salty natto and the cool, refreshing sherbet stimulates all the senses, the tingling sensation of sansho gradually dissipating into the cleansing sherbet. It could be regarded as Nakahigashi's gargouillou!

The chef preparing a wonderful broth to serve with his rich line-caught hamo and ginger jelly, green beans, tomato and yuzu. The balance was perfection, acidic yuzu complemented by the rich and smoky eel with tomato, the brightness of ginger, and the slight bitterness of the yuzu peel. Over the chef's shoulder, a shaft of rice is tied to a paper-folded lightning bolt, a shinto symbol of respect for nature. You can also see his charcoal stove behind him with the okama inserts.

This is me enjoying a refreshing, crunchy salad of green beans, thinly sliced myoga, spaghetti squash, and purple chrysanthemum, with a dressing of sesame and white miso. This fresh and light course with its firm textures was a nice little intermezzo.

Another small course in the meal demonstrates several levels of the chef's genius. He does an exciting job of pairing his courses with a complimentary sauce, or in this case, a beverage. Fresh kyoho grape juice is served alongside a small salad of poached and peeled plum tomato, a salty and bitter pesto made of ayu (a small, sweet-fleshed entrails, a dab of hot mustard, and a slice of pepper served with its blossom. The dish was a marvelous combination of flavors, and I noticed that the glass was cut from the base of a European wine glass, an incredibly subtle and clever connection to the grape juice. The chef often uses several parts of the same plant in his dishes. In this case, using the pepper and its blossom. In another course with sweet potatoes, he also braised the leaves of the plant.

After the shokuji, which the chef serves unadorned (just plain white rice), the chef scrapes the sides of his okama for a special treat. The rice crust that has caramelized to the bottom of the pot is called okoge, a crunchy snack that is fun and tasty with the toasted green tea served after the meal. This reminded me of my days in Switerland serving fromage fondue in earthenware pots. When you reached the bottom, the cheese had caramelized into a layer that you peeled off and pop in your mouth. They called it la religieuse.

The meal at Sojiki Nagakigashi is always concluded in the same way, cold coffee, burnt sugarcane candies and a rare, unsalted cheese from Shiga Prefecture. It is such a little known product that many of my Japanese friends had never heard of it. This was really an inspiring meal for me, reflecting a style of cooking from a mostly bygone era.

Once I returned to Tokyo, I had my first three star dining experience. Chef and owner Toru Okuda of Koju has received a lot of accolades for his small Ginza restaurant. As would be expected from a three star restaurant, the service was great and the glassware and plateware were beautiful, but his style was unique and very classy. The plates were mostly rough and unglazed ceramics, and the glassware was sleek and modern. It made for a nice contrast. The first course was grilled abalone, sliced and served with lime and salt. This is one of the chef's departures from traditional Japanese seasoning of wasabi and soy sauce. Very minimal to let the natural flavors shine.

In the sashimi course, the chef invites the diner to evaluate the flavor of lime and salt against wasabi and soy. Two pieces of each cut are offered for comparison. There were four types of sashimi. Two cuts of tuna, the chutoro from the highly prized middle section of the belly, and akami, the familiar deep red loin section, squid (which is always one of my favorite sashimi items in Japan, but something we rarely see in America), and madai, a sea bream which the Japanese regard as the king of fish, served here with the skin. I found that the tuna was best with wasabi, while the other two were best with lime and salt.

Here, chef Okuda slices barracuda rolled with matsutake and grilled. You can see that there is no bar or counter between the diner and the chef's work table. It was as if he were on the other side of the dinner table, a very open design which requires impeccable cleanliness and technical finesse at all times, a lot of fun to watch.

This is the yakimono, or grilled course, decorated with autumn leaves of maple and magnolia. The rolled barracuda, unagi served both shirayaki (unseasoned) and kabayaki (glazed with sauce), accompanied by ginko nuts and tatami iwashi, a toasted cracker made of tiny sardines, dried and pressed into thin sheets. Beautiful and tasty! This was one of the few glazed plates used in the meal, with the shine and color imitating the autumn leaves garnishing it.

Japanese kaiseki always gives a very strong impression of time and a connection with nature that I adore. As is always the case with something so seemingly simple, it requires an enormous amount of work to make something so minimal into something so rewarding.

Fruit & Vegetable Compression

2009-10-31T13:41:00.000-07:00

Over the past few years, several cookbooks have hit the shelves detailing the techniques of "sous-vide" cookery. Although this is a huge topic of it's own, I want to address one of the simplest techniques that can be applied using a vacuum sealing machine: compression. This is not really an accurate term to describe what happens, but for the sake of familiarity, I will address it as such. Certain vegetables, like cucumber and tomato, and certain fruits, like watermelon and apple, are very porous, with thousands of hollow little cellulosic bubbles of air. Their textures are light and sometimes crisp. The compression technique simply employs vacuum sealing these foods with a flavored liquid. No cooking is required, just vacuum sealing! What happens inside is not really compression. All the air in those porous cell walls is EVACUATED from the fruit and the bag by the vacuum created. The liquid in the bag then floods into these cells and creates an entirely new texture; an opaque persimmon sealed with lime and salt becomes translucent; a crisp slice of watermelon sealed with olive oil becomes dense and substantial.

This first picture shows a very interesting crab apple from Queener Fruit Farm in Scio, Oregon. It is enormous in size, larger than a red delicious apple, with a russet skin and a beautiful, marbled red and white flesh. Tommie & Peter say it is called the Russian Giant Crab. It's not terribly delicious in the raw, but it does maintain it's beautiful color when cooked. That got us to thinking about how we might transform it into something delicious.

We peeled the crab apple and sealed it in a bag with some of Tommie's apple cider, lemon juice and salt. After about 20 minutes, all of the once porous cells have filled with liquid. The once light, crisp and bland flesh is now bright, succulent and flavorful. Now, we can use it to create interesting contrasts of texture and flavor to garnish duck breast with buckwheat noodles and porcini. The last picture shows the garnishing ingredients of Spitzenburg apple, curled green onion, calendula, and compressed crab apple with red currant preserves.

Japanese Cookbooks

2009-10-10T22:33:00.000-07:00

On my most recent trip to Japan, I scored some great new cookbooks. As I was thumbing through them (from right to left), a few notable differences struck me. Cookbooks and magazines everywhere have become more dependent on photography to atract buyers, but the photos and the page layouts were very different in Japanese books, and they tell us a lot about how we differ as a culture and as cooks.

Seasonal Beauty at Kikunoi

This beautiful book hit the shelves in English just weeks before my first trip to Japan in autumn of 2006. The chef, Yoshihiro Murata is the third generation chef of the family restaurant, Kikunoi. The book is divided into four chapters addressing the four seasons. The innovation of the book is that it often has a full page photo of his dishes with a description of its inspiration and meaning on the opposite page. It also displays the beautiful dishes and lacquerware that kaiseki is often served in, and how it is presented to the guest. All the recipes are presented at the end of the book in the appendix, not that the recipes are less relevant than the pictures. Murata-san is a very talented chef. The photography of the book is stunning, but the strength of the book lies in the stories that accompany his dishes, revealing both his innovation and purpose. Japanese cuisine, and especially kaiseki, is a highly seasonal and symbolic art whose meanings are often lost on foreigners. Kodansha (講談社) has been publishing in English for years, and are very experienced in translating for a foreign audience. I am greatly indebted to the chef and his publisher for the timing of this release, just prior to my first tour of Japan.

Two Books from Bunka Shuppan (sorry, in Japanese only)

This is chef Toshio Tanahashi's only recipe book, Shojin, Vegetables are Genius (精進、野菜は天才). I have enjoyed shojin ryori before I bought this book, but my appreciation has deepened tremendously since. Shojin is devotion cuisine, the vegetarian fare of the Buddhist temples. Although humble in origin, it is the predecessor of the tea ceremony and kaiseki cuisine. The chef ran a restaurant called Gesshinkyo out of his home in Tokyo for many years (read more about him here), named after the temple Gesshinji in Kyoto where he apprenticed. The publisher, Bunka Shuppan Kyoku (文化出帆局), like many in Japan, have been publishing books with step-by-step photography, showing how the recipes are executed, not just what they look like at the end. The page layout seems especially appropriate for Japanese cooking, since there is a great appreciation for appearance in the presentation of Japanese dishes. The book is divided into twelve chapters, and the pages reveal a few dishes from each month, as well as instructions and photos of technique, the appearance of the raw ingredients (shokuzai), and the ritual devotions of preparation. The most famous example of this is the chef's use of his ninety minute morning meditation to grind sesame in his mortar for the daily gomadofu!

Another great book from Bunka Shuppan is Grass, Leaf, Root (草　菜　根), by Hisao Nakahigashi. The chef is very famous for his foraged ingredients and his organic renditions of kaiseki. The name of his restaurant in Kyoto, Sojiki Nakahigashi, gives an indication of his style. Sojiki means "to eat grass," but the first prefix suggests that these grasses and leaves are medicinal. That is to say, his restaurant is like an apothecary. Indeed, one of his most defining characteristics is the presence of bitterness in his food, which people often associate with medicines, and his use of the whole plant in his dishes. If you are served sweet potato, it would probably be served with its greens, and the same would be true of peppers, carrots or lotus. If you are served a small fish in one course, you are likely to have it's roe or innards in the following course. The chef says his mentor instilled this approach-his mother. He does not seek the finest ingredients in the country, rather he has a great connection with local products. Only lake and river fish are served, local meats, wild vegetables, and he is intimately attuned to changes in the seasons. If the beans are tender in early summer, and starchy in early autumn, they are used for what they are instead of being discarded for the next prized commodity. And people respond to his cooking...the restaurant is often booked several months in advance! I like this book, because it features many forgotten ingredients that people want to remember, and the photography often shows the chef foraging or working with the farmers who supply him. These connections have become very popular in American cookbooks, but here the connection goes a little further to the source.

Reference Books and Everyday Cooking

Of course, it is not only celebrity chefs books that people want to read. I am always drawn to the detailed Japanese reference book. Whether it is about food, architecture, motorcycles, or electronics, the Japanese people have a penchant for diagrams of the smallest detail. This book published by NHK from their Today's Cooking series (きょうの料理), gives great instructions for the classic Japanese repertoire, more washoku than kaiseki. Photographs demonstrate techniques often hard to explain in words, from peeling a chestnut or cleaning fresh bamboo shoots, to simmering mackerel in a miso glaze. None of the techniques are very difficult, but the pictures reveal the simplicity of the steps and the beauty of the ingredients. Regardless of the level of difficulty, all these books have one common thread, an intuitive understanding of seasonality. The readers of these books have a great understanding of the seasons, and their Shinto heritage and traditions weave together these ingredients in a kind of story we may have once had, but have now forgotten.

Before the Rain Came

2009-09-19T11:20:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the most delightful moments of the year are also the most fleeting. The melon season in the Northwest is such a fleeting moment. This was a devastating year for melons, as Anthony & Carol Boutard at Ayer's Creek Farm called it quits on their beloved charentais crops, and the heavy rains that came the first week of September wiped out everyone else. Like other late summer fruits, such as the tomato and grape, heavy rains oversaturate the fruit and cause splitting and diluted flavor. I bought the last of my local butterscotch melons from Creative Growers in that first week of September.

I managed to get a small salad on the menu before the season ended. It was a salad of melons and lemon cucumbers with house cured lardo and prosciutto, pine nuts, green coriander dressing and wood sorrel. I originally ran this dish as a special with Anthony's Sweet Seduction grapes, but later decided to leave them out, so the rich, tender melon could shine.

I had just begun curing and hanging lardo and guanciale (pork jowl) for the coming fall and winter. Wood sorrel (oxalis montana) is a wild herb that I have been foraging this year (the rains which brought about the end of melon season have ushered in the local chanterelle, pictured below with wild wood sorrel), and I now cultivate it at home as well. It is not a true sorrel, but has a similar herbal sourness. I find it a little more approachable than sheep sorrel (rumex acetosella).

Anthony shared his reason why they won't be planting melons again next year. He couldn't deal with the heartache anymore:

"Sadly the warm nights over the last week (8/9) have reduced the sugar content of this years crop. They are good, but not the usual sublime confections. On average, we harvest between 25 and 30% of the melons. Last year the quality was very high. In this planting we may not even pull off 5%... Good melons have a corky webbing on their skin, those lacking the cork are inferior and not worth picking. Most of the field is smooth skinned."

Anthony also recalled the old market farmer who said you only plant melons for five years before you never want to see them again. Ayers Creek Farm held out for eight years!

A Brief Note to the Vegetarian

2009-09-05T13:38:00.000-07:00

I suppose it was only a matter of time before the many special diets of Portland discovered my love of vegetables, and willingness to accommodate their needs. That day has come, and not without it's effect on Park Kitchen. I hope everyone will understand the need to implement some guidelines to help the restaurant facilitate these requests.

The first guideline is proper notice. It is not a universal tendency of special diets (whether vegetarian, pescatarian, lacto-ovotarian, vegan, celiac, kosher, or whatever) to surprise the kitchen with a laundry list of special requests, but it is the lion's share. I certainly sympathize with dietary needs, but without some notice for special preparations, the diner does not sympathize with my desire to serve a quality experience. Many of my colleagues in town simply print on their menu "substitutions politely declined," which is not an inflexible policy. However, there is little that can be done by any kitchen on a busy Saturday night at 6:30 pm, while we are cooking for 60 other paying guests who have ordered from our menu.

The second guideline is price. There is a very simple equation for a successful restaurant to produce a great dining experience. The kitchen invests an enormous amount of time preparing food that will be served to many guests. When special requests are made, a disproportionate amount of time is spent for a very few guests. As of this week, we will begin to charge a supplement for work that must be done beyond our menu to accommodate special diets. We welcome your business, and we want to cook for you, but it must be fair for everyone.

You might be surprised to know...

I also want to briefly address two widespread misconceptions about vegetarianism. First of all, there is the inaccurate belief that chefs of fine dining restaurants don't understand or sympathize with a vegetarian diet. For those of you reading this blog, it may surprise you to know that I was a vegetarian for many years, Naomi Pomeroy of Beast was a vegetarian for many years, and so was Jason Owens of Laurelhurst Market, to name a few.

I think a great many vegetarians are acting under the assumption, regardless of the philosophy motivating their diet, that being a vegetarian will save them money. Nothing could be further from the truth (unless you are one of the many undernourished vegetarians who believe that a diet of starches will suffice). If you go to the grocery store and look at the price per pound of ground beef, and then look at the price per pound of lettuces and tomatoes, you will quickly see that the American Farm Bill is heavily subsidizing commodity meats, while nutritious vegetables carry a more accurate cost. Although I probably spend more on vegetables than most restaurants, I will list two months of expenses at Park Kitchen as a percentage:

May 2009

07% Dairy
22% Dry Goods
11% Fish
30% Meat
30% Produce

August 2009

07% Dairy
16% Dry Goods
07% Fish
33% Meat
37% Produce

These examples illustrate several facets of the restaurant. Of course, our fish expenses are usually lower than the average restaurant, because we choose to serve lesser known (albeit delicious) seafood like anchovies, sardines, squid, octopus, albacore and black cod, rather than expensive seafood like halibut and tuna. Also, our meat expenses are lower than most because we butcher whole animals in-house. It is also more common for produce expenses to be higher in the summer, during the peak of vegetable abundance. However, at Park Kitchen, I am proud of the fact that any month of the year, our combined produce and dry goods expenses always outweigh our combined meat and fish expenses. I challenge any restaurant in town to compete with that record.

Quelites and Halophytes

2009-08-06T21:24:00.000-07:00

Why I want you to eat more weeds

My grandmother was an avid gardener. I remember fondly how she would rattle off the common names of the weeds in her garden. They had such charming names like chickweed, lamb's quarter, sow thistle, goosefoot, sheep sorrel, and pigweed. The entire barnyard was represented. For years, I thought she would just make the up the names to entertain me. In Mexico, there is a generic term for all these weeds. They call any edible weed a quelite (pronounced kay-lee-tay). These plants have been eaten for generations, the pigweed is amaranth, the goosefoot is quinoa, two of the great indigenous staples of the Americas. Other quelite plants include purslane, epazote, huanzontle, spearmint, chamomile, dandelion and nettles.

This summer, I have been buying weeds from two farms, Ayer's Creek Farm and Dancing Roots Farm. Anthony & Carol Boutard sell a quelite mix at the Hillsdale Farmers Market, and Shari Sirkin at Dancing Roots graciously delivers amaranth, quinoa and purslane by the pound. If you've been eating at Park Kitchen this summer, the truth is you've been eating weeds all along.

I have had a sprouted bean salad on the menu for a few months. This may be the most nutritious dish on my menu right now. The summer version has cucumbers, hazelnuts, quinoa grains and raw greens (chenopodium quinoa), and anise hyssop (a delicious summer herb). The quinoa and hyssop come from Dancing Roots Farm. I serve the salad on a plate sauce I call fromage fondue, a fresh goat cheese rendered into a sauce by melting it with cream and emulsifying it with olive oil. The salad is dressed with a preserved lemon vinaigrette and garnished with a snack I call quinoa crunch, basically a tuile and deliciously addictive.

Lambs quarters (chenopodium album) are a close cousin of quinoa. It has a number of common names, like "fat hen." It can be used in the same way. Young leaves can be eaten raw, more mature leaves should be lightly steamed or braised. In Michoacan, they gather them as they begin to flower, breaded and fried and served with mole.

My summer fruit salad of peaches and blackberries is accompanied by pecans, purslane, and goat's milk feta from Juniper Grove. This firm and briny feta is perfect with the fruit. The Chester blackberries and purslane come from Ayer's Creek. Purslane (portulaca oleracea) has a succulent, fleshy leaf on a sturdy, but edible stem. Depending on where you live, you may see it at the market as verdolagas, its Spanish name. This salad is dressed with a peach brown butter vinaigrette. You can order seed from Territorial or Johnny's.

One of my favorite weeds to cultivate is nasturtium (tropaeolum majus). The entire plant is edible, the seed pod, the leaf and the flower, it is beautiful and very easy to propagate. The seeds can be salt cured like capers, and the leaves have a peppery arugula flavor. I serve it with a smoked sturgeon salad, smoked and thinly sliced with raw zucchini, pickled shallots, and red currants, on a red currant conserva. This dish is inspired by Swedish cuisine, although I really thought about the intertwining of the thin ribbons of fish and zucchini, and just designed the accompaniment around that idea.

Perhaps my most popular summer salad is the refreshing beet and watermelon salad, with pickled watermelon rind, amaranth (amaranthus retroflexus), dried chile vinaigrette and grated Redmondo, a firm, aged goat cheese from Juniper Grove. The beets, amaranth and chiles are earthy and savory, the watermelon and sweet rind pickle are juicy and fruity, the cheese is only mildly salty, and mildly firm. It could be my kind of dessert, though no one has ordered it that way.

What about the Ocean's weeds?

Anyone who knows my cooking knows that I have been strongly influenced by Japanese cooking. I have often used seaweeds in my dishes with seafood, tomatoes, cucumbers, or mushrooms. It can really cover a lot of ground. In more recent years, I've learned about salt tolerant plants, or halophytes, foraged along the coast in salt marshes and rocky cliffs. Some of these plants are now cultivated, like agretti (salsola soda), also known as barba di frate (Monk's Beard). This plant has a pleasant texture, slightly crunchy, a little sour and slightly bitter. As with most halophytes, it is good with seafood. I serve it sauteed with pattypan squashes, baby octopus and arabbiata sauce, which is Italian for "angry" sauce, defined by a healthy hand of garlic and chiles. You can order seeds from Seeds of Italy or Johnny's (It is actually not the same plant as saltwort or okahijiki, as it is known in Japan, but similar enough to be used with the same treatment).

Another halophyte that I use on the menu is marsh samphire (crithmum maritimum), which has many names (salicornia, sea beans, glasswort, criste-marines, pousse-pied, as well as marketing names like sea asparagus or sea fennel). This plant is usually foraged along the coast, and it is naturally very salty. At Park Kitchen, I blanch it in boiling, unsalted water before using it in seafood salads, or with potatoes and vegetables. Many people love to pickle it, but I personally have never enjoyed the flavor of halophytes in vinegar. Our sea beans are being served with a chilled salad of grilled razor clams, tomatoes, peppers and creamy, new crop fingerling potatoes.

One of the most mysterious plants on the menu right now is ficoide glaciale (mesembryanthemum crystallinum), which originated in southern Africa, and has been popular among the French chefs of haute cuisine for many years. It was then that I first encountered this plant in a French cookbook. Not surprisingly, the only place I know that sells seed is La Societe des Plantes (If you can't read french, you may have trouble maneuvering this site). I buy this special vegetable from Viridian Farms, who are the only people outside of California that I know who are selling it. As you can see in the photograph, its leaves are covered with cell walls filled with water. It is sometimes called ice plant or glacier lettuce, very crisp, crunchy and refreshing. Texturally, it reminds me of watermelon. I serve this with salmon and a rice porridge made with sesame and sweet walla walla onions, accompanied with a salad of cucumbers, wakame seaweed and ice plant. Then the entire dish is sprinkled with furikake, a sesame and spice mixture full of textures, colors and flavors. It is also great in textural salad presentations.

And why am I eating this?

Early in my cooking career, I happened upon many a book about herbs and medicine. Samuel Thayer's "Edible Wild Plants" and Euell Gibbons' "Stalking the Wild Asparagus" were probably the first big inspirations. In fact, it all started over a bowl of Grape Nuts cereal when I was a young lad, and I saw Euell Gibbons on a tv commercial. He seemed so cool by the campfire, gathering weeds and berries and eating the same breakfast cereal that I ate. Wow! He was James Dean and Gandalf in the same moment.

Once I started cooking as a professional, I encountered the book that brought all these ideas together and inspired me at a very formative time in my career. I was cooking at a french restaurant, and my chef introduced me to this book (now out of print) by Michel Bras (and it was in this book that I first encountered the plant ficoide glaciale, page 220). He describes the inspiration of foraging for ingredients, and using unusual plants for their unique flavors. His plating style was very clean and classic, simple yet elegant and mysterious. Back in 1996, I think this book more than any other singular influence inspired me to become a chef.

Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson!

2009-07-26T23:35:00.000-07:00

The 23rd annual International Pinot Noir Celebration ended today with a whirlwind tasting panel at Park Kitchen. Jancis Robinson, the renowned author, educator and Master of Wine, was this year's IPNC host. She finished her weekend with the Oregon Wine Board tasting over fifty wines in less than three hours, judging their character and ageability.

Of course, pinot noir is Oregon's most celebrated wine, but the panel examined Chardonnay and Reisling as well. It was among the aged whites that I was most impressed. We tasted some surprising dry reislings from Amity 1988 and 89, and enjoyed Chehalem's 96 Reisling and 97 Chardonnay. With vintages spanning from 1979 to 2006, I have to say that after tasting little more than a dozen wines, I could only judge the quality of my intoxication! Indeed, it does take a professional to evaluate, or even be able to taste so many wines in one sitting.

Nocino, Midsummer's Day

2009-06-24T23:02:00.000-07:00

It was five years ago that I tasted nocino for the first time, the Italian liqueur made from green walnuts. I was the sous-chef of an Italian restaurant in Portland, and we were buying salt and olive oil from Jim Dixon. He also makes his own nocino at home. It was rich and bittersweet, nutty, of course, but something dreamy, something full of mystery.

You'll find nocino throughout northern Italy, but it is still relatively unknown here in the States. I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and make my own. As good fortune would have it, my neighbor across the street has a grand old walnut tree. I climbed into the branches with a basket, and after a few twists and scratches, had plenty of nuts to flavor some spirits.

The green walnuts are traditionally picked on the eve of the Festa di San Giovanni. This is Midsummer's Day, the 24th of June, and the time of year when the walnuts are starting to reach their full size, but have not yet started to harden. The shell and the nut inside the husk are still soft and white. I quartered the nuts, mixed them with sugar, some cloves, cinnamon sticks and lemon peel, then covered them with alcohol. According to the tradition, the mixture should be stored with exposure to sunlight for forty days, then filtered and drank deeply to honor the dead on All Soul's Day, November the 2nd (and throughout the winter months).

While I was researching different recipes, I noticed a trend. Many of the American recipes are pretty straightforward, simply covering the nuts, sugar and spices with vodka. The Italian recipes use grappa or grain alcohol. This facilitates a stronger flavor infusion, because of the higher alcohol content. Toward the end of the process, they add a simple syrup to dilute the proof of the liqueur and adjust the sweetness. I have certainly experienced the effectiveness of this method of infusion in the making of limoncello. Just to be sure, I made both recipes on the same day (St. John's Day, of course) to find out once and for all which renders the finer result.

For now, we wait. There will be a toast at my house on All Soul's Day. Come on over.

Let Them Eat Grass

2009-06-14T19:09:00.000-07:00

A Home on the Range

This Sunday, the Park Kitchen team took a field trip just south of Scio, Oregon to meet our friend Joe Schueller at his ranch. Joe started Rainshadow el Rancho in 2001, and we have been buying pigs and rabbits from him since 2006. Joe has been working hard on a poultry processing plant for the last few years, and it is finally operational. We all wanted to take a closer look at his work on the ranch.

Joe keeps a diverse population on his ranch. He has a small herd of buffalo, a warren of rabbits, a few sheep, cornish hens, chickens and ducks (both layers and meat birds) and turkeys. During the construction of the processing plant, Joe's hogs have been raised on his neighbor, Claude's land. When they come back to Rainshadow, they will rotate on the pasture with the other animals. He has over 140 acres of pasture, and this is the primary diet of his animals. During our tour, Joe mentioned the writings of Joel Salatin from Polyface Farms, author of "Pastured Poultry Profits," as an inspiration to his own model of pasture raised farming.

There are a number of hatchling coops near the house. They stay under the lamps for the first three weeks before they go into the pasture. Then the chickens and ducks live in portable huts that are moved every day, so the animals have fresh grazing, and the manure is evenly dispursed. The animals are rotated in the pasture as well. The chickens will eat the bugs out of the manure of the larger animals and help to break it down, layering the nutrients in the soil. Once the soil is healthy, the environment is favorable for the growth of nutritious legumes like clover and lupine, dandelions and bluegrasses. This is the lifeline of the pasture. Once this harmonic balance is achieved, just letting the animals graze naturally perpetuates the pasture, which minimizes the cost of nutrient grain feeds, antibiotics to combat illness and malnutrition, and drugs to accelerate growth and weight gain.

The laying hens and turkeys have a more permanent residence, grazing under Joe's orchards of apple, cherry, plum and asian pear. The birds seem very happy there. Their eggs are delicious, and a bargain at $5 per dozen. This year will be the first for his Black Star chicken layers and Ancona duck layers. I'm looking forward to his first year of duck eggs and meat birds.

If you build it, they will come.

Joe began building the poultry processing plant on his ranch after twenty years in construction contracting. Joe said this was one of the most difficult projects of his life, in large part due to the difficulties of securing skilled workers for a small, rural project. After $600,000 worth of headaches and more than three years of work, Joe can process his own chickens, ducks, turkeys, game birds, and rabbits. Small growers and distant neighbors can bring their animals for custom processing as well. Today, small processing plants (less than five hundred head per day) are increasingly rare, but a great asset to everyone in the area.

This is Joe's wife, Karen in the doorway of their processing plant. The first room contains the funnels seen here for bleeding, as well as the scalder and plucker machines for poultry. When we were here, Joe had not yet acquired the wax tank for duck processing.

The poultry enters the cleaning room through a chute from the centrifugal plucker. The hangers hold the poultry by the head and feet, and the belt turns around the processing table. Then they enter the chill room, followed by bagging, weighing and freezing (unless they will be shipped fresh). With the plant running at 40% capacity, Joe said the electricity bill is about $450 per month. The economics of the small processing plant are challenging, but they cover the real cost of processing meats. Unlike their large scale competitor, the CAFO infrastructure is usually funded with tax dollars, and so is the waste treatment. Guys like Joe aren't using your tax money to sweep costs under the rug.

An Exceptional Breed

Joe has been raising rabbits, and they have always been outstanding. After a suggestion from a friend at OSU about cross-breeding, they have become the finest rabbits in Oregon. By cross-breeding three commercial breeds (Californian, Satin, and New Zealand), he has cultivated a rabbit that has good weight gain and a finer bone structure, which means a meatier rabbit that costs less than most of the competition. You can see the dressed weight written on these rabbits are all over 3 1/2 pounds! As with most of Joe's products, quality is high and prices are competitive.

The mighty buffalo roam in their own pastures. This is an entirely different scale of animal. There is about one bull for every ten cows, and right now Joe has a bull near 2,000 pounds! The average buffalo weighs about 1,200 pounds and dresses out to about 600 pounds of meat. It's nice to see the buffalo returning to American pastures. It's a rare sight, but Joe has a rare vision, and it's exciting to watch him bring it to life.

One Dinner, Four Kuramoto

2009-05-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

For several years now, I have been sharing my passion for sake by hosting special dinners and pairing sake with my cooking. After travelling in Japan and meeting sake professionals, I have the privilege of bringing special guests to these events to share their enthusiasm and their stories of the trials and tribulations of the craft of brewing sake.

This year, I had the good fortune of hosting four kuramoto at my Spring kaiseki dinner. The kuramoto is the president of a sake brewery, and in some cases (especially among smaller breweries) the president is also the toji, or brewmaster. Each of the kuramoto were visiting from a different prefecture, so I thought it would be exciting for the diners to taste the junmai ginjo from each of the breweries. For the unfamiliar, junmai ginjo is a description of how the sake is brewed, using only water, koji, yeast, and rice which has been polished of its outer forty percent to remove impurities. With all other things being equal, our guests could judge the nuances in the art of sake brewing from different regions.

The meal began with a sake from Akita Prefecture in Northern Japan. Kotaro Saito is the fifth generation kuramoto of Saiya Shuzo, the makers of Yuki no Bosha. This sake is a yeasty, full flavored junmai, rich and floral with hints of apricot and white pepper. The brewery uses Akita Komachi rice, and the toji uses a blend of their own cultivated yeasts and the yamahai method to develop its flavor. I chose to pair it with a salad of hato mugi (a Japanese barley), asparagus and rabbit loin, dressed with white miso and garnished with rosemary blossoms and burnet from my garden. The idea behind the pairing was to accent the yeasts with the barley and white miso. The fruitiness of the sake was complemented by some persimmon preserves I had made in the fall, and the peppery notes were supported by the rosemary blossoms.

For the next course, my good friend Taka Yamauchi poured his Watari Bune 55. Yamauchi-san is the seventh generation kuramoto as well as the toji of Huchu Homare Shuzo. Watari Bune is named after the heirloom rice used to brew it, the father strain of Yamada Nishiki, the most celebrated sake rice. This variety of rice was once widely grown in Ibaraki Prefecture. Because it is a tall rice, it is susceptible to typhoons, and it is also a late harvest crop, making it more vulnerable to insects. It gradually fell out of favor. Because Yamauchi-san wanted to use locally grown rice, he was advised that Watari Bune was a quality sake rice. He found the rice under preservation at the Ministry of Agriculture's National Research Institute. He was able to secure a 14 gram sample of seed. After three years of harvest, he was able to create the first Watari Bune sake in over fifty years, and it does have a distinct flavor worthy of his efforts. Portland is well acquainted with "the fifty five," it's largest consumer outside of Japan. This is one of my favorite sake. It is full flavored, nutty and earthy, yet it has hints of tropical fruits. Very layered, so I decided to pair it with many layers of umami, a miso marinated scallop baked and served on a nettle puree with a salad of seaweeds and mushrooms. Omoshiroi desu ne!

Ms. Miho Fujita joined us for her first visit to the United States. She is the kuramoto of Mioya Shuzo in Ishikawa Prefecture. This region is distinguished by its rich yamahai's, but the style at Mioya is completely sokujo. For their junmai ginjo, the toji, Yokomichi-san uses Gohyaku Mangoku rice to inoculate the koji, and the local Noto Hikari rice for the shubo. This sake is called Yuho, which means "happy rice." It is complex for its soft and silky texture, with a finish of herbs and flowers, a subtle nigami (bitterness) and umami.

I had been thinking of a shellfish dish, so I paired razor clams and hokki gai (surf clams), briefly poached in a court bouillon, thinly sliced and presented with fava beans, red celery and hakurei turnips. Again, I took advantage of my garden lilacs, picking the flowers and making a light infusion with the poaching liquid. Then I made a mousse-like lilac pillow (gelatin sponge) for the salad to rest on. The sweetness of the shellfish and the shibumi (astringency) of the flowers matched the sake perfectly. I ended up liking this dish enough to put it on the spring menu at Park Kitchen.

The final course was served with Chikurin Karoyaka (lightness) from Okayama Prefecture. Niichiro Marumoto is the kuramoto and toji of Marumoto Shuzo. As if this was not enough, he also grows his own rice, and he is the first and only USDA certified organic sake producer in Japan (as of 2009). In this picture, Marumoto-san displays his yamada nishiki rice. His sake is very elegant, with a slight effervescence reminiscent of champagne, the flavor of cherries and a mellow finish. Marumoto-san uses a technique very similar to the solera system used to make sherry. He blends some of the previous years sake with the new brew, which adds richness and body. I wanted to pair it with a rich fish and a bright, acidic accompaniment. I have been poaching black cod in olive oil this spring, so I paired it with onigiri (pressed rice) studded with pickled radish, a sauce of rhubarb, and a salad of peas and their tendrils. Marumoto-san is a purist at times, and I knew I was taking a chance by serving fish and rhubarb with his sake, but even he seemed to like the pairing.

The dinner concluded with cheers and fellowship, and the four kuramoto had a chance to meet a new and growing audience of sake drinkers in Portland. Many thanks are due to Marcus Pakiser, the sake sommelier for Columbia Distributing. It is his expertise and understanding of sake which has expanded our sake market in Portland. Kanpai, Marcus!

Farewell, Sweet Rapini

2009-05-27T21:49:00.000-07:00

With only a few weeks of spring left, and fewer rainclouds on the horizon, we bid farewell to the wonderful Northwest crop of rapini. It's a little strange to be writing about food that we won't see again for another year, but this year it has caught my attention how much misunderstanding there is about this vegetable. I've seen articles published in newspapers and on blogs, as well as a few very respectable books, which all fail to identify what this mysterious vegetable actually is.

Here in the Northwest, we have a shorter growing season than California and many of the southern states. Spring comes very late up here. We don't see the first local sweet peas or favas until it's nearly summer. Instead, we have rapini. Down in California, they don't see a lot of rapini. They don't have to wait for it. By Groundhog Day, they can be planting full fields of crops for spring. Up north, it doesn't matter if you plant your spring crops in February or early March. They aren't going to grow, because there just isn't enough sunlight! If you do plant, the growth is so slow that the crops you plant a month later will actually catch up to them.

So what can you grow? Brassicas that have been harvested throughout the winter are a great source of food from Groundhog Day until the Vernal Equinox. Brussels sprouts and kale, cabbages, collards and turnips; most of the vegetables in the family have a large root stalk. After they are harvested, the plant will continue to send energy up through the root stalk, creating budding sprouts that we call rapini.

These shoots come at different times, depending on the plant. Brussels sprouts have an early sweetness, while some of the cabbages and collards are the last to develop good flavor. They have varying colors and leaf shapes, also depending on the plant. There are deep red shoots from red kales and cabbages, pale green from brussels and turnips, and dark green from cavolo nero and other dark kales. (The photo above shows three different varieties). These crops are enormously popular in Italian and Chinese cuisine, which places a higher value on bitter flavors.

Don't be mistaken into thinking that these are some mysterious cousin of the turnip, or a variety of gai-lan or broccolini. They are all brassica shoots (There is one exception you may see in the grocery store, and that is broccolini. It is actually a cross between broccoli and chinese gai-lan. It resembles rapini, but is not cultivated in the same way). Whatever variety you may buy, they will all have small florets with different leaf shapes surrounding the tips, and thin stalks. The quality can usually be judged by the tenderness at the base of the stalk. Shoots that have been cut too late or long ago will be fibrous and woody instead of tender and bittersweet. I'll be looking forward to them again next year.

Intellectual Property

2009-04-30T13:28:00.000-07:00

Park Kitchen was recently contacted by a lawyer inquiring about legislating the creativity of cooking, to protect the intellectual property of chefs. As laughable as this may seem, it already exists at many levels regarding processes and labeling, but the idea of extending the law to include recipes seems like a litigious nightmare. Who will be the lucky person to own the rights to hollandaise, and how long will it take to encompass the rights to making butter or bacon? Once the process begins, how long will it take to include the protection of ingredients?

I am about to take a vacation to the Great Lakes area and experience the culinary creations of the creative chefs cooking there. Chicago is one of America's capitals of molecular gastronomy, in which chef's take food sciences and apply them to fanciful restaurant creations. Some of these processes are protected by law, such as Homaro Cantu's edible paper at Moto. The chef has used food based inks and printed them on starch based papers, so that you can eat the menu. Chef Cantu also requires his cooks to sign a confidentiality contract to protect his ideas.

This kind of protection through secrecy is moving from a traditional to a more legislated phenomenon. In the old days, the means by which a chef created his masterpiece was part of the wonder, sometimes speculated or imitated by contemporaries. This trend toward intellectual property has already taken a dark turn in the U.S. Patent Office, and should serve as a warning to what is possible. Consider the 1980 case "Diamond vs. Chakrabarty," in which a scientist working for General Electric submitted a patent on a bacterial microbe that could act as a detergent to help clean up oil spills. Of course, at that time, living things could not be patented, but the decision was reversed, and has opened the flood gates of patenting every living function on the planet. Today's companies can capture the rights to life ranging from human genomes to genetically modified plant seed, the raw ingredients of life! Chicken bones are patented as a treatment for arthritis! Where do we draw the line between the intellectual property of God and man?

Easter Eggs from the Chicken Bus

2009-04-13T11:45:00.000-07:00

The Delicious Eggs of Big Table Farm

Our friends Brian Marcy and Clare Carver moved from Napa Valley to the upper Willamette Valley with barn full of ideas. Brian is a craftsman of all kinds, from winemaker to welder, carpenter and inventor. Clare is the keeper of their many farm animals, several hogs, cows, horses, goats and chickens. We were invited to Easter supper at their farm this year, and as fate would have it, we would be delivering a special parcel. Gatherings at their home are frequent and generous, the source of their name, Big Table Farm.

Clare called on Saturday to tell us about her situation. There had been some mistake with the delivery of her spring chicks. They were stranded at the airport. We agreed to pick up this chirping box of cluckery and bring it with us for supper. As unlikely and amazing as it may sound, newborn chicks are packed tightly together and shipped by mail to their faraway destinations from the hatchery. These day old chicks were ordered from one of the best known, Murray McMurray's, and the chicks emerge from their shells fortified with enough nutrients to survive the shipping without food or water. Again, this is amazing. Clementine helps Clare watch over the young chicks until they are old enough to join the flock.

With parcel in tow, we head to Gaston, where Brian and Clare have purchased about 40 acres of hillside and forest. These little chicks will replenish their flock in the cycle of brooding and culling. Clare maintains a flock of about one hundred hens, keeping two or three roosters around to protect the ladies from their predators. She likes to have a variety of breeds, with different plumage, and laying eggs of different colors and sizes. When pressed to choose her favorite four, she named the Buff Orpington, Black Australorp, the Araucana and the Delaware, which are generally well-behaved, with beautiful and diverse feathers and eggs.

When Clare and Brian lived in Napa, they kept chickens in the city for four years, so they had a good idea of what kind of a coop they wanted for Big Table Farm. Brian designed and constructed the chicken bus from scrap metal and mounted it on trailer wheels. In fact, all of the animal huts on the farm are portable. The bottom of the bus is metal grating, so the chicken manure just falls right through, and they move the bus twice a month, so the hens can pasture freely over their farm.

The eggs from Big Table Farm are particularly delicious, and the reason is their diet. The hens enjoy many acres of fresh pasture, and their diet is supplemented with an all-organic feed, which is considerably more expensive than conventional feed. Clare is working with other farmers in the Willamette Valley towards a local organic feed co-op, an enormous project which would take years to establish. Clare believes more people could afford to use organic feed if transportation costs could be reduced, and many others agree with her. Inspired by the writings of Joel Salatin (featured in Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma") and others in the Stockman Grass Farmer, a journal of grassland agriculture, the farms of Willamette Valley will pursue the idea that with the right environment, animals can be raised naturally, healthy and profitably.

The Secret of the Magic Egg

When Clare delivers eggs to the restaurant, each one is lovingly dated in pencil, and sell for the bargain price of $5 per dozen. When you crack open an egg, it tells you it's whole story. The firmness of the albumen tells you how fresh it is, and the darkness of the yolk tells you what the chicken was eating (eggs at the grocery store can legally be on the shelf for up to two months). It is more difficult to peel very fresh, hard-boiled eggs, because very little of the albumen has evaporated, and it grips very tightly to the shell. Boiling the eggs in very salted water helps to dissolve the skin under the shell. Clare didn't believe me until she tried this for herself.

At the restaurant, I have been using her eggs for a salad of braised leeks dressed with a dijon vinaigrette, and placed on a sauce of nettle puree. The eggs are cooked for seven and a half minutes in boiling salted water, then drained and cooled in ice water before peeling. I quarter the eggs, and the yolk is still creamy inside. Lay the egg wedges against the leek and sprinkle with breadcrumbs (we use rye) and duck hams, made from a short-cured tenderloin.

Another egg dish I have used recently with Big Table Farm eggs is a technique I saw in Milan, Italy, at the restaurant of Carlo Cracco. Like myself, Mr. Cracco has spent some time in Japan and has brought inspiring techniques back with him. There is an izakaya tradition of fermenting egg yolks in a mixture of miso and mirin for a few hours. The exterior of the yolk becomes firm, and encapsulates a still fluid, although cured interior, which flows out once it is cut. The richness of the yolks from Clare's hens make this a delicacy.

Begin by making a puree of cooked beans, salt and sugar, and lay the egg yolks in the mixture. They will float because of the high specific gravity of the puree, so after about three hours, you must lovingly roll the egg yolks over, to cure the other side. After another two hours, the eggs are ready. You can also leave the yolks in the mixture overnight to cure them all the way through, and then dehydrate them until they are firm enough to grate with a microplane, as you would bottarga!!

This dish has been on the Park Kitchen menu as the "magic egg," and a winter version of it was used at the Oregon Truffle Festival in Eugene in January. The whites are separated from the yolks, then the whites are passed through a sieve to break up the albumen, then cooked into individual "omelettes." The yolks are cured as described, then the omelette is garnished with the yolk, and a salad of steamed cauliflower, croutons, black truffles, rabbit loin and parsley, inspired by the "a la Polonaise," preparations of French cuisine. Truffles and dehydrated eggs are grated over the top to complete the dish.

A New Chocolate Adventure

2009-03-13T09:11:00.001-07:00

The chalkboard at Park Kitchen pays tribute to the magic of Xocolatl de David.

Ever since I started working at Park Kitchen four years ago, David Briggs has been there with me. A few years ago, David started a chocolate company called Xocolatl de David. Now, this created some confusion, since my name is also David. Many people thought that I was the chocolatier. This month, David left his position as the restaurant sous-chef to focus on his chocolate business, so let there be no further confusion. Park Kitchen will miss David, and we all wish him well in his new adventure.

David has a very original perspective on chocolates and confections. He does not limit himself to traditional ingredients. He has a very creative palate, and integrates flavors that can be surprising. There is often a very savory element to his sweets, and he sources many of his ingredients from local farms and dairies. I interviewed David at his workshop this week to find out what he's doing now, and where he's going in the future.

Padberg: When did you first start working with chocolate and what was your inspiration for Xocolatl de David?

Briggs: It started about four years ago, mostly out of boredom. I was experimenting with different foods, I tried baking breads, but my small apartment was too drafty. I forget where it came from, but I read about a peanut butter ganache, and I wanted to make that. I made the ganache and rolled it in a simple, untempered chocolate, and just kept them in my fridge. It was a simple beginning.

Padberg: What is your most popular creation so far?

Briggs: I'd have to say the salted caramel featured at The Meadow. The esoteric flavors may get people talking, but they don't necessarily sell a lot if people have a staunch viewpoint about them.

Padberg: You have created some unexpectedly delicious confections, like the bacon caramel popcorn and the pig's blood chocolate you served at the Cochon 555 events earlier this month. During your testing of new ideas, what was one of your biggest surprises?

Briggs: About how good it was? Well, the pig's blood chocolate was a surprise. Once I had the base formula for the pig's blood chocolate, it was pretty damn good. I suppose the bacon chocolate was exciting, too, because the ganache could hold all the smokiness of bacon fat and not break the emulsion, and I nailed it on my first try, which is always exciting.

Padberg: I know you were surprised with the roasted white chocolate technique we used at the restaurant. Do you have any other plans for that application?

Briggs: I liked that because I've always hated white chocolate and this was the first time I had actually found a way to like it. It works as a sauce, but I'm not sure it would work texturally with my products, so right now, I don't have any plans for that.

Padberg: Last year, you prepared a five-course chocolate dinner at Park Kitchen. There were several great techniques used, like the cocoa butter confit of pork belly, and the chocolate consomme. What events are you planning now?

Briggs: I'm working on a dessert style tasting menu with Jenny Cook (the secret pastry goddess of Pine State Biscuits). I don't want to call it a supper club, as if it were an entire meal. We plan to do an event here at Meat Cheese Bread once a month. With this format, I can feature innovative flavors that I couldn't serve in stores. I also talked with Steve (of Steve's Cheese) about pairing cheeses for the events.

Padberg: Do you have a name for these events?

Briggs: We haven't decided on anything yet. We're waiting for Spring.

Padberg: We've talked about Hershey's plan to close the Scharffen-Berger plant in Oakland. What do you think that says about the future of artisan American chocolate?

Briggs: I think the future of artisan American chocolate is in good hands. Scharffen-Berger is a name everyone knows, but in the last few years, more people are looking to a younger generation. As far as bean to bar production goes, Theo has a good reputation in Seattle, and there is Rogue Chocolatier in Minnesota, Askinosie in Missouri, Amano in Utah, Steve De Vries in Colorado, and I've heard Mast Brothers in New York is supposedly doing bean to bar work.

Padberg: On your website, I have subscribed to be a Xocolatl lab technician, which means that I will be an objective taste tester, so what are we going to see next from the Xocolatl workshop?

Briggs: The newest thing, once the packaging is done, will be my chocolate bars. I don't make my own chocolate, so the only way for me to market a product is with interesting flavors. I have a Piment D'Espelette (from Viridian Farm) and Sea Salt Bar, the Aji Dulce (from Your Kitchen Garden) Pepper Bar, and the Salted Caramel Crunch, and a few others I am still testing. The first will be the Raleigh Bar, a chocolate pecan nougat with bacon caramel (commissioned by Kevin Atchley for Pine State Biscuits, who also features David's Champs Chocolate Milk). Kevin will get the first case of bars, then they will be available around town.

In Portland, you can find David's chocolate workshop tucked away in the back of Meat Cheese Bread, at 14th & SE Stark. Park Kitchen always features Xocolatl de David on their menu. Retail stores featuring his chocolates include Steve's Cheese, The Meadow, Pine State Biscuits, Tea Chai Te, Cacao, and Foster & Dobbs. If you enjoy adventurous chocolate, it is worth seeking out. Expect great things from David in the future.

The Whole Hog and the Nasty Bits

2009-02-24T08:54:00.000-08:00

For several decades now, restaurant chefs have known that buying high quality meats requires direct purchasing of whole animals. In America today, there is rarely an alternative. This is the result of cheap commodity meats dominating the market, and placing enormous economic pressure on the small rancher and family farmer, who can rarely compete with the scale of commodity prices. At Park Kitchen, I have been directing a whole animal butchery program for the last four years, and seeing the difference in quality can be shocking. Sometimes, guests will ask what we've done to make the pork so juicy and delicious. It can be difficult to explain that we haven't done anything unusual, other than to buy a quality animal, and they may have never tasted that before.

When did this happen? And why? Several decades ago, America began an infatuation with diets. Diets that usually preached about eating leaner, not eating less, but lean meats and low-fat foods. Beef sales began to decline, and chicken was rising fast. Pork producers decided to market their product as "the other white meat," and indeed, that is what it became. The loin, the leanest and least flavorful cut, became the highest value, and pig breeds were selected and raised based on the length of loin. The marbling of pork fat, and the essential American staple of lard virtually disappeared from the market. Any old-fashioned pig farmer can tell you, pork used to be a red meat!

The pastures of Square Peg Farm

On about 40 acres of land in Forest Grove, Chris Roehm and Amy Benson have a variety of operations. There is an apple orchard on one side, what remains of a christmas tree farm on the other, some vegetables and a you-pick strawberry patch, a few hundred laying hens and a few dozen hogs. Chris has been developing his hog breeding program, and producing some very fine swine.

In order to balance desirable traits (keeping the hogs vigorous and healthy, and less prone to illness) Chris cross breeds black, red and white breeds. Of the purebreeds, Chris' favorite, and mine, are the black-haired Berkshires. Not only are they personable and intelligent, but delicious at the table. Some of the best crosses were the Berkshire-Durocs and the Duroc-Yorkshires. The hogs pastured in open fields of rye, clover and vetch, and are fed an all-organic feed of corn, wheat and barley. Organic is always more expensive, about twice the price. They buy the feed by the ton at about $0.32 per pound, and they feed about 40 hogs 2,000 pounds of feed per week.

Breeding on the farm is a calculated process. Chris has 11 sows in all. When a gilt is in heat, she will be penned with Harry, his three year old breeding male. The mating window lasts about 48 hours. Harry, weighing in around 700 pounds, wastes no time. The gestation period lasts about 4 months, and the sows are expected to carry 10 litters over a period of five years. A litter is usually 8 to 10 piglets, though one or two may be crushed by the mother.

Healthy pastured hogs at Square Peg Farm have a feed conversion ratio of five pounds of feed for one pound of weight gain. The miracle of pork is how quickly the young animal grows (by contrast, the feed conversion ratio for beef is about 16 to 1). A suckling pig can weigh 60 pounds after 10 weeks, and over 260 pounds in six to eight months. Chris was targeting a profit of $0.25 per pound, making his sale target $3.44 per pound, including the slaughter fee of $45 at Emmert-Buxton Meats in Sandy. There, the animal is hung for six days before Chris delivers it to me at Park Kitchen in his truck.

Getting what you pay for

Park Kitchen buys a half pig every other week until summer time, and we prefer to buy the head of the animal as well. The last half pig (with the head) I received from Square Peg weighed 114 pounds, and cost just over $380. That leaves me with 36 pounds of shoulder, 30 pounds of leg, 32 pounds of loin (including the ten pound belly and two pound tenderloin) and a 16 pound head. Although I could buy commodity pork as cheap as $1.70 per pound for a half carcass, it is so lean, pale, flabby and flavorless as to make $3.44 sound like a bargain. If I were to buy 114 pounds of cheap, rubbery pork loin, instead of the whole animal, at the shocking price of $3.10 per pound, what happens to the rest of the animal?

These are the questions of conventional purchasing. There are at least two middle-men taking a cut between the rancher and Park Kitchen. It makes me wonder how I can possibly buy that commodity pork so cheap? How could anyone make a profit from that price?

The hidden cost of big business, and mountains of Shit!

Who is Square Peg's competition? In general, it is the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. Instead of Chris' 40 animals, these CAFO's can maintain tens of thousands of animals in a very small building, and their numbers are rising. Over the past twenty years, the number of CAFO's has gone from 3,600 in 1982 to over 12,000 in recent years. The number of animals raised on large farms over the same years rose from 257 million to 900 million. It's easy to see that if Chris needs to make $0.25 per pound on his 40 pigs, the big guy can bring his 50,000 pigs to market for a fraction of that cost. But there are costs that never make it to the bottom line.

Lester Brown, a fascinating agrnomist and author, wrote the article Massive Market Failure, in which he writes about unaccounted expenses in various "free market" industries, and their effect on the economy. Because of the enormous assets that CAFOs muster, they are able to reserve all the benefits for the company while assigning all the risks to the public. The most glaring example is the shit! CAFOs own the hogs, and the profit from their sale, but they somehow don't own the shit, or the costs of managing it. The EPA exempts CAFOs from reporting certain toxic gas emissions above 100 pounds per day. Now consider this, the Government Accountability Office studies show that CAFOs annually produce more raw waste than is generated by the citizens of major U.S. cities.

Because they control most of the policy lobbying and advertising dollars that flow to the local media, it is difficult to promote awareness of these hidden costs that pollute water and air. It is up to the taxpayer to build the infrastructure and to clean up the mess. The CAFO will often get into a community promising to bring (low-wage) jobs, but they require subsidized infrastructures, sewer systems and roads, and their costs to the community always outweigh the tax benefit realized from their creation.

When its dinner time, remember that every dollar spent is a vote for the future. Support restaurants that buy whole animals, and grocery stores that buy sustainable meats, and if they only offer conventional pork, tell them what you want. Their purchasing power is determined by the buyer. If the price of something seems too good to be true, it usually is. For some reason, everyone recognizes this when it comes to anything else besides the food they eat!

Groundhog Day

2009-02-18T20:39:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in the distant past, an idea emerged halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox that the groundhog could tell us the future on this day. This year, it was a sunny Groundhog Day, which means a longer winter. This is usually sober news for chefs and farmers anxious to bring some vegetables to the table. On Groundhog Day, I had a dinner date with some of Oregon's finest winter farmers, and I was anxious to see what the coming months had in store.

Sheldon Marcuvitz and Carole Laity tend the 11 acres of Your Kitchen Garden. Their farm lies just south of Canby, and they have harvested some of the best produce I have seen in the Portland area since I moved here over six years ago. They have three greenhouses, two for growing, and one heated for starting seed. Most of their crops are fully exposed to the elements, and they are very proficient at keeping their land productive.

While Sheldon was showing me the digs, he told me that there had been a film crew at the farm. It is a documentary project called Ingredients, which connects a local farmer with a Portland restaurant that uses their produce. The segment featuring Your Kitchen Garden will be released this spring.

At the beginning of February, they are digging sunchokes, salsify and leeks, cutting cabbages, brussels sprouts, kales, radicchio and treviso chicories, inspecting the turnips and celery roots to see which have survived the snow and frost, and checking the crowns of their cardoon and artichoke. Their mache and spinach are small now, but growing well. In the greenhouses, they have a variety of herbs and greens. They are cutting mizuna, shungiku, claytonia (minor's lettuce), sorrel, watercress and arugula. Things are coming along handsomely.

Of course, the challenges of winter farming are that things must be planted in the fall while they can still grow, but they must survive the weather for 90 days before anything can be harvested. It's risky. A farmer stands to lose a lot of money if they have a crop failure, and working in the rain and mud isn't easy work. There can be some advantages to keeping things in the ground during these difficult months. One of my favorite ingredients of spring are the rapini shoots that start to pop out of the stalks of brassicas that have already been harvested. Nothing else is really growing in January and February, so you leave the kale and brussels sprouts stalks in the ground, and you have another crop in March!

One of Sheldon's favorite vegetables is cardoon, the lesser known and under-appreciated cousin of the artichoke. He protects them in the dark of winter by placing straw-filled boxes over the crown until they establish themselves. On a recent trip to Italy, I had seen that the Italians will use these blanching techniques all the way through harvest, which results in an elegant, mellow white stalk.

My favorite winter vegetable from Sheldon's farm is the Japanese turnip. There are two prominent varieties, the hakurei and fuku komachi (you can order seeds from Kitazawa). They are firm and sweet, a perfectly white globe with delicious leafy greens. In Japan, I fell in love with a traditional dish called Kabura Furofuki, which is simply braised turnip or daikon covered with a sweet miso sauce. The beauty of these turnips is that the skin doesn't have to be peeled so long as they are scrubbed clean. They also make wonderful pickles.

One of the most admirable of Sheldon's philosophies about farming is not just the high quality of his produce, but that he chooses crops which actually have a high yield. He selects crops with good yields, and staggers his plantings, which staggers the harvest. He's not selling pristine baby vegetables or micro greens to high paying restaurants and grocery stores. He actually wants to feed people!

$10,000 and a Strange Invitation

2009-02-14T09:14:00.000-08:00

It was an ordinary day at the restaurant, just before we began preparations for the mayhem of Valentine's Day, when a strange invitation arrived in the mail. PETA is sponsoring a cooking challenge this year with a $10,000 prize. The contest is called the "Fine Faux Foie Gras Challenge," to see "which top chef will develop the world's first authentic-tasting faux foie gras." The foie gras issue has been raging in the States for several years now, with some dramatic clashes in Chicago and San Francisco. Even here in Portland, there have been controversial picket lines protesting its sale. It seems PETA has the idea of winning this battle with a substitution, by producing "a faux foie gras that contains no animal ingredients whatsoever and is as close as possible in taste, texture, and form to the foie gras that is prepared in the world's finest dining establishments."

I couldn't put my finger on the paradox, but something didn't seem quite right about this. I went home and wrote a letter to PETA in fairness, to share why I didn't think this was the victory they were looking for.

Dear PETA,

After giving some consideration to your "Fine Faux Foie Gras Challenge," I hope you will give some consideration to my protest. As a chef, one of my missions is to give consideration to the integrity of ingredients. I prepare my ingredients in such a way that they can each be what they are, and express their own greatness. There is a reason why foie gras is used as a luxury ingredient. It has certain innate qualities, which are achieved by certain methods, whether they are humane or not.

It is here that I find confusion in your intention to spend money and resources on a contest which imitates the flavor of something which your members ethically oppose, when there are so many great and honest flavors which could be promoted in its place, with less effort and less manipulation.

There will certainly be chefs who will submit their creations for the contest, and it can only be "through the use of advanced technology and molecular gastronomy" that this contest will be determined. Only through the elaborate transformation of ingredients (and I imagine, through the suspension and stabilization of fats which the body cannot easily metabolize) will this flavor and texture be imitated. When it is accomplished, the end result can hardly be considered food at all, and the cruelty which you sought to spare force-fed ducks will instead be imposed upon those fine dining patrons who sought the ethical treatment of animals other than themselves.

Sincerely Yours,

David Padberg

Welcoming the Year of the Ox

2009-02-04T22:02:00.000-08:00

It felt like the whole world was ready for change. People were celebrating Obama's inauguration with hope and inspiration, and wondering what lies ahead. Well, everyone, the Chinese say it's the Year of the Ox, and that means hard work. Fortunately, this is my year. I was born in 1973, and I can feel the ox flowing through my blood, waking me early in the morning with eager anticipation. I've been making some big plans for this year, even before I realized this would be my year. This blog is one of the many things I wanted to do, and the many things that come after, I can share with you here. I hope you can find new ideas, new insights, and new connections here. I'd like this to be a place where we can make American food better than it is now. To do that, we have to go to the source. We have to know what to eat, where to buy it, and how to let our voices be heard and vote. This is our year!