Fresh and Local

The ultimate sandwich...

2010-02-23T23:11:00.000-08:00

One of the things I most often enjoy when eating out, especially for lunch, is the classic Italian deli sandwich. Thing is, there are a lot of really bad deli sandwiches out there. So over the years I've thought about what I dislike about bad deli sandwiches, but it's a lot more fun, and more worthwhile, to think about what I like. And that meditation led, over the years, to the sandwich in the photo above.

Bread. It's got to be good. Blah bread fresh from the oven smells good when you walk into the shop, but I like bread with some texture, some bite, some character. I've determined that my favorite is the Italian classic called ciabatta. Typically baked in a flat rectangle, dusted with flour, it has a springy, chewy inside and a firm crust. Better yet, if you lightly brush the bread with a good extra-virgin olive oil before toasting it somewhat, the sandwich will stand up to what you put on it.
Meats. Notice the plural. Yeah, there's a certain purity to a really great pastrami on corn rye, with nothing on it but some hot mustard; but if you're talking Italian sandwiches, you need at least two meats, preferably three. I'm hooked on coppa at the moment; it's a dry-cured pork product, often rolled in powdered red pepper for a little extra bite. Genoa salami is my favorite, with a sour, salty tang and a nice texture. And something like mortadella is good for a base, though sliced cooked ham isn't bad either.
Cheese. Provolone is good; asiago is slightly better (but I just had it yesterday). Basically, milder meats need stronger cheese, and vice-versa.
Garnish, relish, or some kind of dressing. A little tangy mustard (on the meat side, please) is good, but I like something more like a tapenade (a French spread with chopped olives, peppers and vinegar). Lately I've been mixing roasted peppers with Kalamata olives and whole-grain Dijon; I might try adding capers, chopped artichoke hearts, and other salty, tangy vegetable products.
Crisp lettuce in a zesty dressing. I like romaine for its crunch and its body, but a mache blend adds a bit more flavor. In a pinch, use shredded iceberg; just be sure to up the balsamic vinegar, and maybe some fresh herbs, to counteract the blandness of the lettuce.

And that's how we ended up with the sandwich shown here, lunch for Kim and me on Tuesday of the Week Of Eating In. We split it and each ate half; frankly, we could have shared it with two more people, with a nice salad or some crunchy pickled Italian giardiniera vegetables. On the other hand, this exquisite work of culinary art cost about $7 to make lunch for two people. Can't complain.

If you really want to get a sense for how to make this, check out the Flickr set for step-by-step instructions, with illustrations.

This Italian twist on a French classic is easy and delicious

2010-02-22T12:27:00.000-08:00

There's a direct lineal connection between the grilled cheese sandwiches I had as a kid and today's trendy pannini. The idea is pretty straightforward: pretty much anything tastes better if it's fried, and if it's Italian and fried, that's even better.

So a few weeks ago, I was enjoying a homemade croque monsieur. This classic French bistro standard is really nothing more than a ham and Swiss on the grill. I've loved them since I discovered them, quite by accident, in the early Seventies, in the Cafe Americain in Paris. (I'll have to tell that story later...)

And I started thinking... I love French cuisine (we have at least one French classic on the menu for later this week), but if I had to pick one variety of food to eat for the rest of my life, it would be Italian. (Or maybe Thai. It would depend on whether I had a better European market or a better Asian market.)

So it was a natural progression from sliced Gruyere and French Mandrange ham to prosciutto di Parma and Asiago cheese:

Prep notes

Both the prosciutto and the Asiago are so full-flavored, you don't need much. I used two slices of Asiago and three of the paper-thin proscuitto, and the sandwich was pure heaven. (And if you're concerned about the butter, using only two slices of Asiago, rather than four, cuts down the internal calorie count significantly.)
We used a local bakery's "Italian deli bread" for this sandwich. It's a standard Italian recipe but baked in a loaf pan, suitable for making sandwiches. (Look around for the same idea, especially at Thanksgiving; this is the best stuff we've found for cold turkey sandwiches the next day.)
Use real butter. Just get over it. Margarine doesn't cook right, doesn't melt right, and doesn't taste right in this application. You don't have to use a lot, just enough to give the bread a golden crust and to help transfer heat into the sandwich.
Start by cooking the cheese side down. This will help melt the cheese, which helps hold the entire sandwich together.
Cook about two minutes per side, on medium-high heat. When you've cooked both sides for about two minutes, cook another minute on each to make sure the cheese is fully melted.
Condiments: I like a hot Dijon mustard (or a whole-grain) on the ham side. Nothing needs to go on the cheese side, as the cheese will melt into the bread. If you have some tangy chutney (and don't mind a little cultural cross-pollination), a dab of chutney on each bite of sandwich is magnificent.

Best of all, the basic technique used in this sandwich is applicable to all kinds of combinations. Try thinly sliced rare roast beef with Muenster cheese, or turkey and pepper Jack. Vegetarian? Spread an herbed goat cheese on one side and thin slices of roast (or pan-sauteed) eggplant on the other. And if you're vegan, leave off the goat cheese, add a roasted pepper, and use extra-virgin olive oil instead of butter. (I may do that later this week anyway, it sounds too good to pass up even for a confirmed omnivore like me...)

Time-shifting in the kitchen

2010-02-22T10:42:00.000-08:00

Time-shifting has become so commonplace that you may have trouble recalling just what that once-groundbreaking term originally meant. Coined in the early days of programmable VCRs, the term referred to setting your recorder to capture a TV show while you were out doing something else—assuming you could figure out how to program your VCR, of course. With the advent of TiVo and menu-driven digital video recorders (DVRs), nobody has to endure the shame of that blinking "12:00" any more, and time-shifting is something most of us take for granted.

But how do you time-shift in the kitchen? As we were preparing for the Week of Eating In, we started by looking at all the things that, in the past, might have prevented us from cooking. There's something every day, right around dinner time.

So we fell back on a saying I coined while working on my first book back in the early Nineties: One day spent thinking before you start working saves five days spent working before you start thinking. It's true for books; it's equally true for dinners.

My brilliant and adorable wife drew a grid on a sheet of paper and sketched in the times of our conflicts. With this visual aid to help us, we figured out who had time to cook what, and when—a task we usually leave till 4:30 or so on the day. And the result was at least semi-miraculous: we came up with awesome things to cook, and a schedule that permitted us to cook, serve, and eat together every day this week.

Tonight's meal will be carnitas: a classic of Mexican cuisine that I've enjoyed for 30+ years. I first tasted this treasure in Mexico City in 1978, at a time when virtually no U.S. Mexican restaurants served it. It starts with a pork shoulder roast like the one shown at the top of this column; you simmer it in seasoned liquid for hours, a simple back-burner task. The house smells wonderful all day with the aromas of dried chiles, cumin, garlic, bay leaves, onions, and one of our special additions, a bottle of beer to the cooking broth. Best of all, this $8.84 pork roast cost about what a single combination plate of carnitas would set you back at a local Mexican restaurant.

And even when factoring in the sides (sliced avocado, corn and flour tortillas, chopped lettuce, grated cheese, and salsa), you can't beat the value. Especially considering that this nearly seven-pound pork shoulder will make enough to have a huge feast for four this evening, at least one lunch for the rest of the week, and probably still fill a freezer bag to be turned into another great meal at some future date.

We'll post photos of the finished product, of course, but for now, dinner is in the big Le Creuset and I'm wondering how soon I can start in on lunch...

The challenge for "Eating In" won't be the cooking...

2010-02-19T13:57:00.000-08:00

I'm getting excited, and just slightly nervous, about the upcoming Week of Eating In on HuffPost. Which is a little silly.

I started totting things up and realized that I've been cooking for myself for more than 40 years, for my wife for more than 30 years, and for my family for more than 20. Whether it's following a recipe, adapting one to my own tastes (or to what's actually in the kitchen at the moment), figuring out how a favorite restaurant makes something I love, or simply going off on my own, I've been doing this for years.

The challenge really comes down to why we get suckered into the whole fast food/dining out loop in the first place. And the answer: the illusion of saving time.

Like so many people, we've got a rich (read hectic) evening schedule. Two kids, and in addition to never-quite-overlapping karate lessons, the actress in rehearsal for our community theater's next performance, and her brother the sax player is performing in a jazz-band concert on Thursday of the Week of Eating In.

Usually, when the sax player is performing, he stays after school to help set up the stage and we bring him a #2 combo, ketchup and pickles only, with a pint of carbonated high-fructose corn syrup. It's so appealing: drive past the static-laden loudspeaker, hope that they got it right, pay at the window and arrive at middle school with a greasy paper sack.

But not this week. This week it'll be something "more chock full o' love than anything that comes from a store," in the wise words of Lamar from Chunk the Raccoon. It's still February, even though El Nino has been warming (and more important, drying) the skies over Portland for some time now. Chili? Chicken soup? Or given how much my kids like Asian cuisine, maybe a steaming bowl of Japanese udon noodles with thick slices of kamaboko (fish cake) and roast pork? Maybe a meatball sandwich?

One thing's for sure: if we bring the saxophone player a meatball sandwich, we'll make damn certain he eats it before he gets into his concert outfit...

It doesn't get much more local than this...

2010-02-09T14:27:00.000-08:00

So the Huffington Post is issuing a challenge for the last week of February: can you avoid eating out for an entire week?

This will actually be pretty easy for us, as we came to the conclusion last year that eating out—even if you stick to "cheap" restaurants and fast food—costs a lot, and makes us all feel queasy after a while.

It's seductive, the lure of the drive-through. It promises the zipless snack: order a Number Three, tell 'em what size, pick a drink, and pay at the window. But for us at least, too many days of greasy food left us feeling thick and full of grease ourselves.

And a number of things started changing. First of all, it was rejuvenating to get back in touch with the creative side of cooking. I've always enjoyed the act of changing ingredients into a meal, the subtle alchemy of spices and seasonings, the application of heat to turn raw eggs into an omelette, to turn white onions into brown soup. It can be a challenge to make something, day in and day out, that all four of us like; one doesn't like spice, the other doesn't like cheese, so we eat a lot of Asian food because everybody likes rice and soy sauce. (We must be one of the few non-Asian families in North America who keep a vase full of chopsticks in the middle of the kitchen table, just like at a pho restaurant. Which is where we got the idea.)

Even on my own for a week or so last summer, as Kim took the kids down to visit a fair subset of the grandparents and cousins, I made a point of making something extraordinary. One of my Flickr sets includes a photo essay of how to get those perfect diamond-shaped grill marks on a steak, just the way they do at a restaurant.

So with the Week of Eating In just around the corner, I'll be updating this blog with our menus, and of course with an emphasis on locally available produce, meat, and naturally, beer and wine. That's one of the great advantages of living in suburban Portland, Oregon: getting really great local beer here is like asking for a nice sparkling wine in Epernay. You're soaking in it!

2008-06-04T20:25:00.000-07:00

The wine manager at our local grocery store once reminded me, "And don't forget, your lovely-and-talented REALLY likes rosé."

She didn't have to remind me. Kim and I have both been fans of good, well-made rosé wines since June of 1994, at least. That was the anniversary that we flew her mom up to watch the girls, packed a picnic basket into the MGB, and took off to the Santa Cruz Mountains for our 15th anniversary.

The first night out, at the Davenport Inn a few miles north of Santa Cruz, we toasted the sunset with a bottle of Randal Grahm's then-unique "Vin Gris de Cigare," a pink wine made from Rhone varietals (grenache, syrah, cinsault, mourvedre). It was... dry, crisp, delicate, but tasted great chilled as we watched the sunset on the veranda outside our room.

The problem at that time was finding other wine-like rosés. Most pink wines, back then, were still of the "blush" variety, made by wineries trying to get back some of the return on their red grapes in a market dominated by white-wine drinkers. (As far as I'm concerned, wine is red; if it's white, it should have bubbles.)

Randal later introduced a Ca'del Solo rosé some time later; we once did a cross-tasting and came to the conclusion that while the Vin Gris de Cigare was a better wine, we enjoyed the Ca'del Solo more. It was a little fruitier but still not sweet; the vin gris was more austere, more (surprisingly) like a white wine, while the Ca'del Solo had more body, more fruit, and was also a better choice for serving with more highly flavored foods. Since we tend to match rosé with barbecue, a fuller-bodied wine is usually a better choice.

But apart from Bonny Doon and some French rosés (Provence and Anjou being fairly reliable), we were basically stuck.

Until recently.

Fortunately, our wonderful wine lady, Roberta, likes to talk with us and has been looking out for good, dry, fuller-bodied rosés with less residual sugar. Lately we tried two of our favorites, and better still, they're both local.

In between paragraphs, I'm sipping the last few milliliters of a 2007 Elk Cove rosé of pinot noir, from my neighbors in Gaston. (Gaston is at the western end of one of my favorite sports-car roads in the world, and a charming place to visit on its own.) It's got a lovely coppery color, a nice acid balance but a good amount of fruit (even to the point of being a little sweeter than I normally like, but not objectionably so). We're having it as a summertime refresher after dinner, a simple supper of our fresh, local bacon and a spinach salad. It would have been good with dinner, too, and in fact would be good with something spicy—a curry would be an awesome pairing with this wine.

And for all that... the Evesham Wood is one of the best wines I've tasted lately. And not just the best rosés, one of the best wines. It's got fabulous body, with all the usual tempranillo goodness of complexity, depth and richness, but in a lighter color suitable for chilling. I had a bottle recently, and was thrilled; sadly, I bought the last one in Roberta's stock, so I'll have to head down to Salem (about 30 miles from us) to the vineyard.

Because, considering that the tempranillo grape is originally from Spain, I want to make paella this summer and serve the Evesham Wood with it.

Blue-ribbon Pork, Popcorn Rice, and Fake Tomatoes

2008-04-14T21:44:00.000-07:00

I'll be blunt—the only legitimately fresh and local product in dinner is the pork (well, that and the beer, but I'll get to that later). But the rice is worth talking about, and the tomatoes, well, they served as a reminder of what the whole fresh, local foods movement is really all about.

And as it turns out, this dinner started out with the rice. A few weeks ago, my friend Jeff Zurschmeide informed me that he'd ordered a ten-pound bag of rice for me from Ellis Stansel's Gourmet Popcorn Rice out of Louisiana. Knowing that I try to keep a "rice collection" at all times, Jeff took a gamble that I'd happily hand over the $20 it would take to bring all this Louisiana goodness up to Oregon. (You think I'm kidding about the rice collection? In addition to the Stansel, we have basmati in white and brown, a bit of Thai jasmine rice, some Italian arborio, a box of mochi, and a recently-emptied bag of Japanese short-grain rice. Oh, and some wild rice from Minnesota, but that's not technically rice, it's a different grain.)

So when the rice arrived and I brought it home from Jeff's place last week, we started planning a Cajun/Creole feast. The heavy cotton sack, complete with drawstring, makes a great presentation:

Then Saturday was so sunny that I took off looking for future features for the blog (oh, all right, I put the top down and drove the hell out of the Miata, all over the best roads of Washington County). Kim and Boh started doing the grunt work of our own garden. Charlie spent the day zoning out in front of the Wii. So we all had a very light dinner, since nobody had the energy to cook.

Worse yet, we were unable to easily lay hands on crawfish, so the original plan of making a crawfish etouffee to serve on top of this fabulous rice will have to wait. To compensate for it, Kim dug out some wonderful fresh pork chops from the prize-winning hog that Jeff acquired for us last year (blue-ribbon winner from the 2007 Clackamas County Fair, no less), and I grilled them with a mild but zesty dry-rub. They were just incredibly beautiful raw, as I laid them out for seasoning:

While they soaked up the spices from the dry rub, I made the third part of the meal, fresh tomatoes sliced and seasoned with our favorite peppercorn mix (black, white, green and pink, freshly ground), dried marjoram, and crushed red pepper, then drizzled with good extra-virgin olive oil.

While they were good, the tomatoes were on the crisp side, even though they were deep red hothouse tomatoes on the vine. Usually, these are about as good as it gets for store-sourced tomatoes; this was no exception, but I still miss the incredibly, musky lusciousness of real tomatoes.

Overall, the meal was wonderful:

And a word on that beer: I've been a fan of Bridgeport Brewing Company since we moved here, especially since learning that Bridgeport is the old name for the town we live in. They make a lovely IPA and a fantastic porter that I've enjoyed on many occasions.

Last summer, though, Kim and I were in the Hawthorne district (the funky, cool part of town on the east side) and walked past the Bridgeport Brewpub. Since we were looking for refreshment at the time, we stopped in and ordered some bar snacks (warmed olives marinated in lemon zest and herbs) and a sampler of their brews.

All the beers were good, but the Beer Town Brown hit home for me. Years ago, when I was building my race car, I spent a lot of time at the homes of various friends on our loose confederation, depending on who had what tools that one or the other of us needed that week. The beer of choice, since we all raced British sports cars, was Newcastle Brown. I still love Newcy, though it's better on draught of course. But I've always wondered what it would be like to have a Newcy IN Newcastle.

Well, unless I make the trip, a Beer Town Brown at the Bridgeport Brewpub is as close as I'm likely to get. And let me tell you, it's wonderful. Not that I wouldn't love a trip to England, but the Hawthorne is just across the river, and my local grocery store has been selling Beer Town Brown in bottles for the past few weeks.

It's got the great, rich, mellow blend of chocolate and crystal malt that is the highlight of Newcastle, but in traditional Northwestern style it's hoppier than Newcy, with a refreshing bitterness atop the creamy, deep malt. Highly recommended...

Not just fruit and veg any more...

2008-03-30T20:17:00.000-07:00

When talking about fresh and local foods, usually the mind calls forth images of farmland, vineyards, orchards, and farmer's markets growing, selling and offering fresh produce. Green beans, cherries, pears, potatoes, ears of corn—that's what we think of.

Most people don't think of bacon. But I'm here to tell you, that's a mistake.

There's a growing trend to take fresh, locally grown meat as well as fruits and vegetables. For years we've partnered with our longtime friend Jeff Zurschmeide, who typically farms a small number of pigs every year. We chip in for the feed, buy the pig in spring, and in fall when it's a suitable size we pay for the mobile butcher to come and, er, prepare it to go to be dressed, cut and packaged by Shy Ann Meats.

Last year, Jeff's time was taken up with his book and magazine to do quite as much pig-rearing as usual. So he arranged to contract with the 2007 Clackamas County Fair winner and acquire the prize-winning pig, Homer, for us from the young 4H club member who raised a pig for the fair.

The net result, as with past years, is the best bacon I've ever tasted. This is the thick-cut, standard cure bacon, lightly smoked and moderately salty. Their hams are even better, and even the non-smoked meats (pork roasts, chops, ribs, and the like) are flavorful, lean, and best of all, grown by our friends and neighbors, in small lots that allow for careful tending and attention.

Tonight's bacon went into a dish, brussels sprouts parboiled and then finished in crispy bacon. I'll post more recipes, but take it from me, the bacon here tastes as good as it looks: lean, flavorful, and real.

Fresh and local... even from halfway around the world

2007-09-08T15:21:00.000-07:00

On the eastern edge of Ashland, Oregon, just north of the California state line, Dagoba Chocolates makes some of the most exquisite chocolate products on the planet. And while they don't grow the cacao pods in the nearby towns of Talent or Hilt, they hew very strongly to one of the core virtues of the fresh and local philosophy: sustainability.

We stopped at Dagoba on a hot August day, and Kim & Charlie preceded me into the cool tasting room:

Sadly, no factory tours were available, due to FDA regulations (their factory has no separation between the tourists and the chocolate vats). But we were able to console ourselves with tastings, and with an interesting display of cacao pods and beans in the raw:

Dagoba (and it's pronounced da-GO-ba, from the Sanskrit word for "temple"—NOT to be confused with a certain swamp planet in a galaxy far, far away) has a fairly comprehensive line of chocolates, including various powdered cocoa products as well as confectionery bars. The bars are available for tasting, on two separate tables; I'll describe each individually.

The first table contains a selection of chocolate bars with different flavors, including several straight-up dark chocolates. We ended up buying the Conacado, a 73% chocolate from cacao sourced in the Dominican Republic. Rich, bittersweet and deep, it's a good choice for anyone familiar with the better-quality chocolates from Sarotti and Valrhona.

We also picked up a bar of Latte, a milk chocolate with ground coffee and cinnamon, Charlie's favorite combination ever since he discovered Mexican chocolate (which includes ground cinnamon). This one's creamy, with the warm spice of cinnamon and the faint bitterness of coffee, an excellent treat.

Another classic combination is their mint, dark chocolate with mint and a hint of rosemary. Rosemary? Yes, and the choice of this evergreen herb is wonderful with dark chocolate and the bright, wintery zing of mint. Even better to our palates was the Lavender: dark chocolate with lavender and blueberries. The flowery fragrance of lavender on top of the slightly tart blueberry undertaste makes this exotic and luscious. There were more chocolates to choose from, but we turned our attention to the other tasting table for something more subtle.

That subtlety: varietal chocolates, from Peru, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Madagascar. We especially liked the Madagascar, an intensely flavored dark chocolate (65%) with a strong mineral backbone (as they say in wine circles), earthy and robust with hints of citrus. We also came home with the Ecuador Arriba, a more flowery chocolate but still with the strong astringency that real dark-chocolate lovers crave. I was also fond of the Costa Rican Cru Trinitario (68% cocoa), with elements of golden raisins and hazelnuts in the finish.

But one of my favorite things about Dagoba chocolate is that they are 100% organic and fair-trade, which has two benefits. First: for those who have been disturbed by the growing outrage over the use of slave labor in the production of West African chocolate (page will open in new window), Dagoba's organic certification means that the cacao beans were grown and harvested without slave labor. Additionally, since slavery is still used in western Africa, Dagoba's use of Central and South American chocolates (plus some Madagascar beans) avoids the issue entirely.

And second: their organic methods really break into the new buzzword of "sustainability." The model of sustainability focuses on a type of agriculture which puts back nutrients into the soil, avoids pollution of water sources, and reduces the negative impact on the ecosystem in which the agriculture takes place. For Dagoba, this means that the cacao trees grow in their natural habitat (like shade-grown coffee), not in clearcut plantations. This means that the cacao farms retain the native plants used as nesting and food sources for migratory songbirds and other rain-forest animals. In short... this chocolate may be brown, but in its heart it's green.

Best of all is the story from Madagascar, one of the world's most fragile ecosystems. Biodiversity in and around the cacao farms is actually increasing, rather than decreasing, since Dagoba has started contracting for cacao pods from the Sambirano region. Given that 80% of Madagascar's species live nowhere else on earth, the news that sustainable cacao farming is restoring and preserving these subtropical forests is very encouraging.

But at the end of the day, intellectual arguments over fair trade and sustainability fade in comparison to Dagoba's real strength: the chocolate is just superb. Whether it's the unsweetened powdered cocoa (which we've been using in mochas now that the school year has resumed) or the exquisite bars of chocolate, Dagoba deserves the attention of serious chocolate lovers anywhere.

2007-08-24T11:08:00.000-07:00

As part of a feature I'm writing about day tours in the Oregon wine country, I had the great pleasure of visiting the Carlton Winemakers Studio yesterday. Part of that great pleasure is immediately apparent from this photo of the Studio from a nearby hillside:

I was intrigued by the idea of the Studio recently when I was seated next to its founder, Eric Hamacher, at a dinner for the Oregon Chardonnay Alliance. Eric had brought his own chardonnay, produced at the Studio under his own label, and we were much taken with it. (I'm working on a separate article on that dinner, and on Eric's intensely passionate take on chardonnay.)

The idea of the Winemakers Studio is fairly simple: Construct a location where small winemakers could share resources (space, fermentation vats, bottling facilities, the all-important forklift for carrying cases of wine to be shipped, etc.) and allow them to take their wines to the next level without the huge investment in property and equipment normally required. As a result, ten wineries participate in the Carlton Winemakers Studio to make wine in their own personal style. And best of all from the enophile's standpoint, they're all available in the same tasting room, with some inventive and creative ways of presenting them.

I arrived midafternoon on a warm August day, and was delighted to find a very modern, cool tasting room just in from a pleasant sheltered patio. How tasting works here: on any given day, the tasting room has a selection of wines from among the members' available vintages; their house wines (that is, wine produced under the Carlton Winemakers Studio label) are always complimentary, and there are modest tasting fees associated with the other offerings of the day.

The way to get the best results here is to go with one of the flights they offer. The principle is simple: take two or three wines of some similar characteristics, serve a small amount of each, and let the taster compare and contrast them. The flights vary, of course, from day to day depending on what's open; on my visit there was a flight of white and rose wines, another of "miscellaneous reds" (about which more later), and the one that caught my eye, pinot noirs. For $10 I was treated to a generous splash from each of three different pinots produced at the Studio: their house pinot ($18), made by Eric Hamacher for the Carlton Winemakers Studio label; a J. Daan ($22), described by the young woman who poured as her personal favorite; and a Boedecker ($28).

My take on the tasting is that the Studio's house wine is one of the most salmon-friendly pinots I've had recently, light enough not to overpower a grilled slab of Copper River sockeye but with enough complexity and range to be good with other white meats—it would have been just fine, for example, with the pan-roasted pork tenderloin with cipolline onions and fresh sage that I made for Father's Day this year (and considering that I splurged on an Argyle Nut House pinot for that dinner, this is quite a compliment for such a modestly priced Oregon pinot). I'd stop short of serving the Studio pinot with lamb, duck or goose, however, as it's just not deep enough for those flavors. But it's light, with fresh red fruit in the aroma and enough earthiness to keep it balanced.

The J. Daan was interesting. It had almost no aroma at all, just the barest hint of fruit, but it was the most powerful in the glass of the three I tasted. If you've reached the point in your wine-tasting experience that you understand it when the winemaker talks about a "strong mineral backbone," that's what this wine has in spades. If that's just wine-snob jargon to you, let me explain: if you've ever dug a hole, whether for a garden or to plant a tree or just because you were a kid and digging a hole was fun, you must remember the way freshly dug earth smelled, dark and cool but neither sweet nor sour. That's what "strong mineral backbone" means when it applies to wine: the sense that the vines have extracted this fresh, cool strength from the soil itself, like Antaeus getting his power from being in contact with the earth. The J. Daan layered elements of blackberry on top of this earthy substrate, making for a powerful and satisfying pinot that could stand up to much heartier fare than most pinots; I wouldn't hesitate to pair this with a mixed grill including beef and Italian sausage as well as pork or chicken, or even a mildly seasoned prime rib.

The Boedecker was closest to the style of wine I personally enjoy the most, with more power than the Carlton Winemakers Studio but more complexity than the J. Daan. A luscious bouquet hinting at black cherry, with a bit of the forest-floor earthiness that becomes transcendent in the best Oregon pinots, this one is a good all-rounder, though at $28 you're approaching the price of a reserve pinot that will have even more of everything. However, this is still a worthy taste, and as I sipped it I couldn't help but think of osso buco, the Milanese dish made by braising veal shanks in a sofrito (the Italian name for the "holy trinity" of savory vegetables: carrots, onion, and celeray) with wine, sage and fresh brown stock till the meat slides off the bones as you lift the shanks from the simmering liquid.

In the end, I left with a bottle of the Carlton Winemakers Studio pinot noir because Kim has been craving salmon lately and this really will be superb with salmon on the grill, especially since she broke down recently and did a test piece by marinating it in fresh blackberry juice before cooking over indirect heat. And I had to buy a Hamacher chardonnay (and yes, I promise to write up my conversation with Eric at the Chardonnay Alliance dinner before we head to Ashland next week).

And finally, as a shot in the dark, I bought a bottle of Boedecker rose. Kim and I are very fond of certain kinds of rose, but only certain kinds; as I put it recently, we like roses that are more like red wine served cold, rather than roses that are like white wines turned pink. One of my benchmark rose preferences is Randall Grahm's Vin Gris de Cigare, from Bonny Doon in Santa Cruz, California; made from a blend of southern French varietals (grenache, syrah, mourvedre, cinsault, etc.), this one is bone-dry and very, very subtle, but with the kind of balance and complexity that a good Cotes du Rhone brings, but light enough to chill and sip while watching the sun slip into the Pacific. The staff at Carlton Winemakers Studio concurred that of the various rose offerings they had, the Boedecker was the fullest-bodied and most like a red wine in complexity and dryness. It's still in the refrigerator now; I'll be sure to add tasting notes when we try it.

Got a favorite discovery in Oregon wine? Have a tip on a farmer's market or roadside produce stand with an emphasis on organic and sustainable treats? Let me know!

Fresh and Local—the confluence of great food and great chefs

2007-07-30T14:32:00.000-07:00

The American dining scene has been through a revolution in the past twenty-five years or so. It's a revolution of ingredients as well as technique, of content as well as style. The weapons have included the spade and digging fork as well as the chef's knife and whisk; the battlefield, an organically farmed garden or ideally situated vineyard as well as a Wolf range, a wood-fired stone oven, and a white linen tablecloth.

Fresh and Local is a celebration of what this revolution has brought us: a confluence of incredible skill with unparalleled ingredients, a fusion not only of the cuisines of different cultures, but of the disparate skills involved in growing and producing premiere ingredients on the one hand, and turning those ingredients into new, cutting-edge dining experiences on the other.

Soil. Climate. Passion. These are the holy trinity of great food. And at Fresh and Local, we'll explore what happens when you combine the commitment to producing the best ingredients with the obsession for turning out perfect new dishes.