Taste of Grace

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Chef Jack Czarnecki is in a good mood. Make that a great mood. It's 8 o'clock on a sunlit February morning, and the mushroom hunter is rocketing through the hamlets and emerald fields of Yamhill County, intent on today’s prey. In minutes, we’ll be hunting black truffles, and the chef can hardly wait.

Why all the fuss? Aren’t the best truffles unearthed by pigs in Italy and France?

Czarnecki laughs like a miner in possession of a secret mother lode.

“Wait until you smell a few of them in the bucket, then you’ll understand the passion; why people’s nostrils flare when they even talk about these truffles,” says Czarnecki, who won the James Beard award for A Cook’s Book of Mushrooms.

As far as he’s concerned, Oregon black truffles are “absolutely superior” to their Gallic counterparts, redolent with an “almost pineappley, earthy guava character.”

Five hours later, after rooting around dozens of towering Douglas firs, four of us have gathered barely enough of the velvety fungi to cover the bottom of a plastic milk jug. In another six hours, guests of the Joel Palmer House, Czarnecki’s restaurant in Dayton, will enjoy the first fragrant taste of the forest’s most elusive delicacy.

For a growing fraternity of chefs, growers and artisan food makers across the state, today’s harvest is a perfect illustration of what makes Oregon the culinary promised land—and the darling of food critics and discriminating travelers.

“The most plentiful and downright astounding bounty of local foods, grown in close proximity to some of the finest wines in the world—it’s all here,” Czarnecki says of the wide-ranging array of native foods, from berries to hazelnuts to salmon. “There’s no place where you can pull so many different elements and get them so quickly from the earth to the plate.”

But plenty and proximity are only two parts of Oregon’s culinary mystique. What about preparation? Can Oregon or even the Northwest claim a regional cuisine?

“Absolutely not,” answers Czarnecki, batting the question aside. It’s not just that this question is so common, says the chef; rather, it’s beside the point. If there’s a theme to cuisine in these parts, it’s faith in the region’s outstanding ingredients. The robust quality of local products demands center stage, and wise chefs direct the spotlight.

“The flavors of the earth simply offer themselves up to the chef for his use,” Czarnecki says. One taste of his wild mushroom soup tells the story: Saturated with the essence of porcini mushrooms, the creamy dish is a testament to the fungi’s innate and musky charms.

“The food here is so good that chefs in the know let it speak for itself,” says Portland resident Janie Hibler, a devotee of local foods and cooking lore who considers simplicity the region’s culinary signature. “It’s the opposite of New Orleans cooking.”

“If I had to use one word to describe cuisine here, it would be natural,” says Czarnecki.

That’s not to say that sauces and artful combinations of spice don’t appear on tables from Portland to Pendleton. Indeed, the lack of a singular culinary tradition in the presence of such gustatory splendor allows cooks here full creative license. Blessed with one of the world’s most prodigious larders, the adventurous—professional and amateur alike — cook with abandon. Chalk it up to independent Western spirit. In a state settled by people willing to trek thousands of miles by wagon and on foot, is it any wonder folks take a can-do approach to cuisine?

“Not so long ago, everyone in Oregon had a vegetable garden,” Hibler says, adding that self-sufficiency was the rule. Hibler, who wrote Dungeness Crabs and Blackberry Cobbler: The Northwest Heritage Cookbook, celebrates the fertile marriage of native foods and ethnic influences that underlie the region’s contemporary cooking — along with the maverick tradition they engendered.

Removed in miles and mentality from Old World rules and Eastern formalities, Oregon honors a democratic standard for food: If it tastes good, it is good. James Beard, Portland’s favorite son and the recognized Father of American Cookery, would have approved.

“The clientele here demand that you keep everything honest. They’re not into chi-chi. They’re a little uncomfortable with white tablecloths, but they’ll tolerate it if what’s on the plate is good. They’re no-nonsense,” says Czarnecki. “And that’s great, because it dovetails very nicely with our ideas of what food should be: basically something that ends up in the mouth.”

Travelers eager to get a taste of Oregon now are in luck. There’s no better time to sample the state’s bounty than autumn and thereafter, when much of Oregon’s legendary fruit and produce, seafood, game and wild foods are at their peak.

Fall harvest yields many of the state’s most abundant crops, from blackberries to pears, apples, tomatoes and corn. For travelers, one of the best ways to enjoy it all is to wander the valley farm roads, stopping here and there to taste the bounty at roadside stands. Succulent tree fruits grow around Hood River in the northern part of the state and throughout Jackson County in the south; no road trip is complete without a stop to sample and perhaps send a box home.

And then there are hazelnuts, also known as filberts. Ninety-nine percent of the American supply is grown within Oregon’s borders, mainly in the Willamette Valley. The glossy round nuts are frequently paired with aged cheese over wild greens—or simply eaten out of hand.

“In the fall, I go to a farm and buy hazelnuts,” says Hibler. “Then there are the squashes. There must be a zillion of them. I also love the mushrooms; chanterelles are especially good.”

The orange, blossom-like chanterelles proliferate in the fall throughout the wet, western third of the state, much to the delight of mushroom hunters such as Czarnecki.

Harvest time also means grape season, an exciting period in the thriving vineyards and wineries, many of which welcome visitors up through the October crush and on into winter. Thanksgiving is an especially popular time to visit wineries, when many of the operations generally closed to the public open their doors for the long weekend.

Cranberries are another autumn crop, harvested from bogs near the southern coastal town of Bandon, which hosts a festival in honor of the scarlet berry each September. A trip to the Oregon Coast also affords travelers the chance to revel in the ocean’s bounty, from oysters and clams to the legendary Dungeness crab.

Last, but not least, there is salmon—arguably Oregon’s most definitive food: staple of the region’s first people and still prized today.

Paired with a glass of the region’s Pinot noir, you could call it the taste of Oregon.