Savory Season
Fresh from the ski slopes on Mount Hood, I curled around a cup of cocoa and settled in a window seat with my husband. A flurry obscured the view, so we focused on a game of “fantasy menu” instead. If you could have anything to eat right now, what would it be?
“Venison stroganoff,” said Tim, shaking ice crystals from his hat. “With puréed nutmeg squash, crusty bread and a good merlot.”
My dream dish was less Bon Appetit. “Chili,” I replied, remembering a gratifying batch I once tasted made with Oregon buffalo.
In a sense, we wanted the same thing: soul-satisfying, winter-worthy comfort food. Things like thick cuts of lamb seared crisp on the outside and rosy in the middle. Sizzling crab cakes. Pan-fried trout. Wild mushrooms served with anything. And how about some hazelnut torte?
As we whetted our appetites, the sky suddenly pulled its curtain to reveal a panoramic view of the state — or at least its peaks and the suggestion of remote plains and valleys.
Later, I realized our game couldn’t have been more apt. From our lofty vantage, we overlooked a state almost obscenely blessed with culinary treasures. Thanks to varied landscapes of ocean, forest, river and range, Oregon offers an unrivaled bounty of signature delectables, and word is out. The state’s native bounty has transformed what was once considered a dining backwater into a mecca for ambitious, adventurous chefs who demand high-quality, locally grown ingredients year ‘round.
“Riches on All Sides”
“It’s just heaven,” says Stephanie Pearl Kimmel, executive chef-owner of Eugene’s Marché restaurant. Kimmel and her bistro enjoy a central location in the Willamette Valley, legendary for its cultivated crops.
“There are riches on all sides of us,” says Kimmel, citing all manner of vegetables, berries, poultry and meat. “That’s our first focus: what’s right here, right now.”
But if there’s one iconic food that speaks for the region, especially in the off-season when tastes run to substantial, rich flavors, it’s got to be hazelnuts (also called filberts). Ninety-nine percent of the nation’s supply is grown in these parts, and some of the finest star at Marché.
“It’s our nut,” says Kimmel affectionately, citing the filbert’s “buttery, caramel-y” quality and winning texture.
Kimmel uses hazelnuts liberally in first courses, where she pairs them with complementary native treats. Marché diners can’t get enough of her salad made with Oregon pears, Oregon blue cheese and hazelnuts. In 2003, Kimmel showed off the creamy nut at the James Beard House in New York, where she paired them yet again with Oregon blue cheese, this time on pizzetta.
In the comfort food category, I’ll put my money on Kimmel’s butternut squash soup, a creamy concoction topped with — yes! — toasted hazelnuts. Afterward, there’s always something sweet and nutty like Butterscotch Pot de Crème with Hazelnut Tuile, a pudding for grownups.
But Oregon’s signature foods don’t all grow on trees. On the coast, nutcrackers are used to release the flesh of Dungeness crabs, perhaps the most prized of Oregon’s coastal treasures. At the Stephanie Inn in Cannon Beach, chef John Newman celebrates the prodigiously clawed crustacean in canapés and subtle soups that allow its delicate flavors to star.
“What’s so great about Dungeness is that you don’t have to do a lot to it. It’s got a natural sweetness to it, with a hint of salt,” rhapsodizes Newman. “You don’t have to — you don’t want to — mess with it.”
Newman shows off the crab’s natural charms in his distinctive crab cakes, a signature dish at the Stephanie Inn. Bound with a purée of shellfish instead of the usual breadcrumbs, the cakes are crispy, light, and crab-centric.
In the off-season, after a day of beachcombing around Haystack Rock, Newman’s cakes are a warm and savory taste of the sea. Midwinter visitors to the Oregon coast enjoy the peak of not only crab harvest, but oyster season, too.
Of course, with so many regional delights to be had, wise chefs don’t limit themselves to a corner of Oregon. Rather, Newman and his peers use choice ingredients from around the state to show off their local specialties. In central Oregon — a high desert landscape where anglers come to wade the icy Deschutes River — tastes run to steelhead. At the Trout House in Sunriver, a resort community near Bend, executive chef Jonathan McMahan delivers the goods in characteristically pan-regional fashion. When snow covers the ground and comfort food is at a premium, a popular Trout House special is steelhead stuffed with Dungeness crab, encrusted with toasted hazelnuts and baked.
“That, to me, sums up the ultimate Oregon winter dish,” says McMahan.
In the northeastern town of Pendleton, home to the famous Pendleton Roundup and the heart of cattle country, one might assume that the region’s poster food is beef. And while steak holds an almost sacred place on tables in these parts, there’s competition
for the title from a little, native fruit: the huckleberry. Native Americans in the area have gathered the tiny, deep-blue berries since long before cows arrived, and locals still prize the wild fruit.
“They’re so good, everyone should taste them,” says Rob Hoffman, chef of Raphael’s restaurant. “Huckleberries are really sweet and tart, with a taste similar to blueberries, only more intense.”
Hoffman and his wife, Raphael, spread the huckleberry gospel in a gracious, converted mansion originally owned by a Roundup founder. Entrees, desserts and spirits made with huckleberries appear on Raphael’s menu all year. In winter, Raphael’s caters to the hearty appetites of hunters with venison, elk and salmon — all prepared with fresh-frozen huckleberries. And for dessert?
“Huckleberry crème brulée,” says Hoffman, who goes through 200-300 gallons of huckleberries a year. “It’s far and away our favorite dessert.”
In the state’s opposite corner, temperate climes encourage a cuisine built around growing things. “It’s the Climate,” crows a banner in one of the region’s small towns, and it’s especially true for food. World-famous apples and pears thrive here in the ample summer sunshine, and the area’s undulating river valleys produce an astonishing variety of other produce throughout the year.
Given such abundance, executive co-chefs Stu Stein and Mary Hinds of the Peerless Restaurant in Ashland can’t settle on a signature food. Instead, it’s whatever’s fresh and available at the moment.
In winter, that means premium root vegetables and winter greens delivered straight to the restaurant, says Stein, author of “The Sustainable Kitchen,” a cookbook devoted to the use of fresh, local organic foods. If that sounds austere, it isn’t. A typical meal at the Peerless might begin with silky, chilled carrot soup topped with ginger crème fraiche, move on to rutabaga and celery-root gnocchi with poached Pacific oysters and climax with an entrée of roasted Oregon rabbit and culminate with lavender-scented flan floating in a sweet rhubarb soup. Together, it’s the essence of Oregon on a plate: a symphony of earthy, concentrated flavors served at their prime.
If southern Oregon can’t be defined by a single food, the same is even truer of Portland because there’s so much to choose from. It’s all about location, location, location.
“We’ve got the Willamette Valley 30 minutes away, farms within easy reach, Hood River for stone fruits, and the coast is a stone’s throw,” enthuses Vitaly Paley, executive chef and co-owner of Paley’s Place. “It’s all here.”
Thanks to Paley and an elite fraternity of like-minded Portland chefs, Oregon has become the darling of food critics and savvy diners nationwide. It all comes down to ingredients: organic meat from Painted Hills Natural Beef, winter lettuce picked and served the same day, wild mushrooms and truffles, late season heirloom tomatoes. If Oregon grows it, Paley wants it and can get it fresh.
As for a dish that exemplifies the taste of Oregon, it would have to be Paley’s grass-fed lamb, infused with and roasted over a bed of hay. Cooked with sprigs of dried lavender from the chef’s own kitchen garden, it’s toothsome and tender.
“You can eat it with a spoon. The flavors are a little gamey and butterscotchy, with the same vanilla nose you get in wine,” says Paley.
If only James Beard could be here now.