Jakob's Bowl

How Can You Argue With Fresh "Fresh"?

Now, I am on record in stating that the Portland Farmers’ Market is the best on the West Coast, if not in the country. Even with the vagaries of the weather from year to year, it seems as if there has always been much to discover and enjoy on each of my bi-weekly visits from May to October; it rarely disappoints. This Saturday was different. Strawberries, pork, heirloom lettuce, spring shallots and carrots topped my list this week, but as I strolled around the market watching farmers neatly pile their vegetables and cheese makers cut their samples, an unexpected sign in a familiar booth caught my eye and my interest. It was actually four signs at the Pine Mountain Ranch booth announcing a new offering at an introductory price - pasture-raised chickens for $3.99 per pound. It was the hand-written sign with the added word "fresh" that piqued my interest though.

Small Grapes: "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of oak."

heirloom grapesI seem to recall being a charter member of the ABC club - Anything But Chardonnay - back in the 1980s when oak, vanilla, and butterscotch were all the rage. My palate was obviously silly and uneducated in presuming that wine should be about the flavor of grapes and not the flavor of barrels. But, then again, Chardonnay was king. If you wanted to enjoy good California white wine that wasn’t oaked back then, the choices were limited. Then in the 1990s, they took a thoroughly enjoyable, easy-drinking red grape, Zinfandel, and tried oaking it into Cabernet. But then again, Cabernet was king - although at the time, Merlot was giving it a run for its money.

In the days before the Internet, if you were able to find alternatives to the "important" grapes from Europe and California, it was often impossible to get any good information - the wine reviewers didn’t expend a lot of space on grapes far off the well worn wine trails that wound through Napa, Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Rhone, the Piedmont, Tuscany and the Rioja. To add insult to injury, there were a significant number of instances in Spain and Italy of vintners ripping out vineyards of locally prominent grapes to plant Chardonnay, Cabernet, Merlot and Syrah in order to take advantage of rising global demand.

Being a natural born contrarian, seven or so years ago I began seeking what I would eventually refer to as “small grapes,” - grapes that were no longer widely planted, if they ever had been, but were of historical significance in specific locals in France, Spain, Italy, and Greece. Grapes that were being kept alive, or brought back from near extinction, by grape growers and vintners who understood their historical significance, and more importantly, how to make quality wines from them that truly showcased their strengths - names like Greco di Tufo, Sagratino, Charbonneau, Alicante Bouché. You might think that this excludes the New World from consideration, but many of these small grapes were brought to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and Africa and were never widely planted either because of viticultural difficulties or prevailing tastes in the region. I hope to share some of these delightful wines with you over the weeks, months, and years to come.

Hanger Hell

As an addendum to my post of April 25th, Hanger Heaven, I’ve been noticing hanger steak appearing on more and more restaurant menus here in Seattle, as well as in Portland and San Francisco, and this causes me to shudder. On my last visit to Portland, I had a long discussion about the hanger steak with one of the butchers at Chop and she raised a concern about its newfound restaurant popularity. A few years ago here in Seattle it was hard to find, very much a “special order.” Now I can readily find it here, but the price has been rising - what was once $4 to $5 per pound is now $8 to $9 per pound. My nightmare scenario alternates between the butchers selling all the hanger steaks to restaurants and the butchers taking advantage of the demand by increasing the price to $10 to $12 per pound!!! Please, buy some skirt steak instead!

Heritage Hall of Fame: Ayrshire Dairy Cows

When I was growing up the milkman still delivered in glass jars and the color of butter depended on the season of the year. Times have changed though, and Big Ag has taken over the dairy game. The number of dairy farms and the total number of dairy cows decrease every year, but the volume of milk produced continues to rise - true industrial efficiency. The driving factor here is Big Ag’s most efficient dairy machine, the Holstein cow. If you buy milk in a supermarket today, odds are it’s from a Holstein since this breed now represents 93% of the total herd in this country. The other “significant” dairy breeds in this country over the last century, Jersey, Guernsey, Ayrshire, Brown Swiss and Shorthorn, have all seriously declined in numbers in the last 50 years.

The whole milk that is sold these days has been standardized at a minimum fat content, 3.25%, but this is a point of purchase standard, not a point of milking standard, and all milk is not created equal. When the focus shifted to the volume of milk produced by a cow, the quantity and quality of butterfat and protein in the milk became secondary concerns, if they were concerns at all. Believe it or not at one time milk was a very local product in most parts of this country, and many people bought a particular farmer’s milk based on its taste.

Spring Obsession

I am a firm believer that garlic is one of God’s greatest inventions, and while I’ve used the young shoots referred to as “green garlic” for years, my epiphany over them has only occurred recently. If you are not familiar with green garlic, it resembles a spring onion and represents the stage of the garlic plant prior to the bulb forming and the cloves differentiating. The bright, sweet aroma stunned me as I chopped my first stalk about a month ago, and I have been incorporating them in my cooking as often as I possibly can ever since – especially in simple pasta dishes like tonight’s strozzapreti with anchovy, green garlic, and red cabbage raab. The flavor is sweeter and milder than cloves of mature garlic, and it does not possess the characteristic raw garlic bite. Here in Seattle I think we just have a few weeks left for this spring treat.

Local Yokels

Big Ag has a voracious appetite, for government subsidies, for land, for industrial pesticides and fertilizers, and for GMO research, so should we be surprised that it has an equally voracious appetite for words?  First there was the attempt to swallow and transform the word “organic” to suit its needs, then the word “natural,” and now, as Kim Severson’s, When 'Local' Makes It Big indicates in today’s NYT, the word “local.” All of these machinations on the logos remind me of a novel, in part about the control of words, published 60 years ago:

"How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."
      "Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."

1984, George Orwell