Hard cider bottling of the Newton pippin cider that I pressed with Nat West last winter. Really good this year -- much better than last's. The dandelion wine is bottled on the left...

Ever since I bought a copy of Sandor Ellix Katz’s Wild Fermentation shortly after moving to Portland I’ve been a food fermentation freak.

I love everything about home food fermentation. I love the DIY aspect of crafting foods that I love such as sauerkraut, wine, and miso. I love the time and patience involved in creating these foods and drinks — most ferments I make take anywhere from a few days to a year. I love the full flavor of food ferments — from pungent and sour to salty and spicy to sweet and effervescent. I love that fermented foods and drinks are inherently good for me because of the live micro-nutrients they contain. I love that I’m carrying on food traditions born well before refrigeration, artificial preservatives, and pasteurization. The list goes on and on.

In January 2009, I got to travel to Nashville to meet one of my heroes — Sandor Ellix Katz — and interview him for The Sun Magazine. In October of 2009, we got him to come out for the inaugural Portland Fermentation Festival that David Barber, George Winborn and I organized and continue to organize every year. The date is still TBD for this year’s and I’ll let you know soon when/where it will be.

For now, I’ve got a bunch of home food and drink ferments that I’ve been checking on, bottling and eating up lately to share with you here. This weekend I started a sour cherry wine with fruit collected from a neighbor’s tree. I’ll post about that soon.

I’ve got two batches of miso going right now that I started in November — soybean miso and red bean miso. Here’s what they’re looking like now after several months of fermenting…

I scraped the salt off the top of this red bean miso and it's looking pretty and already tasting DELICIOUS. Going to be patient though and let it ferment until fall. At least.

The soybean miso is looking and tasting great too. Did the same and scraped off the salt and mold, repacked with a nice layer of sea salt, covered and put back in the utility room till fall.

Yes, you have to be very generous with the salt so you don't get too much mold.

This year's three gallons of Brooks plum wine has finished fermenting and is now bottled. It's so good. It's tart and off-dry and tastes like a perfect plum. The alcoholic kind.

These petals and more went into this year's gallon of dandelion wine. We bottled last year's and it's delicious as always, a little more flowery this year too which is nice.

If you’ve never done any home food/drink fermentation I recommend starting with saurkraut or kimchi. They’re both quick and easy ferments that pack a lot of flavor. I can’t recommend Sandor Ellix Katz’s book Wild Fermentation enough. I use it all the time. Happy fermenting! Let me know what you make.

It’s been two years since I started this blog as a sort of companion piece to my book Food Lover’s Guide to Portland. Since the beginning I’ve aimed to keep my posts short and sweet and informative for Portland food folks and visitors. I hope it’s been helpful.

This time last year I celebrated one year of blogging with a sort of year-in-review. It was a nice way to take stock so I’m doing it again for the two-year marker. Thanks for stopping by now and again. Thanks for chiming in now and again. Thanks to each and every one of you out there who celebrate our local food scene in Portland and beyond. Here are some blog highlights from the past year…

I started off February 2010 with our semi-annual Cincinnati chili feed. Can’t beat Gartner’s dogs, spicy Cincy chili and finely grated Tillamook cheddar…

Sometimes 3-ways are sloppy. Cincinnati chili 3-ways that is...

Portland International Film Festival followed shortly after. PIFF is my favorite local film fest and we always do PIFF + Pizza. Was going to giveaway some tickets here for this year’s now in its final week but unfortunately got too busy. Go to PIFF while you still can!

Cheese followed by egg...

I won an Excalibur Food Dehydrator and made my first batch of spicy beef jerky late March. It was amazing and I’ve made it many times since…

Thin sliced tri-tip ready to marinate and dry...

In May I had my first interview in The Sun Magazine with one of my favorite people — Sandor Ellix Katz…

I never thought this day would come...

Several weeks later I had a kick-ass book launch party for Food Lover’s Guide to Portland the day it came out — July 1st, 2010…

The best celebration I could have hoped for. So much fun.

At the end of summer my boyfriend and I went on a magical 10-day sailing trip around the San Juan Islands and I blogged about our DIY galley cooking in three installments…

We have a stainless grill too but most of what we cooked on the boat happened here.

In the fall we put together a filled-to-the-gills second annual Portland Fermentation Festival at Ecotrust…

Biwa's rocking kimchi with big chunks of daikon and lots of fire.

Late December I got to press hard cider with our friend Nat and he gave me a carboy of the stuff to take home and ferment myself…

Nat sorting through one of the last Newtown Pippin apple bins.

And just in time for the new year I made miso for the first time. In a month or so I’ll be checking on it…

After mashing the soybeans you mix that with the brined koji...

THANKS FOR ANOTHER GREAT YEAR!

Eat, drink and be hairy!

Nat sorting through one of the last Newtown Pippin apple bins.

In early December I got to help out a friend with the last cider press of the apple season. Our friend Nat West has been crafting his own cider and hard cider for a few years now from gleaned, traded and orchard picked local apples and this year was the biggest. He thinks his total apple haul this year clocks in at about 5,800 pounds, which translates to roughly 500 gallons of cider.

This year’s apples included a mix of Newtown Pippins, Lady, Jonagold, Kingston Black, Yarlington Mill, Brown’s Apple, Hereford Redstreak plus about 1,000 pounds of mixed varieties gleaned from various local spots. I helped out with the last of the Newtown Pippins — about 250-300 pounds.

The agreement was (and is with a lot of Nat’s friends) that in exchange for helping out for a shift of apple milling and pressing I’d get to take home a carboy of that day’s cider. I thought that sounded great and I was really happy to get to work with and learn more about Nat’s awesome set-up.

Basically, Nat mills his apples with a retrofitted garbage disposal and presses them with a hydraulic press in his garage. Apples are stored and rinsed in bins and buckets in the driveway and once the juice is pressed it’s kept in 55-gallon drums in the basement during fermentation and then stored largely in kegs. Nat lets his cider go anywhere from six to eight months.

Nat doesn’t sell his cider he just drinks it and trades with it. Really good stuff. Here are some photos…

Nat rinsing the apples before I put them through the apple mill aka retrofitted garbage disposal in the garage.

I filled bucket after bucket with apple pumace shown here. It oxidizes pretty quickly while in queue for the press.

Nat's awesome hydraulic cider press.

Hard cider fermenting in the basement in 55-gallon food grade barrel.

Most of Nat's cider goes directly into kegs but he bottles some for friends.

Read about my cherry wine here.

Ready about my plum wine here.

Read about my dandelion wine here.

Strike a pose. Mustard Seed Farms.

Portland has great food cooperatives and on Sunday, June 6th all three of them are joining forces for a day-long local farm tour — Alberta Cooperative Grocery, Food Front Cooperative Grocery, and People’s Food Co-op.

Tickets are $25 for adults, $15 for youth below 14 years old, and low income tickets are available. Ticket price includes: lunch, wine tasting admission, bus transportation, entrance into raffles, drinks and snacks. To register, contact your nearest co-op for details.

From the press release:

3 CO-OPS, 2 FARMS, 1 CIDERWORKS

On June 6th, the three Portland food co-ops will be joining together to offer a day long farm tour. Community members from Alberta Co-op, Food Front Co-op, and People’s Co-op will spend a relaxing day together in the rural farmlands of Oregon visiting two farms and a ciderworks.

Sunbow Farm

The farm tour will began with a visit to Sunbow Farm in Corvallis to meet “the father of organic farming”, Harry McCormack. MacCormack established Sunbow Farm in 1972 to be an organic market garden. The farm is now home to six greenhouses, several barns, a bath house, and the Institute of BioWisdom, an education center focused on building hands-on organic farming and life skills.

For lunch, Wandering Aengus Ciderworks will host the tour for a seasonal local meal and cider tasting on their 280 acres of land. Just outside Salem, Wandering Aengus grows organic apples that are crafted into cider using a low intervention technique that showcases the delicious taste of their heirloom apples. With Willamette Valley Cheese Company just across the road, tourers can also expect to be treated to a little cheese with their cider.

Wandering Aengus Ciderworks

The final stop will be at Mustard Seed Farms in St. Paul, where Farmer Brown and his wife Nancy will show off their diversified vegetable farm that supplies all three co-ops with beautiful, year-round nutrition. Known for their fall pumpkins, Mustard Seed Farms grows a large variety of organic produce, from lettuce in the spring to over-wintering cauliflower. By working with local communities and organizations, farmers David and Nancy Brown have been able to maintain what may seem impossible…a small working family farm.

About the Cooperatives:

All three co-ops are community-owned grocery stores focused on providing customers with high-quality organic local food. Alberta Cooperative Grocery at the intersection of 15th Ave. and Alberta St. was founded in 2001 and serves as a community resource and gathering place, while providing fresh, high-quality, affordable food to the diverse members of North and Northeast Portland.

People’s Food Co-op, located on SE 21st between Division and Powell, has been thriving since 1970 and will celebrate its 40th birthday this year. From cob walls to living rooftops, a weekly farmers market to relationships with over 50 farmers and producers, they are dedicated to nourishing the Portland community.

Food Front Co-op was founded in 1972 in NW Portland. It opened its second store in the Hillsdale neighborhood in 2008. Food Front treasures the relationships they’ve built with local farmers and food producers who provide them with the freshest and the finest.

Sunday, June 6th
All day local farm tour hosted by PDX food cooperatives
***Tickets are $25 for adults, $15 for youth below 14 years old, and low income tickets are available. Ticket price includes: lunch, wine tasting admission, bus transportation, entrance into raffles, drinks and snacks. To register, contact your nearest co-op for details.***
 

At 7pm on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 a book was born. It’s got some baby fat (10,000 words longer than contractually agreed) and it needs help with, well, everything but I did it and I feel great. To celebrate on Tuesday I went to EaT Oyster Bar with friends.

I’d heard that every Tuesday night EaT offers one or more types of raw oysters at $1 a piece but I hadn’t been by for that although I’ve been to EaT a fair few times. I started with a sazerac and six oysters on the half shell — petites from Oregon and Washington. 18 delicious raw oysters and a couple glasses of muscadet later I was on top of the world.

Yesterday I slept in and after I had a cup of strong coffee in my not-typing hands I stepped outside to see what was going on in the garden. The past couple weeks I only watered a couple times since my focus was elsewhere. Lucky for me we’ve had some heavy rain recently so rather than meeting a bunch of withered and neglected plants I got this…

My garden loves me

And if that’s not good enough last night my boyfriend came home with a 5-gallon carboy of freshly pressed cider, a bottle of homemade hard cider and a bottle of fresh apple juice all from a fellow who’s a client at my boyfriend’s tattoo shop. We talked with this man at the Portland Fermentation Festival and it turns out he has a pretty awesome home set up for juicing apples that involves a big stainless sink and a garbage disposal just for that purpose. Anyway he just got done with his fall pressing and generously gifted us 5 gallons of the sweet, golden stuff to ferment into hard cider. All he asks is that we save him a bottle or two of the bubbly in the spring. What a guy. We cracked open the hard cider last night and the celebration continued.

Up next on the blog — DIY cheese in Portland…

EaT Oyster Bar
3808 N Williams
503.281.1222
www.eatoysterbar.com