Farm-to-Cone: Blissing Out at Portland's Salt & Straw

It's our last evening in Oregon after two weeks of happy exploration that have taken us from river gorge to organic farmland to foggy coast and finally to Portland itself. We discover a city that has become a hopping food and wine (and beer) destination. We've just dined well for the second time at PaaDee, a hip yet cosy neighborhood Thai restaurant; we're getting ready to head back to our hotel to pack up for the return journey to L.A. the next morning.

"Let's just drive around a little," my husband Jeff suggests. "We really haven't seen much of Portland." We head toward a cool, artsy neighborhood he's read about, zigging and zagging down tree-lined streets with craftsman-style homes that make me want to move here permanently. A long line of people snakes down one side of Alberta Street. It's not a movie screening--just a lot of families making a beeline for what's become one of the most talked-about ice cream shops in Portland--Salt & Straw.

The wait is about a half hour, but we decide it'll be fun. We need something sweet to offset the salty, sour, spicy noodles we devoured at PaaDee.

I hobnob with the family in front of me. They include an excited 3-year-old boy whose father is twirling him upside down to keep him entertained. When his head accidentally bumps the pavement with a resounding thud, his parents comfort the child with descriptions of the delightful treat ahead. Walking distance from their house, Salt & Straw is the family's ice cream go-to destination, not just in summer but year-round. The flavors change seasonally, with all things berry popular in mid-July. This is the start of the berry season in Portland, with farmers market stands sporting colorful flats of raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, plus local berries seldom found elsewhere. Among these is the famed marionberry, a hybrid blackberry developed at Oregon State University in the 1940's and extremely prolific and popular in Portland and surrounding Willamette Valley.

The little boy, whose tears have miraculously vanished, has his heart set on the Strawberry with Lime Cilantro Cheesecake. "All the flavors are great here," his mom says--with the possible exception of the turkey ice cream that showed up last fall in time for Thanksgiving.

When we finally arrive at the front of the line, a young woman offers us tastes of as many flavors as we want. I try some of the top-sellers, including Goat Cheese Marionberry Habanero, Birthday Cakes & Blackberries, and Cucumber & Raspberry Sorbet. Somehow, I manage to skip Black Raspberries & Smoked Ham. Some popular non-berry flavors include Sea Salt with Caramel Ribbon, Chocolate with Gooey Brownies, and Pear with Blue Cheese. Just the names make my mouth water!

I settle for the vanilla (actual name: Double Fold Singing Dog Vanilla) and the raspberry sorbet. Jeff goes for a fresh waffle cone filled with Birthday Cakes & Blackberries and Sea Salt with Caramel. Unusual--and delicious! We both leave with satisfied smiles on our faces.  Not a bad way to end a vacation!

Just a word on Salt & Straw: Started almost exactly two years ago by two cousins, its website bills it as "Portland's farm-to-cone ice cream shop." The ice cream is made in small batches using "the best sustainable and organic ingredients Oregon has to offer," along with some ingredients sourced from "handpicked" farms and producers around the world, the site states. The Alberta store's interior is fairly retro, with reclaimed-wood shelves, vintage ice cream scoops and other goo-gas that date back to another era. Yet the flavor mixes have a definite 21st Century tease-your-tastebuds edge. 

For the moment, there are just three shops in Portland, but the word is out: Salt & Straw is coming to Los Angeles' Larchmont Village next month--and already has an ice cream truck roaming Southland roads. According to L.A. Times Daily Dish, the new store will feature California flavors and ingredients, like Stumptown coffee, olive oil and goat cheese. Sounds ok to me--just no turkey ice cream, please--unless you call it something else!

Vanilla Bean Brown Butter Ice Cream

Sticky Toffee Pudding, Vanilla Bean Brown Butter Ice Cream & Toffee Sauce 

I recently attended  Nicole Weston's informative class on food blogging at the New School of Cooking in Culver City. You can read about it elsewhere on my blog. Here's a recipe for Vanilla Bean Brown Butter Ice Cream that Weston shared with us but hasn't yet posted on her popular Baking Bites blog. It will be in her new ice cream cookbook, due out next year. Meanwhile, here's an advance look, with additional notes on making brown butter from the recipe for Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies in her 2009 cookbook, The Baking Bites. Brown butter seems to be one of Weston's favorite ingredients. From the rich and sensuous taste of this ice cream, I can see why!

Vanilla Bean Brown Butter Ice Cream

1/3 cup butter

2/3 cup sugar

1 cup milk

Seeds scraped from split vanilla bean

2 cups heavy cream

Melt the butter in a saucepan over low-medium heat until butter has turned an amber color and smells toasty but not burnt. (The butter turns brown after 4 or 5 minutes, Weston said.) Add sugar and milk and stir for a minute or two until the sugar dissolves.

Remove the pan from the heat. Split the vanilla bean lengthwise and scrape seeds out using the back of a knife. Add the beans to the milk, sugar and butter mixture. Stir to incorporate. Then stir in the cream.

Put the mixture into the refrigerator to chill completely--for about 6 hours or so. Remove it from the refrigerator and stir. Pour into an ice cream maker and churn according to the manufacturer's directions.

We enjoyed the ice cream with Weston's Sticky Toffee Pudding, a recipe you can find at her Baking Bites website. For those of us without an ice cream maker, Weston said it's definitely worth the investment for ice cream lovers. She has an excellent discussion on how to choose one at her blog.

Tips for Food Bloggers (or Wannabes) from a Master

It seems that everyone's a food blogger these days. But when Nicole Weston started hers in 2004, she had only come across a handful of other food blogs and just thought of it as a hobby, never dreaming it would become a full-time profession.

"My intention was to motivate myself to bake more," she told a class of would-be and novice food bloggers at the New School of Cooking in Culver City recently. "I really liked baking and thought this is a chance to enter into a community and to do a little bit more of what I liked to do and meet some other like-minded people."

Weston's little writing enterprise--at the time called Bakingsheet--morphed into the wildly popular blog Baking Bites, which also has a prominent Facebook presence. Named as one of the top 50 food blogs in the world by the London Times, the blog gets more than a million views a month and tops 2 million during the holidays. It's easy to see why, what with a large repertoire of imaginative and delicious recipes (like the Sticky Toffee Pudding she baked for our class and served with her signature Vanilla Bean Brown Butter Ice Cream and toffee sauce). The site also offers ingredient, gadget and product reviews (example: Candy Corn Oreos); baking tips and how-to's; comments and links to some favorite recipes from other blogs; and useful social media highlighting her own take on food.

Add to that this accomplishment a cookbook--The Baking Bites Cookbook--and you have to wonder how this woman looks so relaxed when she clearly works like a fiend! Could it be that in addition to her cooking and writing life, she's an avid horsewoman and partakes in the competitive equestrian sport of dressage? Obviously, that's the secret of burning off a few of those baking bites!

And what's Weston's advice on how to create a successful food blog?  Here are some points she made:

1. Content is key.  "For me, bar none, it is the writing that is the most important thing. You need to make it clear to the reader why they should come back." Her main concern when she posts a recipe is, "Is it simple enough to make?" Her favorite response from readers is that they made the recipe and it came out perfectly. Her second favorite? They changed everything, and it still turned out great!

2. Good photos are a big plus. Excellent pictures will help entice people to check out your site, but without consistent, useful and interesting content, photos alone probably won't hold readers. You don't need a big expensive camera; your iPhone or a point-and-shoot can work.

3. Find your voice. Whatever your interest--whether family recipes, restaurant reviews, road food, home cooking, or, as in my case, a mix--putting your personal stamp on the blog is crucial. The writing and focus will likely change with time, growing more defined as you find your way.

4. Post regularly. Your readers need to know they can to find new and interesting content on your site and when to expect it. Weston recommends posting at least two or three times a week. She writes daily, usually in the early morning, baking and taking pictures of the goodies in the late morning and early afternoon. As for what to post, Weston finds it helpful to have a list of stories, subject to change based on reader feedback and her own inclinations.

5. Use social media. Without it, it's hard to get the word out about your blog and to get the feedback that helps you build it up. Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are the most important; Weston's website has links to all of these, as well as to YouTube. As part of this effort, check out and learn from other people's blogs, post comments, and seek connections with other food blogger interest groups.

6. Look for what's trending. If everyone's writing about Cronuts or bacon cupcakes, then jumping on the bandwagon with your own version might just draw more attention to your blog. Tying into holidays, seasonal ingredients and celebrations in a creative way is another avenue to readers. Not surprisingly, Halloween themes are front and center at her blog right now, with plenty of pumpkins, apples, and a particular favorite, vampires! Check out the recipe for her Vampire Cookies, pale white cookies with a bright red jam filling.

7. Just do it. "Even if it's not perfect, push that publish button," Weston advised. Sticking with it and paying attention to the consistency and quality of your blog will eventually bring visitors. "Don't be discouraged. Keep putting out that quality content. Keep making it better. Keep educating yourself and share that information with your readers and you're going to build an audience."

At a million page views and counting, I'll take your word for that, Nicole!

Weston making Guava Cream Cheese Bacon Puffs, New School of Cooking 

Listen to a sound clip from my brief interview with Nicole Weston:

Huckleberries: Summer's Last Hurrah!

Roadside stand near Hungry Horse, Montana. Cherries and huckleberries
are both big in the state, but the hucks get all the attention.

Huckleberry season was almost over when we visited the little town of Hungry Horse, Montana, not far from the western entrance to Glacier National Park. But you could hardly tell from the huckleberry madness that seemed to have overtaken the town and was still going strong in early September. 

During the summer, when the berries are at their height, a sort of frenzy for this wild-grown fruit seems to infect tourist-crowded towns in parts of Washington, Idaho and Montana, with gift shops, restaurants, roadside stands, farmer's markets and even drugstores and gas station counters hawking huckleberry merchandise of all sorts.

There are the expected items, like jams, jellies, syrups, preserves and pies. But there's also huckleberry licorice, lollipops, lip gloss, ice cream, shakes, toppings, wines and ales. There's even a Huckleberry vodka called 44º North Mountain Huckleberry Vodka and a huckleberry fudge (at The Huckleberry Patch in Hungry Horse, you can have it shipped to you in the shape of the state). There's huckleberry hot chocolate, coffee, tea and lemonade. Also huckleberry shampoo, soap, candles, body butter and a goat's milk body lotion in a lovely lavender hue.

What's so special about huckleberries? "It's probably because you can't get them anywhere else," says Huckleberry Patch manager Laurie Carpy. And perhaps it's the possibility of competing with ravenous bears for the treats--they're a particular favorite of grizzlies. Of course, you can always play it safe and stop at a huge shop bursting with huckleberry products and a decidedly purple decor--or, off season, order some online.

Patty Dunning shows off the last pie of the day at The Huckleberry Patch.

Originally opened in 1949 by a legendary character called James Willows (Huckleberry Jim to the locals), the store cafe's huckleberry pie is a major draw. In summer, Carpy said, they make 60 pies a day and still can't keep them in stock. We got the last slice the day we visited, which we carted home to our little KOA cabin and devoured with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I ordered a jar of huckleberry filling, which Carpy claimed was a close replica of the cafe's own. Shipping home some fresh or frozen berries didn't seem practical.

For those who haven't encountered the famed berry (outside of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn), they look quite a bit like blueberries, but tend to be more reddish and taste somewhat different--a mixture of tart and sweet--"like a blueberry, cranberry and raspberry mixed together," one sign said. "It'll make you feel like a wild grizzly."

Sign on the side of the HuckleberryLand Shop

Grown wild mostly in northeastern U.S. and Canada--particularly Washington, Idaho and Montana--they're usually handpicked in mid- to late summer, though a young man at a small farmer's market in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, told us some hardy folks continue to gather them "until the first snow flies." "The later it gets, the higher you have to climb to get 'em," he said. His favorite sight is a bush "just black with berries." And no wonder! He was selling gallon bags of fresh huckleberries--weighing about 4 1/2 pounds--for $35 apiece. Elsewhere, he said, the berries, fresh or frozen, can fetch upwards of $80 to $100 for a gallon.

Picking wild huckleberries is a competitive sport--and not just among pickers; everyone who hunts the purply-red fruit has a story of a close encounter with a bear.

Jeremy, serving a huckleberry cone, doesn't worry about bears.

"They never bothered me," said Jeremy, a young man who planted a large purple scoop of ice cream atop a cone for my husband at another Hungry Horse huckleberry spot, the Huckleberry Jam & Pie Factory--also called Willows HuckleberryLand.

At a roadside stand advertising "Cherries & Hucks," Mark McGee said he arrived in Hungry Horse from Kansas astride a horse on a rainy day some 30 years ago--and hasn't looked back since. Huckleberries, he said, "keep you young and put spring in your step."

Mark McGee selling cherries and hucks by the road near Hungry Horse

Good enough for me. I brought home a good cache of huckleberry goods--and I may just order some more.

Check this video look at all things huckleberry: