Portland Butch: Laurelhurst Market

I met up with Ben Dyer of Laurelhurst Market mid-day on a weekday late last month. I was working on a story all about Portland's new wave of meatmen for the local alt. weekly Willamette Week and I did double duty asking him questions about his newest meaty venture for my book as well. Laurelhurst Market opened this spring and business has been booming for the butcher shop/restaurant since. Ben and his partners formerly owned Viande Meat Market in City Market in Northwest Portland and are the current owners of Simpatica Catering and Dining Hall.

I felt kind of bad when I joined him at the bar because he'd just sat down for lunch and hadn't yet taken a bite of his sandwich. I asked him to please eat but he wouldn't and so during the entire interview we both eyed his housemade roast beef, pickled red onion, zuke pickle, butter lettuce, cheddar and fresh grated horseradish sandwich on Fleur de Lis multi-grain that he'd made. It was difficult.

It was kind of like when you look at something in the bright sun and then look away and the image of that object imprints itself on everything you look at. As I drove home that afternoon I saw roast beef sandwiches with fresh grated horseradish on Music Millenium's door, the Laurelhurst Theater marquee, at the entrance to Foti's Greek Deli and walking with some sort of death wish right down the middle of the road.

During the day the butcher shop sells sandwiches -- choose your own fillings as well as several daily specials. Most sandwich ingredients are prepared in house including from scratch deli meats, pickled vegetables and soon-to-be housemade cheeses. Although you can't eat them in the dining room (dinner service only) there are a few covered tables in front of the building.

With four full time employees the butcher shop also sells housemade pates and rillettes, pancettas, foie gras torchon, bacon, andouille, tasso, deli meats, and sausages. In the case whole meats usually include Piedmontese air cured beef and local pork (two of the biggest sellers) chicken, rabbit, buffalo and lamb. There's also usually one or two items made somewhere else such as hot or sweet sopressata from Claudio's in Philadelphia.

There's so much going on at LM that's it's hard to know what to include. Some of my favorite things include this...

The case may be small but it packs a lot in.

This...

Air cured, grass fed Piedmontese beef from Montana

And this...

Look up and you'll see what you've been missing on the board. Sorry it's a little blurry.

My favorites from the restaurant so far are the marrow bones and the steak frites.

Laurelhurst Market 3155 East Burnside 503.206.3097 www.laurelhurstmarket.com

Homemade Hard Cider Pt. 1

Last fall my boyfriend and I decided to finally make good use of the apples from the ancient apple tree in our backyard. I'd heard that F.H. Steinbart Co. rented out one of their cider mill/presses every weekend in the fall for $20. I called as soon as I found out last summer when our apple tree was set with loads of good looking fruit. I thought it would probably ripen around late October just as it had the previous fall so I reserved the press for the first weekend of November. That happened to be a very busy weekend -- Wordstock, my first face-to-face with my publisher, an all-day rain garden/stormwater management class for the Organic Gardening Certification Program, and cider making 101.

Two things happened that had a huge effect on the latter. First, we lost a major limb of the apple tree mid-summer, which completely obstructed the street behind our house and sent tennis-ball-looking, unripe apples all the way up and down the street. Because of that we had to do some major emergency pruning to save the tree. The next impediment to our home cidery: the slim-pickings apples that remained ripened early. Very early. Most were good to go by early September. Although apples keep well -- two months was pushing it and to be honest there just weren't that many still on the tree. Our cider press reservation was firm, however, and no other weekends were available. I started hunting for apples.

I surfed Craigslist and found a man with a small home orchard in Woodland, Washington with ripe heritage red apples (not a variety just a description -- he's not sure what kind they are) ready to sell for a good price that sounded like they'd make a decent, but probably not great, hard cider. I was ok with a small batch of decent cider for a small chunk of change. It'd be good practice for our future bumper crop cider. I drove out with my puppy picked up the loot and headed home. The apples had been sweated (stored for a couple weeks so that they'd ripened into peak flavor and sweetness) and were ready for cider. We rinsed them, halved them and threw them into the apple mill/grinder -- stems, seeds and all...

Into the mill

After milling we put the apple pomace (the resulting bits and chunks) into the press and then started hand cranking the juice. That took the most time.

Pressing the cider

Cider Falls

As you can see a lot of bits made it into the cider. That didn't matter because before pouring the cider into the carboy, with a packet of champagne yeast, we filtered it through cheesecloth. Apple Bits was a nickname my friend Mary Ellen gave me in grade school. If only she could see me now.

80-plus pounds of apples became a mere 3 gallons of cider. Our how-to book Cider Hard & Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making Your Own by Ben Watson for The Countryman Press doesn't suggest an apple to juice ratio but surfing around online it seems like the consensus is that roughly 15 pounds of apples usually translates to about a gallon of cider. Either we need to do some push-ups in prep. for this fall or our apples weren't exactly up-to-snuff juice wise.

Cider's home for a few months

After all that, which took the better part of a day, we had three gallons of cider in a carboy with a purge tube stoppered to the top leading to a half-full bottle of water. This way nothing noxious or foreign could travel into the cider but if the fermentation got particularly feisty and bubbly the cider would overflow into the bottle of water. We kept it in the utility room and checked on it every few hours at first and then every few days. Once the initial fermentation was over, about a week or two I think, we removed the tubing and topped the carboy with a regular fermentation lock. Then we left the cider largely unattended until January.

Hard Cider Part Two...

Zenner's Sausage Co. since 1927

I've been a big fan of Zenner's since I moved to Portland in 2002. I first had one of their sausages at a short-lived little sausage/dog cafe on Southeast Belmont called Java Dogs. I was just starting to make my own sauerkraut at the time and after listening to Java Dogs owner Steve Yazzolino wax poetic about Zenner's sausage, and then trying a couple myself, I returned with a jar of red kraut with juniper berries for him. I was hoping he'd like it so much that he'd incorporate it into his dog topping line-up. The sad reality: several weeks later he closed shop due to a difficult family situation.

The next memorable Zenner's sausages I ate, when I knew they were in fact Zenner's, were at Helser's on Northeast Alberta. Their sausage breakfast is one of my favorite PDX breakfasts. I usually order one Louisiana red hot and one chicken apple sausage (they also have bratwurst) with their potato cakes, a ramekin of creme fraiche, two eggs any style and a small side of fruit.

Last Friday I stopped by Zenner's and talked with the good folks there all about their 80-plus years of crafting small batch (130-240 pounds at a time) sausage, and smoked/cured meats in Portland. It was an amazing slice of local restaurants past since the company has been a small, family-run friend of local restaurants and markets since the 1920s. George Zenner Sr. started the business and George Zenner Jr. runs it today. Restaurants that we spoke of that regularly serve Zenner's sausages and meats included Besaw's, Serratto, the Rheinlander, Sanborn's, Helser's, The Original Pancake House, Highland Still House and many more.

The Zenner's door is always open for walk-ins even though they don't operate a store-front. They'll sell you any of their wholesale products by the case and sometimes if you're nice they'll even break a case for you.

A slew of Zenner's sausages -- photo courtesy of Zenner's

Zenner's Sausage Company 2131 NW Kearney St. 503.241.4113 www.zennerssausage.com