Amazing Pizza in PDX? Lovely's Lovely!

Much to my chagrin, I hadn't met Sarah Minnick until just a few weeks ago. She was ably manning the woodfired oven at Ayers Creek Farm (below left), having made its acquaintance a few scant hours ahead of having to crank out dozens of pies for people attending the farm's annual Ramble.

Sarah working her oven magic.

She'd built the fire and was trying to suss out its individual peculiarities—hot spots, cold spots, timing—by making a few test pizzas. Nicely blistered and oozing with the incredible flavor of the farm's tomatoes and greens accentuated by Fraga Farm's goat cheeses, these were some of the best pizzas I'd had anywhere. By the end of the day, with the oven and chef having settled into a mutually copacetic groove, I'd made a vow to get myself and Dave over to her pizza joint on Mississippi, which she owns with her sister, and have her pizza in situ.

Cornmeal cookies with Chester blackberry ice cream for the farm tour.

Just like Sarah herself, the interior of Lovely's Fifty Fifty is warm and inviting, the wood oven roaring in the back and the lighting at just the right level, enough to see what's on your plate and yet feel cozy, even at the long shared table. There's a seating area as you walk in if you're picking up a to-go order or getting some of her stunningly delicious ice cream to take with you. (I had a sample of her Chester blackberry ice cream sandwiched between cornmeal cookies made by Linda Colwell and thought I'd landed in a crunchy-creamy purple dream. In other words, even if you've stuffed yourself on pizza and the creative woodfired sides on the menu, order some ice cream anyway. Seriously.)

Black radish, peppers and soft cheese pizza on the farm tour.

We ordered their classic housemade fennel sausage pizza with braising greens and rosemary (top photo) and it came out just as I'd remembered it from the farm…the dough blistered with a pillowy rim, the base not crackery-thin but not too thick, the amount of filling in the just-right category, with plenty of there there and ever-so-fresh. Our side of wood-roasted cauliflower with golden sultana raisins and frenched almonds was toothsome (i.e. not cooked to mush) and slightly smoky, with a sweet-tart tang from the raisins and a crunch from the almonds. I'm going to be working on a version of this at home, for sure.

When it comes to using locally sourced, seasonal ingredients, there are only a couple of other places in town that can compare with the 'za coming out of Sarah's oven. We're lucky that her place is just a few blocks from our front door—it's taken me long enough to get there, but you can be sure we'll be stopping in regularly from now on.

Details: Lovely's Fifty Fifty, 4039 NE Mississippi Ave. 503-281-4060.

"You've Been 'Shroomed."

Jack Czarnecki loves to take newbs out and demonstrate the wonderful world of mushrooms, edible or not. And who better to introduce the subject than this bacteriologist-cum-restaurateur who moved to Oregon specifically because he could hunt his favorite fungi 365 days a year?

Mushroom pros on the prowl.

He goes out looking for the ones he can take back to his son Chris, who is the owner and chef at the legendary Joel Palmer House in Dayton, a shrine to mycelium that Jack and his wife Heidi opened in 1996. But he also picks up oddball specimens, like the creamy butter-yellow individual we ran across on a recent foray for porcinis and butter boletes. He said he'd never seen this particular mushroom before, indicating it would be duly noted and identified when he got back home to Dundee.

Dick scores the first porcini.

He describes finding his earthy prey like a series of shots of pure dopamine to his brain. "There's the five-minute mushroom," he said of the effect, when he gets discouraged, of finding the object of his quest.

"Then there's the 10-minute mushroom," either a nice specimen or a small patch. But a mother lode of hidden gems or, even better, an as-yet-undiscovered location that the "commercials," the foragers who sell to buyers who supply stores and restaurants, haven't found? That's anything from a two-hour high to a fix that'll last all day.

I actually found some, too!

"We're going to take you through the back door," he said when he invited me along on a recent trip to search out early summer porcinis (Boletus Rex-veris) and butter boletes (Boletus regius) (top photo). Visions of Alice in Wonderland filled my head, but having been out with Jack before on a hunt for the Oregon white truffles that lace his Oregon white truffle oil, I knew it would be a day of tromping in the woods and an education in the where, what, when, why and how of species I'd never encountered before.

At seven in the morning I parked Chili in the parking lot of a large box store in Salem and Jack drove up in his Subaru wagon, dubbed the Truffle-mobile, and introduced me to his mushrooming pal Dick, a retired teacher and fellow fungus addict who'd be coming with us this trip. We drove up the Santiam Pass to a series of locations in the Cascades that will, of course, remain undisclosed except to say that they were at elevations of 4,500 to 5,000 feet. Any threats of excommunication (or even execution) weren't necessary, since Jack pilots the dizzying web of gravel and cinder forest roads, some more like paths, of the backwoods like the familiar he is.

Porcinis hide in plain sight, in singles and pairs.

In the decade-plus that he and Dick have been hunting together, their favorite spots have been given descriptive names like The Rocks, The Ditch and The Mound, and we were going to hit most of them and more that day. These guys are relentless, barely stopping to eat lunch or have a cup of coffee during a 14-hour-day on the hunt for their elusive prey.

Each stop had the same pattern: stop the car, pile out with bags and knives and walk to some previously productive patches, sometimes scrambling down banks or hiking up hillsides to check the area. At first there don't seem to be any mushrooms in sight, just twigs and branches and leaves scattered across the ground, but as my eyes adjust to the landscape I start seeing beyond the litter and notice the bumps and eruptions that indicate the (potential) presence of a fungus.

Porcinis: more mature, left; less mature, right.

In the case of the porcinis, we'd look for patches of disturbed needles or tilted "lids" of litter. Tip the lid off or brush aside the detritus and it might be a fern pushing its way into the light or…wait…the brown-ish amber cap of a mushroom. Haha! Then it's brushing aside more duff and, using my pocket knife, slicing it off at the bottom of the stem.

The smaller,  less mature porcinis have more firm, dome-shaped caps with white, spongy-looking undersides, rather than the gilled mushrooms like button and portobello I'm familiar with from supermarkets. The caps of more mature porcinis grow broader and flatten out, the undersides getting a yellow tinge. Eventually the edges of the caps start curling up, the whole mushroom gets soft and spongy and the underside can become greenish-yellow and quite buggy.

Butter boletes.

Up to that past-its-prime point, however, in the second stage where the cape and stem are firm and the underside is yellow, the underside can be separated from the main body, which is used in sautés or duxelles. Jack mentioned that some people will dry the yellow undersides and crush it into powder, using it to bump up the mushroom flavor of recipes.

As with most hunting expeditions, there were many hours of searching interrupted by moments of excitement. The hours between were filled with stories of a particularly nice find from a previous trip, the time that Dick came back from a search to find a footprint he'd left in the dirt an hour earlier had sprouted a fully formed mushroom, or the trip where the very road we were on had sprouted a fine patch of mushrooms.

Half the haul, about 12 pounds.

After harvesting a big basket of porcinis, it was time to move on to the butter boletes, also known as royal bolete or red-capped butter bolete, a mushroom I'd never heard of. In its earlier stages it lurks underground in a perfectly edible state, and you'd never know it was there except for a handy, if fatal (for it), flaw. It tends to grow in patches, so a suspicious hump or crack in the dirt or litter on the ground might reveal a slightly more mature cousin, which results in a thorough search of the ground within a foot or so. At one point I found myself standing frozen on a particular spot, feeling like I could be missing a mother lode, thinking, "They're right under my feet!"

The sun was setting and, 30 pounds of mushrooms richer than we started out that morning, the two mushroom maestros were thinking it might be time to head home. And here, at last, is one location I can mention that won't get me in trouble: on the way home from (mumble mumble), I was informed it is long-standing tradition to stop in Mill City for pizza at Giovanni's Mountain Pizza. Really good, hand-thrown pizza with mega-toppings and lots of microbrews by the bottle, this place is a small town, way-under-the-radar cafe that, according to Jack and Dick, also has nice calzone, spaghetti and lasagne. It's a perfect way to toast a successful day getting 'shroomed.

Date Night in Italy

Sometimes events conspire to change the most engrained habits. And I hate that. Or I would hate it if the event in question didn't bring with it some dang fine eatin'. Which is why the other evening we found ourselves downtown…yes, the downtown that we've assiduously avoided for years because parking is awful, the restos aren't worth the trouble, etc., etc.…for a date night dinner at newly opened Via Tribunali.

Half a block from Voodoo Doughnuts, it's on the corner of the same little avenue (SE Ankeny) that is home to the hotter-than-hot Central and the older-than-old Dan and Louis Oyster Bar. Its small footprint contains a long bar, a few booths, a scattering of tables and a huge mother of a wood-fired oven built onsite by a craftsman from Naples who used mortar dusted with ash from Mt. Vesuvius.

The ingredients for the pizza that comes out of that oven is in accordance with the Associazone Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN), which dictates the authenticity of everything from the pH level of the water to the pedigree of the mozzarella di bufala. But the genius of the finished product is the responsibility of pizzaiolo Gennaro Nasti (top and above left), who was brought from his native Naples to oversee the first firings of the oven and the training of the staff in what he considers the near-holy calling of making pizza.

Which is quite a trick considering that Nasti doesn't speak more than a few words of English, but the night we were there (and I urge you to get the booth right next to the oven) we watched him quietly showing the staff how to press out the dough and stretch it ever so gently into the proper shape. A pat on the back and a nod of the head communicated everything about his passion for his art, and the staff has clearly caught the fever.

For our antipasti we chose the misto salumi, a meat board of prosciutto di parma, speck, mortadella, porchetta, castelvetrano olives and grana padano. And we got to watch as the server went over to the giant red hand-cranked meat slicer on the bar and peeled wafer-thin slices off the big hunks of salumi he'd pulled out from behind the bar. The octopus that came next was a salad of firm sections of tentacles tossed in vinaigrette on a bed of whole radicchio leaves, simple and perfect.

But the highlight was definitely the Via Tribunali (left), a work of art that started with dough stretched into a roughly rectangular shape, with a line of herbed ricotta placed on one long side and a line of smoked mozzarella down the other. The outside dough was then folded over each line of cheese and brought to the center where it was pressed and sealed. This was then placed in the oven—so hot it only takes 45 seconds to bake a pizza to perfection—and when it was pulled out of the fiery furnace, fresh cherry tomatoes were laid down the center between the rows of cheese and lightly dressed arugula topped that. Deserving of a hearty OMFG if anything in this world is.

We ordered a bottle of red to go with it all, a lovely, reasonably priced bottle from the Piedmont, and while I can't speak to the pricing structure of the list, there were plenty of bottles we could afford. Our leftover slices of the pizza they'd made especially for Dave, one without mozzarella (sorry AVPN) were brought to us in a box embellished with a portrait of a young woman (right). When asked about its…um…"unique perspective," our server said they'd requested an illustration of a "young country girl" from an artist in Italy and the resulting portrait was what was sent back.

Needless to say, when we got home Dave insisted on saving that portrait as a memory of our evening in Napoli. I prefer to remember Gennaro's hands gently stretching out the dough on the counter as he worked to transfer his passion to his young students.

Details: Via Tribunali, 36 SW 3rd Ave. 503-548-2917.

In Season NW: There's a Fern in My Pizza!

The very first trip I made to Maine to meet my future in-laws, they made sure I tried genuine Kennebec and Katahdin potatoes grown in Aroostook County (in Maine, it's just called "The County"). They made sure to emphasize that their potatoes were grown in the rich, rocky soil of New England, unlike the potatoes grown in Idaho that they disdained as being "grown in sand."

Of course they made sure I had lobster a few times, too, sweet and luscious and served whole in the shell, unlike the odd bits mixed with other seafood I'd grown up with, included only so the restaurant could justify doubling the price of the dish. But the real revelation of the trip was an odd little green shaped like the scroll of a violin, the unfurled fronds of a young fern that are gathered along streams in the spring.

As with nettles, these first little sprouts of green that appeared in the spring were no doubt greeted with great relief by people living in northern climes who hadn't had any fresh vegetables for several months. With a flavor reminiscent of spinach and a crunch like celery, they make a great appetizer (and conversation piece) simply sautéed in olive oil and sprinkled with salt. Add bacon and shallots for a side dish or to serve over pasta.

Or do what we did: sauté them and scatter the fiddleheads over a homemade pizza for a seasonal twist. You can find them at the farmers' markets now and they should be available for the next month or so. Oh, and they also freeze quite well if you want to test any potential relatives when they come to visit.