OPB’s “Superabundant” explores the stories behind the foods of the Pacific Northwest with videos, articles and this weekly newsletter. Every week, Heather Arndt Anderson, a Portland-based culinary historian, food writer and ecologist, highlights different aspects of the region’s food ecosystem. This week she offers a new video — Saltwater Taffy! — and a recipe for Scotch whisky toffee with alder-smoked sea salt.

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We couldn’t have asked for a more splendid week at the Oregon coast last week — it was an ideal balance of sunny days on a blanket on the beach tempering the soggy ones spent reading a good book indoors. Alternating ice cream with clam chowder is par for the course while staycationing at the coast, but everyone knows it isn’t a proper beach trip without a stop at your favorite candy shop. This week, a new “Superabundant” short explores a longtime coastal favorite — saltwater taffy — while telling the story of one longtime family-owned candy shop. Though taffy and toffee have similar-sounding names, they have a couple key differences — do you know what they are? Read on to find out!

A new episode! Plus Oregon farmland values, the best pizza, a brewery closure and a noodle factory fire, plus good things in market, gardens and kitchens

“Superabundant”: Saltwater Taffy

Born in New Jersey and perfected on the Oregon coast, saltwater taffy has been around awhile — but who are the people behind the pulled treat? (And how did it get salty?) Check out the latest “Superabundant” short — Saltwater Taffy.

Oregon farmland values outpace the nation

On “Think Out Loud” this week, OPB’s Dave Miller chatted with Dan Bigelow, an associate professor of applied economics at Oregon State University about how Oregon’s farmland jumped in value by 23% over the past five years, compared to the national average of 7%. Listen to their conversation here.

Hapa Pizza named by the New York Times 🍕

In its list of the best pizza joints in the United States, the New York Times devoted space to Beaverton’s Hapa Pizza for its unique (some may say ethnochaotic?) blend of Neapolitan and Vietnamese flavors. This is old news to OPB’s Steven Tonthat, who first visited the spot back in 2022.

Cascade Brewing closes after 25 years 🍺

Weeks after the death of its founder, local craft beer pioneer Art Larrance, Cascade Brewing has shuttered. Brewbound has the news.

Watch the Hops episode of “Superabundant”

Fire at the noodle factory! 🍜

Earlier this week, North Portland-based Shin Shin Foods went up in flames when the grease that had accumulated in a hood vent caught fire. It took almost 100 firefighters and an overnight effort to gain control of the fire. The plant was also the manufacturer of Umi Organic’s noodles, which provided yakisoba noodles to school cafeterias around Oregon.

Good things in markets 🛒

Whether you opt for u-pick or buying them at the market, sweet cherries are abounding and astounding right now — look for Rainier, Van and Montmorency varieties now before the Bings come on. Strawberries are still going strong, and you might still find fresh snap peas, rhubarb and asparagus depending where you look.

In the “Superabundant” garden this week 🌱

It’s still loganberry and raspberry city over here (still mostly stashing them in the freezer to make jam later), and the garlic chives are getting ready to bloom so some flavored vinegars will be on the docket. We’ll also be eating some of the daylilies blooming in the yard; though all parts are edible, the flower buds and blossoms will tide us over until we have zucchini blossoms later in the summer.

In trade for a little garden consultation, a cheesemaker friend gave us a bag of green plums that she’d culled from her tree. Since we’re already working on one batch of peach umeboshi, we might like to try our hand at a batch of verjus with some of these or may we’ll just bash some up and steep them in vinegar. We also watched a video of Azerbaijani women pickling their green plums to enjoy during the winter, which got us digging into other traditional uses for green plums from the Middle East to Central Asia.

This is the type of work that inspires us most — preserving and storing an over-abundant harvest not merely to avoid waste, but because it is an ephemeral delight to be savored. Remember this the next time a neighbor abandons a bag of zucchini on your porch!

Lately, in the “Superabundant” kitchen 🍽️

✨ After subsisting almost entirely on fried food and candy during a recent beach trip, it was nice to have a bowl of Thai red curry with Ota Tofu, stir-fried veggies and brown rice.

✨ We were a little zealous about the brown rice so we made another rice bowl with spicy seared tuna, mayocoba beans, sautéed peppers and gobs of cilantro flowers and cotija.

✨ Seriously, who knew one dry cup of brown rice would stretch so far? Round three was brown rice congee with homegrown bamboo shoots and bok choy, a soft egg, tons of ginger and scallions and a liberal dribble of crunchy chili oil.

Recipe: Scotch whisky toffee with alder-smoked sea salt

In this week’s “Superabundant” short, we learn about saltwater taffy’s origins on the East Coast, and while we do love the chewy stuff, we have to admit a preference for the buttery, slightly savory crunch of its cousin toffee. While taffy is an American invention, cooking the sugar to the soft crack stage and then pulling the cooked confection to aerate the sugar crystals before they cool, toffee was invented much earlier in the UK and has a non-crystalline structure, having been heated to the hard ball stage and then poured into a mold (like rock candy). Another difference is in the flavor — to make toffee, the sugar is caramelized (more specifically, it undergoes the Maillard reaction) whereas in taffy the sugar is melted and flavored with other ingredients before it caramelizes. Depending on the flavor, it can also help hydrolyze the sucrose molecules in glucose and fructose.

Another reason we prefer toffee over taffy is that it’s much easier to make in a home kitchen. Gearheads may balk, but not everyone has a copper kettle and marble slabs to dedicate to candy making. A word of warning, however: molten sugar will burn the ever-loving crap out of you, so be careful! Candy-making is not for the faint of heart — it’s basically blacksmithing in the kitchen! — so, since when did eating candy become such an antithesis to rugged toughness?

Social mores and cultural expectations have long been associated with specific foods, and still are, even today. Preferences for some foods (stereotypically meat and spicy stuff) are considered more masculine, and others (like chocolate and sweets), more feminine. This trope even bleeds into kitchen culture — 64% of all pastry chefs in the US are women (compared to head chefs, who are women only 25% of the time). Whether or not there’s a biological basis for flavor preferences remains to be fully clarified — even the latest science seems to conclude that “eh, it’s complicated” — but it seems a pretty safe bet that even the most Ron Swansonian eschewer of sweets will enjoy these salted toffees. Makes 64 toffees

Ingredients

2 cups heavy whipping cream

1 stick (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, cut into pieces

2 ½ cups sugar

¼ cup corn syrup

¼ cup whiskey, Scotch or bourbon

1 teaspoon alder-smoked sea salt (or other flake sea salt)

Instructions

1. Spray an 8″ x 10″ rimmed baking sheet with cooking spray and line it with a sheet of parchment paper.
2. In a large, heavy-bottomed pot, bring the cream, butter, sugar, corn syrup (which keeps the toffee smooth) and Scotch to a boil, whisking to ensure the sugar dissolves and is even distributed. Reduce the heat to medium/medium-high, and keep cooking, whisking occasionally, until the candy turns golden brown and a candy thermometer reads 250º.
3. Pour the molten candy into the prepared dish, using a silicone spatula to scrape it all out (and being as careful as you can!). Sprinkle the salt evenly over the top of the toffee.
4. When it’s cooled enough to handle, pull the toffee out of the pan and cut it into an 8 x 8 grid to form bite-sized pieces. Wrap the pieces in wax paper and store in an airtight container in a cool, dry place.

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