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 recipe for Chinese smashed cucumber salad (pai huang gua).
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Cucumbers are so very much in season right now, here to brighten salads and sandwiches with their thirst-quenching crunch. If you’re growing a variety that pickles well, you might be shoving them all into jars or fermentation crocks, but they’re also good on their own with hummus, dill yogurt, or spicy chile oil. Cucumber plants may have originated in the Asian continent, but we have our own wild cucumber species native to the Northwest — do you know what it’s called? Read on to find out!
Culinary Breeding Network celebrates a delicious decade
Sunday, Sept. 8 is the 10th anniversary of the Culinary Breeding Network’s (CBN) Variety Showcase, and it’s your chance to not only taste what’s coming down the pike in new varieties of grains, beans, fruits and vegetables, but you also get to chat with plant breeders and share your opinions! And it’s a great opportunity to learn more about how climate-resilient vegetables are developed in Oregon. Tickets are still available.
Coffee on ‘The Evergreen’ podcast
If you loved the Coffee episode of “Superabundant,” be sure and check out the bonus content on OPB’s “The Evergreen” podcast with “Superabundant” narrator (and longtime coffee biz pro) Crystal Ligori.
Watch the Coffee episode of “Superabundant”
About as helpful as a chocolate teapot
They came for American newspapers, they gutted long-standing retail chains and now investment bros are stripping restaurants for parts too. OPB’s Lillian Karabaic reports on how the private equity company Sortis Holdings stepped in to bail out Portland restaurants like Tusk, Sizzle Pie and Bamboo Sushi when they struggled during the pandemic — and then simply stopped paying the bills, leaving business owners holding the bag.
Learn to make cheese
Oregon State University’s Arbuthnot Dairy Center is hosting a two-day cheesemaking workshop from Oct. 1-2 at the OSU Food Innovation Center in Northwest Portland. Attendees will learn the science and technology behind making cheese at both large and homestead scales. The full agenda can be found here.
Kroger in hot water again
Oof, Kroger had a tough week. Not only did Fred Meyer’s union workers go on strike across the Portland area, but during an antitrust trial last week, Kroger’s senior pricing director Andy Groff admitted that the megachain price-gouged beyond inflation on grocery staples like milk and eggs during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, all while coincidentally reporting record profits.
Redefining the hippie co-op with ‘Group Living and Other Recipes’
Umi Organic Noodle company (until the factory that manufactures them burned down 😭) founder Lola Milholland has a new book chronicling her time cohabitating with various folks in her North Portland home, making a heartwarming case for creating your own version of the “family household” as a balm against both housing inequity and loneliness. (Full disclosure: I used to create recipes for Lola’s noodle company. She paid me in noodles.)
The pulchritude! The bounty! Markets are exploding with wonderful things to eat: Melons, peaches, berries, and all the tomatoes and peppers imaginable. Cucumbers and summer squash are thriving with the cooler evenings, and the artichokes are streaming in. Everyone I know is sitting on dozens of pounds of plums — bushels of Italian prune plums and Damsons are flooding my Instagram feed and my neighbor just dropped off a large bowl of Mirabelles from their yard.
My elderberry bushes are heavy with fruit, but I can’t decide if I want to harvest them to make cough syrup and pekmez (fruit molasses), or just let them ferment on the branch so I can watch the cedar waxwings get trolleyed. (Don’t worry, my windows are hidden from drunk drivers.)
September is the start of the Northwest’s second growing season. The parsley has all gone to seed, so I scattered them around the garden beds to keep me in fresh green garnish for the coming months. The seeds from the chervil that bolted in May have become a lush, green carpet of seedlings perfect for adding to potatoes and Oktoberfest salads. It’s also a good time to plant other parsley-family stuff like lovage (shoot me an email and I’ll mail you some seeds!), carrots and parsnips. You can seed other cool-weather crops like lettuces, spinach and crucifers.
Lately, in the ‘Superabundant’ kitchen
✨ A friend gave me a massive geoduck clam that her 86-year-old aunt plucked out of the estuarine mud of Puget Sound (where she lives; Aunt Ann is a self-professed “beach person”), shucked with basically a pocket knife, and skinned as deftly as someone removing a stocking. I diced it as finely as possible, yielding two full cups of meat from one clam (!) and turned it into a silky, buttery chowder with lobster mushrooms, homemade shiro miso, shrimp/lobster shell dashi and plenty of half and half.
✨ I wanted to make peach ice cream with some of the puree I froze after harvesting my Red Haven peaches, but my rinky-dink ice cream maker wasn’t up to the task of churning a quart and a half of custard. I broke it down into batches — a pint of peach-almond-candied sakura blossom and another of peach-ginger-black sesame brittle — but the third one was a pint too far so I turned it into cake instead. (Just add flour and leavening agents; liquid ice cream already has everything else that normally goes into cake.)
✨On Labor Day, I grilled a whole spatchocked chicken over juniper and pine, then shredded the leftover meat for chicken tortilla soup. The smoky carcass made a gorgeous broth, and I already had roasted Anaheim chiles and a charred onion in the fridge. It may not be soup weather today, but soup freezes beautifully.
Recipe: Smashed cucumber salad (pai huang gua)
Chinese smashed cucumber salad: Delicious, and a great way to relieve stress
Heather Arndt Anderson / OPB
I recently received an email from Scappoose, Oregon, reader JJ Duehren with a link to a TikTok video from 23-year-old cucumber influencer Logan Moffitt, who has evidently caused a cucumber shortage in Iceland because his recipes are just that darned good. “Well heck,” I thought to myself; “I have a ton of cucumbers right now and make smashed cucumber salad all the time — I should help spread this delicious, hydrating gospel.” (It’s also a very quick recipe to write, an important consideration when you’re one workday short because of a Monday holiday.)
Cucumbers are neat. The plant originates in Asia, so it makes sense that some of the best uses for the fruit come from China, India and Thailand. The fruit is botanically a type of leathery berry called a pepo, but it usually gets the savory treatment nonetheless. We have a native wild cucumber in the Northwest — Oregon manroot (Marah oreganus) but it’s too bitter (read: toxic) to eat and aside from traditional medicines for treating scrofula sores, venereal disease and achy hands, it hasn’t been used much locally.
My version of the ubiquitous Chinese restaurant cold dish is more of a non-recipe recipe, so feel free to riff on it according to your preferences. I like it with just soy sauce, black vinegar and jarred crunchy chile oil straight from the fridge, but you can add more garlic if you like, fancy it up with sesame seeds, add chopped cilantro, whatever you want. The most important thing is that you smash the daylights out of the cucumbers — not only do you end up with craggy chunks that grip the delicious dressing, but it’s also a great stress reliever. Serves 4-6.
Note: It’s best to use thin-skinned cucumbers for this — English, Persian, and Asian varieties (like the White Sun cukes I grew from Korean grocery store starts) — that won’t require peeling or seeding.
Ingredients
1 pound cucumbers (see note)
1 clove garlic, finely minced
1 tablespoon Chinese black vinegar, rice vinegar or sherry vinegar
1 tablespoon soy sauce
2 tablespoons chile oil (store-bought or homemade)
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon sugar
A pinch of MSG (optional)
A few pinches of toasted sesame seeds
Instructions
- Cut the cucumbers into 2-inch chunks, then smash them with the flat side of a cleaver or a chef’s knife (if you don’t have a large cleaver you can lay a small plate over the cucumber chunks and press down to smash them). You don’t have to completely pulverize them, but you want them to burst open and release some juices.
- Stir the smashed cucumber pieces in a bowl with the remaining ingredients. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Cover and let the salad sit in the fridge for at least 15 minutes before serving.