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 soft pretzel rolls with a warm beer-cheese dipping sauce (the sauce is warm, not the beer).

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Harvest season is fully upon us, and that means time for harvest festivals! On Tuesday, Sept. 17, come the festivals that run on the lunar calendar — Mid-Autumn Festival (aka Mooncake Festival) and its equivalents celebrated by Asians around the world, like Tết Trung Thu in Vietnam, Chuseok (“Autumn Eve”) in Korea and Tsukimi (“Moon Viewing Festival”) in Japan. It’s also a busy time of year for people who work with seasonal ingredients — just ask anyone who makes wine or hot sauce (but don’t be surprised if they forget to text you back while they’re slammed). Huckleberry season will soon come to a close, as the final fruits ripen in the mountains and foothills, gathered and preserved for the winter since time immemorial. This weekend, however, is the Mt. Angel Oktoberfest (which touts itself as the largest folk festival in the Pacific Northwest), and although plenty of beer will be consumed at that and every other Oktoberfest running through the first Sunday of October, beer wasn’t the original impetus for the popular volksfest (and neither is the harvest) — do you know what was? Read on to find out!

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Is climate change the latest ingredient?

It’s Climate Solutions Week over at NPR, with a special focus on climate change impacts food systems at every level. In Washington’s Skagit Valley, the Bread Lab is working with crop scientists and wheat farmers to create new wheat varieties resilient against the intense heat that’s becoming more common in our region’s growing season — and that can be milled into flour that makes really good whole wheat bread.

Oyster farmers are mowing the eelgrass meadows

OregonLive reports that Pacific Seafood’s oyster operations in Tillamook Bay have been getting away with dredging eelgrass beds that are crucial to maintaining the functions of a healthy estuarine ecosystem and a great tool for combating climate change. (A recent letter from Friends of Tillamook Bay to The Tillamook Herald explains the situation beautifully.) Eelgrass is a keystone species in estuaries, bays and nearshore wetlands; these ecosystems are reliant on eelgrass meadows for supporting migratory bird populations and commercially important fisheries like salmon and Dungeness crab. Eelgrass beds are also where oysters are raised, but the plant lowers the pH of the water where it grows, making it hard for oyster spat to grow shells.

Rising costs of eating out, explained

I recently saw an acquaintance post on social media, a gripe about the price of fish and chips plus milkshakes for two (I think the total bill had been around $40). Another friend complains fairly regularly about banh mi places charging more than $10 for their sandwiches. As someone who grew up never eating out (except for when Tastee-Freez had their 39¢ burger specials at their wacky Brooklyn-neighborhood A-frame), dining out never ceases to feel like a luxury to me, but there must be a middle ground between value to the customers, workers and business owners. Jaya Saxena’s recent essay in Eater unpacks the complicated math of eating out.

Foods that are not worth making yourself, according to a chef

The other day I was shooting the breeze with Graham Cheney, chef at my favorite German restaurant, Stammtisch, and we got on the subject of food that no one should bother trying in their own kitchen, either at home or in a restaurant. Maybe this will be a new segment — watch this space — but for now, these are the three foods that Cheney has sworn to never make from scratch again.

French fries: “Lamb-Weston perfected the French fry.”

Ketchup: “Why would you try to do better than Heinz?”

Baked beans: “Every time I make baked beans I’m just trying to make it taste like Bush’s.”

The fruits of this time of year always make me crave some type of winemaker’s cake: Dense, nutty, olive oil-y cakes studded with an assortment of local Italian prune plums, table grapes or figs (not to mention the fat, sticky dates coming up from California), drenched in warm honey once it comes out of the oven. Add cardamom and orange blossom water to take it from the Mediterranean to the Middle East.

I keep picking the foot-long cucumbers in my garden and then stashing them in a bag in the refrigerator with the full intention of making pickles, but I keep forgetting to. (As a matter of fact, I think there’s one getting funky in my wheat bran nukadoko right now.) They’re too big to fit in my pickle crock or I’d just chuck them into some garlicky brine to get them off my to-do list.

Last spring I asked readers if anyone wanted a winter squash start from my garden. I had two takers, and a month ago, Kathy Lincoln in Keizer wrote back to give me the update that the plant had little squashes on it! My own winter squash plants are lustily taking over a third of my vegetable garden and are fairly laden with buttercup-yellow fruits. I admit I have no idea what variety they are, but hope to suss it out once they’re fully ripe (assuming they aren’t just a bunch of random cross-pollinated hybrids; cucurbits like doing that).

Lately, in the ‘Superabundant’ kitchen

✨A buddy of mine got together for a good old-fashioned sambal-making party (if this is your first time considering that making Indonesian chili paste could be a social event, well I don’t know what to tell you). We cooked gobs of minced shallots, garlic, peppers (various Mexican chiles soaked in hot water and pureed along with frozen Thai chiles) with dried shrimp and anchovies, palm sugar and lots of oil in my giant wok over live fire. We swabbed pizza crust through the dregs in the pan and pressure-canned four half-pints of sauce for later.

✨I bought some queso tamales from a nice man selling them out of a cooler in my neighborhood, and since I had a few hobak (a squat, grayish-green summer squash that looks like calabacita) and some sweet peppers from the garden, it was an easy meal to sauté some vegetables to eat with the warm tamales and homemade salsa verde.

✨A well-stocked larder saved the day when I was too busy to make a real dinner one evening — cooked garbanzos in the freezer, the dregs of a jar of tahini and half a lemon became hummus (I like mine with lots of za’atar and sumac on top), which we ate with pita, scraps of feta from the sloshy tub of brine and various oil olives in the fridge, rounded out with cucumbers and tomatoes from the garden. Mezze always comes to the rescue.

Recipe: Soft pretzel rolls with warm beer-cheese dip

On Oct. 12, 1810, Prince Ludwig (of Bavaria) married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, and naturally, there was a celebration replete with fairgrounds, horse races and wine and beer tastings. All of Munich was invited, and everyone had such a blast that they decided to make it an annual event. The first Oktoberfest in 1811 repeated the horse races, but added an element of Bavarian agricultural boosterism that’s still celebrated today. Eventually, the fest was moved earlier because face it, the weather in October is usually pretty crummy. (A caveat, day-drinking one’s body weight in festbiers when it’s quite warm and sunny out is a lot more conducive to passing out, which is why Bavaria now employs the local Red Cross to mop up the Bierleichen, “beercorpses,” because Germans truly have a word for everything).

Today, Oktoberfest can be summed up with three Bs (in German, anyway): Bier, bratwurst and brezeln (pretzels). Since it’s cooling off a bit (and I still have a stash of food-grade sodium hydroxide from my old soapmaking days), I opted to turn on the oven and make the third B.

First, an admission. OK, yes, these were intended to be the slender, recognizable pretzels you’d see at your local emoji menu (🥨), but I underestimated how long I’d need to roll dough ropes, and they puffed up way more than I expected. I’m not mad, though. If you want a classic pretzel, go with a fairly long and skinny dough-rope (maybe two feet long), otherwise I guess you’ll just have to roast some Schweinebraten and make sandwiches. Makes 12 pretzel rolls (or pretzels, if you’re anti-sandwich)

A note: You MUST use non-reactive cookware here — sodium hydroxide (aka lye) is super caustic, and won’t just eat a hole in your butcher block countertops, it also has a real talent for destroying copper, aluminum and cast iron cookware. You’ve been warned!

ANOTHER NOTE (THIS TIME IN ALL CAPS TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE PAYING ATTENTION!!): If you’re feeling wary about working with lye, good! It’s powerful stuff and will burn the h*ck out of you if it touches your skin. But a little danger never kept you away from a sharp knife or a hot burner, did it? Exercise a healthy amount of caution — rubber gloves, safety goggles, protected counters and plenty of fresh air — and you’ll be fine. Probably. (Keep a jug of vinegar close by just in case.)

Ingredients

Pretzel rolls

4 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon sugar

1 packet (2¼ teaspoons) instant yeast

1 cup warm water

1 tablespoon unsalted butter, softened

Flake salt or pretzel salt for sprinkling

Lye Bath

2 level tablespoons (1 ounce) food-grade lye

4 cups (2 pounds) cold water

Beer-Cheese Dip

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 cup whole milk

1 cup wheat beer or pale ale

16 ounces shredded cheese (preferably a blend of good melters and bold flavors, such as Emmentaler, fontina, aged cheddar or Gruyère)

1 teaspoon mustard powder

Instructions

1. Make the pretzels: Combine the flour, salt, sugar, yeast, water and butter in the bowl of a stand mixer. Affix the dough hook attachment and mix and knead the dough for 8 minutes, until a soft and pliable (but not sticky) dough forms. Cover the bowl with a kitchen towel and set it in a warm, draft-free spot to rest, about 15 minutes.
2. Divide the dough into 12 pieces and leave them on the counter under the kitchen towel for another 5 minutes to relax. Roll each piece into a long snake roughly 16 inches long, slightly narrower at the ends and fatter in the middle. Arrange the pretzels on a non-reactive, parchment-lined baking sheet and set the tray in the freezer for one hour. (If your freezer can’t hold one big tray, it’s OK to use smaller trays.)
3. Preheat the oven to 450 F.
4. In a wide, non-reactive bowl (such as glass or stainless steel), dissolve the lye granules into the ice water. Working one at a time (and I cannot stress this enough, WEARING GLOVES!!), lay the pretzels into the lye bath and soak for 15 seconds, gently pressing down as needed to keep them submerged. Scoop the pretzels out of the lye with a spider, slotted spoon or slotted spatula and arrange them on the parchment.
5. Slice the fat part of the pretzel (the “belly”) with the tip of a sharp knife and then sprinkle the pretzels with the flake or pretzel salt. Bake until well-browned fragrant, about 12-15 minutes. Transfer to a cooling rack. (If the pretzels stick to the parchment, just wait a few minutes to peel them off and they should be more cooperative.)
6. Make the cheese dip: In a medium skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Whisk in the flour and cook, stirring, until the flour becomes fragrant and begins to turn golden brown.
7. Whisk in the milk until no lumps remain, then whisk in the beer. Bring to a simmer and cook until the sauce is bubbly and begins to thicken. Stir in the shredded cheese until it’s melted and thoroughly incorporated with no lumps, then stir in the mustard powder.
8. Transfer the cheese dip to a fondue pot or crock pot to keep it warm, and serve with the sausage-pretzel bites.

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