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 yuzu koshō (Japanese citrus chile paste) with cedar fronds.

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It’s the first newsletter of 2025 and for me, it’s New Year, New Projects. After a few years of noticing that my neighbor has a living, fruiting citrus tree in her front yard, I finally got up the nerve to ask her what kind it is. (OK, that’s a lie; I asked my kid to text her kid and when I found out it was a yuzu, I plotzed.) I’d said hi to this neighbor a few times over the years, chatted in friendly, small talk about gardening, etc., but now I had an excuse to knock on her door, jars of fig jam and peach butter in hand, to ask if she’d up for a trade. If you don’t know what a yuzu is, it’s probably because you’ll almost never see them in mainstream (or non-Japanese) grocery stores. That’s a shame because the juice and zest of this knobby citrus will brighten anything they touch, turning regular soy sauce into ponzu and giving soups and stews a stimulating pop of sunny color and aroma. Plus, they’re a cool-looking fruit, thought by molecular botanists to be a cross between a mandarin and a papeda. What is a papeda? I’d never even heard of those before, but it turns out two species of papeda are somewhat more familiar in the US — do you know what they are? Read on to find out!

Oysters and broccoli recalled

Sorry, anemics: Two important sources of iron may be off the menu for a bit. This time, norovirus is to blame for the recall of oysters in Oregon and Washington, not domoic acid. And listeria has caused the FDA to issue a recall on “Marketside Broccoli Florets” sold in Oregon Walmart stores.

Styrofoam ban takes effect

Though the non-biodegradable packaging material has been banned from Portland since 1990, the full statewide ban on polystyrene foam (aka Styrofoam) containers has officially taken effect as of Jan. 1. Unfortunately, some restaurants and food trucks will likely just switch to plastic clamshells, which aren’t any better for the environment.

New NA bottle shop opens

Doing Dry January? Downtown Redmond, Oregon, has a new place for the booze-free and sober-curious to pick from an array of zero-proof beers, wines and spirits — and on Friday and Saturday afternoons, to taste before buying. Bon Esprits Bottles is now open in the Arome kitchen store. Read more about the NA movement growing in Oregon.

Tiny bubbles are a big deal

In case you missed it (or you’re more of a Damp January person), OPB’s Meagan Cuthill recently gave us a story on Oregon’s growing sparkling wine scene, featuring vintners making what Wine Enthusiast Magazine called some of the best wines in the world for 2024.

Along with chicories and endives, radicchios — especially baby-pink Rosalba, fuchsia Luna Rossa and freckled Castelfranco — are turning the salad bowl into a bouquet centerpiece. As I’ve mentioned before, curly endive and escarole are two solid choices for winter greens that are equally delicious raw, grilled or stirred into soup. If you’re worried about bitterness, give washed and cut greens a 15-minute soak rinse in cold water, followed by a rinse, before you spin or towel them dry.

Winter citrus season (not the year-round parade of bland oranges and lemons, but the real season) is just getting started. Sure, you’ve got a better selection of tangerines, tangelos and mandarins (especially Daisy, Pixie and sumo), but there’s also a whole range of super-niche ✨specialty citrus✨ to keep things exciting. Look for bergamot limes, calamondin (aka calamansi or Philippine lime), variegated pink lemons and sweet-skinned mandarinquats and limequats. These are all perfect for juicing into spritzes or turning into marmalade.

Speaking of which, introducing my new (probably limited) series:

Quiet Kitchen Projects To Calm Your Mind When the News is Bumming You Out

It is January. SIGH. Now that the holiday cheer has all been boxed up and taken to the curb (and for some of us, without a potent potable in hand to ease the transition back to workaday life), the reality may be hitting that winter is just starting. On top of that, a lot of truly unpleasant events are seemingly all happening at once. It sucks! But I want to help! (Until gardening season starts, anyway.)

That’s why I’ll start dedicating a little space here to sharing extra ideas and non-recipe recipes for stuff like big batches of granola, fancy little seasoning salts and fruit vinegars — intentional (but still easy and affordable) projects that can make life more delicious, or at least to occupy your time when Calgon can’t take you away.

Let’s embrace slowcore together: I’m talking contemplatively stirring a pot of lentils until each grain of starch yields to velvet; the meditative joy of making pesto the hard way (and how to make pesto out of anything green, while you’re at it); how to take advantage of a good deal (strike while the BOGO is hot!) when you don’t have a ton of freezer space.

This week’s recipe is a great place to start — learn to love slowly crushing citrus zest and salt into a thick paste while making your whole home smell like it’s been freshly cleaned with pure sunshine.

Lately, in the “Superabundant” kitchen

✨ I had a few fully bletted persimmons lingering in the garage and half a pint of heavy cream that needed using, so I cobbled together a really nice persimmon-walnut bundt cake spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon. This covered the afternoon snack break, dessert AND breakfast for a couple of days. (Hey, cake is a perfectly nutritious breakfast — this even has fruit and nuts!)

✨ Legumes have featured prominently in meals these days, and by far the easiest and tastiest was the batch of misir wat (Ethiopian red lentil stew) I made by simply throwing split red lentils into a pot with a jar of Eleni’s Ethiopian simmer sauce, made in Hillsboro. I added a lemony green salad and toasted pita to make it a meal. The sauce had been included in a gift basket, which just confirms my stance that interesting groceries are always a stellar gift idea.

✨ I made a nice pot of tantanmen using some really rich creamy homemade soy milk and chicken stock, a tare of shiro miso that I started fermenting in 2023, good soy sauce and freshly ground sesame paste. The rest was frozen ramen noodles, bok choy and a spicy ground pork ragu (cut with minced enoki mushrooms to use less meat) seasoned with a fiery-hot Chongqing hotpot base.

Recipe: Yuzu-cedar koshō

I weebed out pretty hard over winter break. Like, more than usual. I think that since I couldn’t get away for the holidays, I took an imaginary (but immersive!) excursion instead, playing cozy video games about Japanese culture, fire-hosing educational Japanese cooking YouTubes straight to the dome, reading ultra-specific Japanese cookbooks and preparing all manner of time-consuming Japanese dishes. It was a perfect storm of boredom, free time and neurospicy special interests, unrestrained.

There is nothing even remotely Japanese about me, yet here I was, shaving whole-block katsuobushi on a kezuriki (a tool resembling a mandoline on a wooden box with a drawer) to make smoky, umami-rich flakes for super-concentrated shiro dashi. Another day, I got a wild hair up my bonnet to make tofu from scratch. I zested yuzu from my neighbor’s tree, along with every other citrus fruit in my kitchen and then used a suribachi (aka “grinding bowl,” a Japanese mortar and pestle) to grind it with sea salt and chiles into an intense condiment called yuzu koshō. It’s usually just made with yuzu zest, but it’s a tricky fruit to source locally and there aren’t really any direct substitutions.

Yuzu has a distinctive flavor; its parents, mandarin orange and papeda (which includes species like the makrut lime common to Thai cooking and citron, whose peel and zest are used throughout the Mediterranean and Europe), are decidedly fruity, but yuzu’s fragrance isn’t solely citrusy — it’s much more complex. There’s a deep-earth dankness to it, thanks to the chemical compound myrcene (the smell of hops and cannabis) and the resinous, evergreen/coniferous notes of pine, rosemary, eucalyptus and lavender. It turns out that seven unique aromatic compounds (including yuzunone and yuzuol) are found only in yuzu peels. Apparently, the primary aroma of yuzu could be most accurately described as…yuzu-like.

If you can’t find fresh yuzu, don’t worry — I’ve come up with a flavor hack that comes pretty close and yields a wonderfully bracing result: A combination of lemon, grapefruit (or Melogold, a pomelo-grapefruit hybrid) and…cedar fronds. Yes, the Northwest’s Cupressaceae (cypress family) members like incense cedar, western redcedar, Port Orford cedar and Alaska yellow cedar aren’t just edible — they’re about to become your new favorite secret ingredient.

If this sounds like some kind of noma fever dream, consider the grapefruit peel: High in the nootkatone, an aromatic compound first isolated in Alaska yellow cedar (Callitropsis nootkatensis). These two plants already smell and taste similar, so it makes sense (to me, anyway) to experiment with evergreens to hit the bracing green notes of various citrus, kind of like how perfumers layer fragrances.

Or recall that the Port Orford cedar, endemic to Southwest Oregon, is almost all shipped to Japan, where it’s a stand-in for their revered hinoki (which, incidentally, comes from the same parts of Japan as yuzu and yuzu koshō). The concept of “what grows together, goes together” doesn’t just apply to the terroir of wines.

While yuzu trees defy citriculture convention and tend to grow and fruit better in cooler, mountainous areas like Kochi prefecture on the island of Shikoku, the condiment yuzu koshō is a specialty of Kumamoto (home of the famous oysters) on neighboring Kyushu, the subtropical, southernmost major island of Japan. This makes sense since spicier foods are often associated with the cultures of warmer climates. (Why is this? One 2021 study looking at 93 different spices found that spicy foods may not be the foodborne illness safeguard we once assumed them to be, but another study published one month later suggests that capsaicin — the chemical compound that makes chiles pungent — could be a silver bullet against antibiotic resistance.)

Sure, you could stick to lemon pepper, but if you want something to really wake up your senses, try a citrus-cedar koshō using whatever interesting citrus strikes your fancy (bergamot would be another outstanding addition). If the New York Times’ food trend predictions are correct, 2025 will be the year of sauces — and does ketchup really need another revamp?

Note: Use yuzu koshō much in the way you would a bouillon paste — it has a lot of salty punch and a little goes a long way. The typical ratio of salt to citrus zest + chile (by weight) usually ranges from 10-20%; if you’re watching your sodium intake, you can make it with less salt, but add a little more citrus juice to keep it fresh longer.

If you don’t have a suribachi, mortar and pestle or molcajete, you can use a blender, food processor or even a sharp knife to get everything into a paste.

Ingredients

1 pound (about 6 or 7) yuzu or a combination of grapefruit, pomelo and lemon

1-2 Serrano chiles, stems and seeds removed

A few pinches of cedar fronds, preferably tender tips (about 1 teaspoon; optional)

2 teaspoons coarse sea salt

Instructions

1. Zest all the citrus, then juice the citrus (set the juice aside) and mince the chiles and cedar fronds. Using a suribachi (or mortar pestle or molcajete), grind the zest, chiles, cedar, salt and a teaspoon of the citrus juice until a smooth paste forms, adding more juice as needed.
2. Scrape the yuzu koshō into a sterilized jar and cover with a napkin (you want to let it breathe a little while it ferments). Leave the yuzu koshō in a cool place for at least a week before using, then store in the refrigerator.

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