Market Guide 2014: Introduction

Look, you gotta eat every day. We get this. And because the demands of your growling stomach are as incessant and irritating as A Prairie Home Companion on NPR weekends, it's easy to fall into routines in your shopping habits.

Whether New Seasons, Whole Foods, Fred Meyer or Zupan's—or maybe the Alberta Street co-op—you've already got your favorite grocery store for buying staple food. Maybe it's close to your house, and maybe it says something about who you are. You know it like you know your neighbors, with all of their virtues and flaws. At Safeway, the smart shoppers hunt out yellow tags and meat specials; at New Seasons, they haunt the bulk grains and caress deli cheeses.

But this guide isn't about your daily trip to buy bread and milk—unless you buy your daily bread straight from a baker and your milk from the farmer who got intimate with the cow. We hope you use this market guide as a map to adventure in your meals. 

And so we've scoured the weird strip-mall storefronts, fruit stands and suburban hillscapes to discover our favorite wine and beer and tea spots, the best places to get fresh-made rice noodles or sushi-grade mackerel, jars of nopales, tofu they'll cut for you with a knife, herbs you've never heard of, and housemade slim jims.

We've also talked to the makers of some of Portland's most interesting and flavorful sauces and spices, from Cambodian grill sauce  to quince honey rosemary jam, and asked them how they made it, as well as what's the best way to use their pinot noir sea salt or habanero carrot curry sauce. And we've rounded up our city's copious array of farmers markets, where you can buy your edibles straight from the people who made and grew them.

Like a coach for food introverts, this guide invites you to embrace the fresh, the special and the unfamiliar in Portland's food markets. In other words, kiss the damn fish.

Happy eating.

Matthew Korfhage

Editor, 2014 Market Guide

Contributors

Art Director Amy Martin

Copy chief Rob Fernas 

Copy Editors Matt Buckingham, Nina Lary, Jessica Pedrosa 

Editorial contributors Penelope Bass, Martin Cizmar, Liz Crain, Jennifer Gilroy, Jordan Green, Laura Hanson, Angie Jabine, Rebecca Jacobson, Deborah Kennedy, Mitch Lillie, Matthew Korfhage, Brian Panganiban, Lyla Rowan, Matthew Singer, Adrienne So, Michael C. Zusman. 

Photographer Natalie Behring

WWeek 2015