Home Grown: A celebration of local culinary enterprise

Kevin Pogue: Champion of Rocks

Kevin Pogue, Ph.D., professor of structural geology at the bucolic Whitman College in Walla Walla, is happiest when he's out in the field, looking at rocks, looking at dirt.

A native of Kentucky, he came west because he was drawn to the mountains. At Idaho State, he studied the structural geology of the Idaho-Wyoming thrust belt. Then he moved to northern Pakistan for a paper on the structural geology and tectonics of the Himalayan thrust belt. Returning to the Northwest after 9/11, he began devoting himself to the underpinnings of the emerging wine industry: nothing less than the geology of the vineyards. Within a few years, he had established himself as the region's leading authority on terroir.

Terroir is a word much bandied about; it's not just the top layer of dirt but the whole vineyard ecosystem, starting with bedrock (basalt in the Columbia Basin of eastern Washington) and encompassing the influence of soil chemistry, vineyard topography and temperatures. Professor Pogue will jump into his Nissan Xterra at a moment's notice to inspect a vineyard site of windblown loess or photograph an "erratic" boulder. But back in Walla Walla, he's also known as a wine connoisseur with a sophisticated palate who likes nothing more than tasting distinctive wines "that have something interesting to say."

American Viticultural Areas (AVA) are designated on the basis of history and geology, so Dr. Pogue is the go-to guy when it comes to writing applications for AVA status. His current project is called "The Rocks at Milton-Freewater," five square miles on the Oregon side of the Walla Walla valley planted with about 250 acres of vineyards covered with baseball-size rocks called cobbles. Most of the Columbia Valley's agriculture is on alluvial soils that came from the great Missoula Flood, tens of thousands of years ago. But "The Rocks at Milton-Freewater" are pure basalt, chemically distinct; physically, they resemble the famous galets of Chateauneuf du Pape in the southern Rhone Valley.

The pioneering vintner here is Christophe Baron, a Frenchman, whose winery, Cayuse, produces an incredible Syrah from these vineyards, full of earthy aromas and mineral flavors. Says Dr. Pogue, whose AVA application on behalf of "The Rocks" is currently under review in Washington, D.C., "I would be very surprised if there was a more terroir-driven AVA in the country."

Neil Robertson: King of Croissants

A croissant is a work of art, a layered pastry requiring not just infinite patience but infinite skill. Prime ingredients, a deft touch, the right equipment, and the discipline to see it through. (Chefs and bakers often talk about their "passion." Nonsense. Cooking and baking are about discipline, about sticking with it, time and again. Chopping ten boxes of onions, forming 20 dozen croissants. That's military-style discipline; that's what apprenticeship is all about, weeding out the weak-willed.) So here we have Neil Robertson, a graphic designer turned pastry chef who spent a year in a formal pastry program and went on to work at Canlis and Mistral Kitchen before opening his own tiny spot on Capitol Hill named Crumble & Flake.

Other croissants from other well-known bakeries (not naming names here, sorry) have what you might call crowd-pleasing flavors of salt, of sugar. Robertson's croissants have an additional element: the faint but recognizable lactic sourness of sweet-churned butter. And then, of course, there's the texture. Robertson's croissants actually do crumble and flake. They often sell out in the first hour, and on my first visit there were none to be had. On a subsequent visit, shortly after noon on a Thursday, there were only half a dozen left. I should have bought them all.

Robertson's day starts at 4:30 a.m., when he brings the previous day's dough out of the fridge. "We could use a satellite kitchen," he explained to The Stranger, "but I want to stick with my vision-small batches made really carefully. I touch each piece myself to make sure it's right." The Economist (yes, the Economist) did a piece about his dilemma: since he sells out of everything, every day, and doesn't have the space to expand his production, what would happen if he increased prices? Answer: he tried it and sold out twice as fast. But that wasn't his vision. He wanted to remain a neighborhood bakery with a loyal clientele. He has a complete line of items in addition to croissants, by the way, among them ethereal macaroons, heavenly cream puffs, the delectable Breton buns called Kouign Annan (in regular and chocolate).

"Capitol Hill doesn't really have 'pastry culture' like they do in Paris," he explained to me. "You know, where they will stand on the sidewalk waiting for the pâtisserie to open." Still, he's building that culture, one croissant, one pain au chocolat at a time. His regulars may not come every day, but once or twice a week, they do.

April 2014

Ronald Holden is a Seattle-based journalist who specializes in food, wine and travel. He has worked for KING TV, Seattle Weekly, and Chateau Ste. Michelle; his blog is www.Cornichon.org