Welcome to TASTE | Pacific Northwest!
I’m so glad you’re here. It’s lovely meeting you.
The Pacific Northwest is a place where food and ingredient dreams come true. For those who want to be - or already are - in love with splendid fruit, vegetables, seafood and lighter protein dishes, you’re in the right place.
At TASTE | Pacific Northwest we “aspire to inspire” you. Afford yourself the pleasure of exploring your own regional legacy ingredients. Our finished dishes and ingredients never get too far away from their source.
I like to call it my earth-grounded, tied-to-time-and-place philosophy of cooking.
It’s cross-cultural because it’s always about using the best local ingredients creatively, respectfully, to make your quality of life soar. Sweet or savory, you’ll learn how to maximize ingredient flavor, use aromatics to enrich your life, and learn processes that are replicable. For you.
TASTE | Pacific Northwest: What’s It All About?
The TASTE Flavor Lab’s focus is a particular sweet spot. We teach flavor development. The Lab showcases light proteins: poultry, fish, seafood, selective riches of the Pacific Northwest. It also showcases superbly simple, deeply flavored desserts and confections and accoutrements that enliven dishes as contrasts or complements.
The TASTE Flavor Lab will create recipe collections for your easy reference. In every case, we teach the process of flavor development that professional chefs use, made simple for our readers.
This philosophy is exactly how I approach each cooking project, savory or sweet. A bit of knowledge seasoned with intuition, further enhanced by moments of creativity and curiosity. These are skills we all have.
Loving the Pacific Northwest!
One wonders how a region as grand as the Pacific Northwest can be such a well-kept secret:
Nine months of rain; rich nutrient-filled volcanic soil; long, warm summer days and cool nights (for wine grapes and sweet blueberries);
The rich micro-climates of the Cascades (for boutique pears, Italian plums, the Marionberry (a unique blackberry cross grown only in Oregon);
The Willamette Valley’s world-class wine houses, its Italian green figs and strawberry cultivars with fruit quality so good it’s the country’s best-kept secret;
Oregon’s high desert (big dark-sweet, and tart-sweet Montmorency cherries); and,
Coastal regions and rivers (King/Chinook, Coho and Sockeye salmon).
What’s not to love?
What are the Benefits of Subscribing, You Ask?
We call our paid subscribers TASTE Buds. Their generous support allows to do the work that matters to us all. The benefits of a paid subscription are:
Paid subscriber-only posts including a yearly recipe index of our full recipe archive: these are professional chef recipes created exclusively for TASTE | Pacific Northwest paid subscribers;
Techniques from food writers and cooks I pay to subscribe to;
The fabulous Essential Run Sheet: a little magic trick you can use when you and a friend spend an afternoon cooking, or when your kids want to cook together. It makes a fun experience… a joy!
And now, a twice-monthly proprietary accoutrements recipe from the TASTE Mini Lab! These are restaurant-developed recipes from when I was “making my bones” in the hospitality industry! All down-loadable for TASTE Buds.
What surprises are there on TASTE | Pacific Northwest?
At TASTE | Pacific Northwest we’ll showcase a simple seasonal recipe, like a baked apple. Why apples? Washington State produces 65% of the apples consumed in the U.S. Washington State University bred the Cosmic Crisp; stay tuned for the Sunflare in 2029!
What’s TASTE | Pacific Northwest’s back-story?
TASTE | Pacific Northwest is a convergence of love stories:
My head-over-heels love of sultry European buttercream tortes back in the early eons led to my passion for Oregon’s local, Euro-style high-fat butter that we use in producing Essential Douglas Fir Shortbread™ with aromatics from essential oils of fir and lemon, grounded in galangal and pink peppercorns;
My unceasing love of rich single flavors and lavish textures led to developing creative ways to use Oregon’s premier hazelnut: our HazL+Nutly™ cookie with house-made hazelnut butter and elegant miso notes;
The beauty of the Pacific Northwest that I fell hard for! I was a Midwesterner who sold investment and residential real estate for 25 years before uprooting to the West Coast to attend culinary school - at age 62!
HazL+Nutly™
What other secrets does TASTE | Pacific Northwest have?
Food and storytelling: that’s my life. A bit of poetry when other words fail:
Aromatics, the inbreath of the artisanal essay,
the story of alchemy, of appetite, of desires
botanical and buttery, floral and foresty,
of an olfactory narrative that remembers, relives, rejuvenates
Other proprietary secrets?
In the early fall after we’ve eaten every possible fresh green Italian fig, we’ll show you how to candy and partially dehydrate them for use in a killer fig-butter cookie for the holidays. (Friends really like our holiday gifts.)
During the holiday season, we’ll pull off a high-wire act by baking Essential Panettone™. Half-kilo loaves that take 60 hours to produce using only sourdough starter - no commercial yeast. They’re ethereal and pull-apart; they’re studded with candied orange, raisins and other Pacific Northwest ingredients.
Is TASTE | Pacific Northwest occasionally incognito?
We ride the rails to places like Seattle - a city people say is “like Portland after it went to business school” - for no other reason than a spontaneous solstice walk at the University of Washington Botanic Garden. We love unveiling new-to-us restaurants where we can schmooze and sip with the bartender.
OK, tell me your real secrets…
I’m a simple girl. After a long stint in a professional services business, I snagged a Baking & Pastry Management degree from the Oregon Culinary Institute. I made my bones for five years as a pastry chef in a Portland-area trattoria. I’m an encore-career chef.
Every bit of my effort, energy and education goes into each post - for every subscriber, paid or un. Those posts include my proprietary recipes. TASTE Buds can count on a monthly deep-dive, subscriber-only post; access to the full recipe archive; and techniques from food writers and cooks I subscribe to.
My partner, Paul Caloca, and I love cooking together, professionally and personally. We discovered a little magic trick that empowers us both - and is fun! Use our magic trick when you and a friend spend an afternoon cooking, or when your kids want to cook together! Ready? A TASTE Bud benefit is… the world-renowned Essential Run Sheet to help you build your own kitchen ‘run book’ of tools, techniques and procedures. All for the price of an $8 monthly/$65 yearly preferential subscription.
Become a noble TASTE Bud at the preferential price of $65 per year.
If you love TASTE | Pacific Northwest, we’d love your support!
TASTE | Pacific Northwest is 100% reader-funded. If our posts resonate with you, consider becoming part of the TASTE community as an annual paid subscriber - a TASTE Bud. Your support helps me continue writing work that matters to both of us.
Paul Caloca is a Contributing Author and Photographer at TASTE | Pacific Northwest.
No professional stylists or photographers. Just Paul and me. We have really good cameras.
Please subscribe. We welcome you!
Do we Have to Talk About AI When What we Love is Food?
Sadly, yes. This is precisely how I use - or do not use - AI on Substack.
Where Do I Use Artificial Intelligence - AI - in My Writing Process?
Substack Writers@Work, to which I am a paid subscriber, recommends stating AI usage in our writing process. The relevant posts can be found at:
Why Every Substack Creator Should Disclose Their AI Usage Policy
Substack Live video: What’s your Substack’s AI policy? And why you need one
Here are the opportunities for using AI in the writing process and how I have decided to live with it:
Brainstorming for ideas to write about - None. I formulate my own ideas and subjects to write about. There is so much happening in the world right now that I find no shortage of topics screaming for my attention.
Research: Yes. I use AI built into the search functions in the Brave (called Leo AI), Edge (rarely used), and Chrome browsers and related search engine sites. (As a reminder, I only use Chrome for browsing when it involves a Chrome property, like Gmail or Calendar because Google is a monster culprit in data tracking and profiling.) Brave is my default browser.
A cautionary tale. “Hallucination” in AI is a phenomenon where machine learning generates or retrieves information that is not in real-world data. Basically, it makes stuff up when it can’t find sufficient resources to search, or for several other reasons. I personally review the search results for veracity and any links provided as sources.
As a subscriber to Microsoft CoPilot, I pose questions requesting its Web search for a specific item or topic relevant to my research and specifically request links be included with the results (sometimes links are not provided).
Drafting: None. I always draft my own posts and Notes (Substack’s social media).
Macro Editing and Revision: None. My revision process is to write, read and edit; walk away for some time; return to write, read and edit. I work this loop as many times as is needed until I’ve edited the topic to my satisfaction.
Fact Checking: I personally fact check AI results due to my inherent distrust of the technology, its propensity for hallucination, and on what data the AI was trained.
Micro Editing | Copy Editing | Proofreading: I subscribe to Microsoft Office and its tools. Microsoft is placing more AI into its proofing tools which I do not use because I believe those usage choices should be my own.
Image Creation: I do not use generated AI images, such as those made available within the Substack Post Editor with the "Insert Image" function. My images are either my own photographs or stock images licensed from an online stock image provider only if it’s a photo I’m unable to take myself or can’t own for copyright reasons. For each stock image I acquire, I retain its related use license regardless of usage in publication.
Reader Data Protection: I do not use AI in any processing of reader data on or off the Substack platform, nor do I process any reader data. The only reader data processed is that which is native to the Substack publisher platform commonly available to those of us who write regularly.
AI Training on my Writing: I have used the tools available to me as a Substack writer to block AI training. That does not mean all AI will be blocked. It means that my intentions are published to the ubiquitous AI content scrapers and it is up to those scrapers to honor my blockage settings. There is no way for me or anyone else to block an AI content scraper that willfully ignores blockage settings.
Audio & Video: Yes. AI has excellent capabilities for voice recognition and is quite useful for transcribing audio and video programs, inserting time stamps in the transcriptions, and summarizing descriptions. My main use for this is as a consumer of audio or video programs for future commentary. In the event I undertake publication of my own audio and video programs, I will certainly use AI transcription services as the labor-savers they are intended to be.
That covers how I use AI in my writing process. You are welcome to contact me for clarification or extended discussions on this topic.
To learn more about the tech platform that powers this publication, visit Substack.com.
