road food (oregon coast trip)

My so and I went on a Goonies trip this week. That means driving up and down the Oregon coast, which is fantastic. Since this isn't strictly a Seattle food blog you get to hear about it. The food parts anyway. (If work is really boring today, you can read more about the Goonies parts)

Astoria, OR. Home of tasty mexican

We learned that Astoria sports some incredibly tasty Mexican food at El Ranchero Dos. Of course, it was about 3pm and our first meal of the day. Our judgment may have been... off. I think I would have enjoyed eating a phone book at that point.

Pizza a Feta (Cannon Beach, OR) makes crab pizza

Cannon Beach (home of Haystack Rock, the famous 'Goonies Rock') is an 'upscale resort town', so it's full of over priced surf and turf restaurants. Like Doogers. Which I went to once, and that was enough. Instead Rakka and I wandered around until we found Pizza a Feta. We fell prey to the Coastal Seafood Fever, or CSF, and ordered the crab pizza. Rakka loved it. I thought the crab was good and the pizza was good, but they didn't much meld together. The crust was fantastic.

This is where cheese comes from

Since it was only another 30 miles south (of Cannon Beach) we just had to go to Tillamook, home of Tillamook cheese. They don't have factory tours, they just have a factory with windows. You can walk around the observation deck and watch what goes on. Of course, most of the stuff was closed down for maintenance. They were doing some packing though. I got some video of the magic cheese rotator.



They also have free samples, and a store. At the store you can buy Tillamook cheese at grocery store prices. In other words, no factory special discount.

free samples! the extra sharp cheddar is the best!

Of course, Tillamook also makes ice cream. Since we were on the Goonies tour we got some rocky road.



Oh, and there's a cafe.

the ice cream counter is in the background

I got the grilled cheese. (what else?)

grilled cheese, a pickle and some chips. classic.

Rakka got the 'gobbler', which was a grilled cheese with turkey on. I think she was expecting some fancy stuff like lettuce. It didn't happen. But it was, what, four bucks. Mine was the best grilled cheese I've had in a while. The homestyleness was refreshing after the fancy grilled cheese sammiches that Seattle is famous for.

To sum up, the Oregon coast was not only fun and beautiful, it was tasty too.

theo chocolate factory

Theo Chocolate makes chocolate. I mean they really make it. From beans. Most chocolatiers buy pre-made chocolate and melt it back down, but Theo goes the whole nine. They're the 11th largest chocolate maker in the country, so they say. They do it in the old Red Hook building in Freemont.

Call in advance, tours fill up quick

And they have factory tours! Twice a day, everyday. With simply gobs of free samples! For five dollars!

hair nets are not optional

The owner travels around the world, tasting beans and making relationships with growers. They do use some fair trade growers and some organic ones, which is awesome, but their primary concern is quality. The relationships with the growers are pretty tight too. They test all the bean shipments when they come in, and let the growers know immediately so they can correct the problem and protect future shipments. I don't know why, but I didn't expect that level of intimacy between the grower and the buyer. It's cool though. And it certainly seems to be paying off for them. Their choc is good.

beans

If you're into this kind of thing, the factory tour is really fun. It's one thing to watch a tv show about a food factory, it's quite another thing to be there. Theo is a rather small scale plant, but still the machines tower over everybody. Their weight is measured in tons.

an extrusion press thingy

And yet, when it comes time to make the bars, they just pour chocolate in to the little plastic trays at the workstation in the foreground (below). The guide said that that station is a bottleneck, actually, and they're getting a bigger one.

We didn't talk about it, but I think the liquid chocolate gets to that workstation via that shiny metal tube coming down at a diagonal. There's a nozzle at the end that pours the stuff out on to tempering station (in the far foreground). Huge meets human scale again; they're pumping chocolate, which is food, around through the ceiling or whatever but it comes out on to a 2'x3' slab of metal that some guy stands in front of with a hand scraper.

the factory floor

In addition to making chocolate bars, Theo's also makes a variety of confections. They gave us a few to try. The mint one blew me away. It was like eating a roll of fresh mint leaves lightly dusted with coco powder. So good. They had peanut butter and jelly ones for sale, but by the time we got back to the store section I was actually so stuffed with free samples I couldn't even make it to the counter.

the confection kitchen, that's the enrober

that's a lot of sugar
(it's cane sugar used for the confections,
the pure chocolate bars get beet sugar)

They make bunches of kinds of chocolate bars, which they sell in lots of stores around town (PCC, Metropolitan Market, others). They let us compare and contrast a few of their pure chocolate bars. Their biggest seller is the Ivory Coast, but I loved the Madagascar. It has the really sweet, tart cherry flavor. Incredible.

In addition to the pure chocolate they have several flavor infused bars too. The vanilla amused me. But there's chai, coconut curry, bread and chocolate, nib brittle and coffee too. The coconut curry got our attention by being honestly spicy. Spice and chocolate go together really well. They where all good though.

Oh, the nibs! The nib brittle has chocolate nibs in. They're little little bits of pure chocolate from early on in the refinement process. We got to try them. They're weird. They have a really rich flavor, not sweet at all; more, sort of, olivey.

outgoing

As we were milling about in the store after the tour, A said he'd be buying Theo exclusively from now on. We all agreed. I think that about says it all.