Chef Sarah Minnick’s Guide to the Portland Farmers Market

The Portland State University Farmers Market is one of our strongest, running year-round with scores of vendors. But it truly shines in the summertime, when plump stone fruit and tomatoes, leafy greens and brassicas, and piles of beans and nuts create a whir of colors and aromas across the South Park Blocks. Upward of 9,000 people might visit in a single day, making parking a nightmare. That’s why chef Sarah Minnick—Netflix star, multi–James Beard Award nominee, and high priestess of produce at her lauded North Mississippi pizzeria, Lovely’s Fifty Fifty—hops on her electric bike each Saturday morning, storage bins strapped tight, to gather the finest and wildest gems of the season’s bounty. After hundreds of these trips, she has honed a strategy to gather what she needs, scout for hidden treasures, and make it back to Lovely’s in time for pizza prep. “I’ve got it pretty much down to a science now,” she says, because “you don’t just get to cut [the lines] if you’re a chef.” 

Deep Roots Farm grows some stuff that no one grows— artichokes, cantaloupes. They’ll oftentimes grow fresh shell beans and cow peas, a traditional crop brought over from Africa by people who were enslaved. They would get fed to cows, which is why they’re called cow peas. It’s kind of like a cross between a lentil and a bean—if you think of a green pea, like a sweet pea, it’s like that, dried. So anything cool like that, I will watch for.

Winters Farms has really good eggs. Any sort of free-range egg is very valuable, and we use a lot of those on pizza, so I usually get eggs from them. The farmer, Marven, I think his dad was the original farmer, and he and his brother run it now. He knows I love nettles, and so he’ll always get me lots and lots of nettles.

Gathering Together Farm, I’ll usually have an order called in to, but I’ll cruise it, because they have really good tomato starts in the early summer. And they make a salad mix that often has goose foot and different things in it. They also grow great herbs—tarragon, cilantro, things like that.

We get a lot of peaches for pizza from Baird Family Orchards. It’s another one of those where they don’t deliver, so a lot of times I’m picking up 10 cases of peaches on my bike. And they grow nectarines, apricots, and a lot of cherries.

Eloisa and Sunrise are these two farms that split off when another farm sold to two different employees. Sunrise, in the spring, grows a lot of sorrel and other spring greens that we always want, and they grow a lot of spinach, which is kind of hard to come by. And then Eloisa grows sunflower sprouts, watercress, and things like that in the spring. Come summer, I get all my Sungold and red cherry tomatoes from them.

I don’t really eat there, but I will sometimes go to Small Baking Company because my daughters are always like, “Bring us some stuff!” They make really good whole-grain cinnamon rolls, muffins, cookies, things like that. So, I will occasionally get that, but I usually have to get back over [to Lovely’s] and get the dough done before everybody comes in.