What Spokane Grows, and When It Lands on a Pizza

Spokane gets roughly 155 frost-free days. Last frost lands around the first week of May, first frost around the first week of October, and north or east of the city you lose a couple of weeks off each end.

That's the number that decides what we cook. Everything else about a seasonal menu follows from it.

The calendar, roughly

A short season means things don't trickle in. They arrive all at once, in a rush, and then they're gone.

• May and June. Strawberries start late May. Asparagus, the first greens, green garlic, chives. Rhubarb, if anyone will take it.
• Late June into July. Cherries, which are the Inland Northwest's real claim to fame. Raspberries behind them. The first zucchini, before anybody is sick of zucchini.
• July and August. Blackberries, apricots, the first peaches. Peppers coming on. Basil finally big enough to be worth picking.
• August and September. Peaches and nectarines at their peak, early apples, and tomatoes. Tomatoes go in the ground around the last week of May here and don't really pay off until late August.
• October onward. Apples, squash, the last of the peppers. Then it's storage crops, alliums, and whatever came out of the cellar.
• Deep winter. Brassicas and citrus, which is why a white pizza with kale and Meyer lemon makes sense in February and a caprese doesn't.

A real tomato pizza is a six-week event in Spokane. The rest of the year, pretending otherwise just gets you a worse pizza made from a worse tomato.

Where it comes from

Spokane has an unusually good market week for a city its size, and the days are spread out:

• Wednesday is the Kendall Yards Night Market, down on the bluff above the river.
• Thursday is the Perry Street Thursday Market, up on the South Hill.
• Friday is Emerson-Garfield.
• Saturday is the Spokane Farmers Market, plus Liberty Lake out east.

Then there's Green Bluff, fifteen minutes north, which is a different animal: thirty-odd family farms and orchards where you go out to the farm instead of the farm coming to you. Strawberries in June, cherries in July, peaches through August, apples and pumpkins into fall. Half of Spokane has a childhood memory of standing in one of those orchards.

The practical effect of all of that is that a small kitchen here can buy from people it knows by name. That's not a romantic claim, it's a logistics one. A city of this size is small enough that the person who grew the peppers is reachable and large enough that there are enough of them to choose from.

What a short season does to a menu

It makes the menu move, and it makes it move whether you want it to or not.

Some things stay. A margherita stays, because a margherita is the test of a pizza shop and you don't get to skip the test. Dough doesn't change with the season. Mozzarella doesn't.

The rest rotates because the supply rotates. In February that pushes you toward brassicas, alliums, cured pork and citrus, which is a better set of constraints than it sounds and produces things like a white pizza with kale and Meyer lemon. By late August it pushes you toward tomatoes and basil and almost nothing else, because that's the one moment of the year when restraint is obviously correct.

It also means some pies just don't come back. Something built around apricots exists for three weeks. The garlic olive oil house pie is the kind of thing that works when nothing is in season, which in Spokane is a useful trait.

Cooking along with it at home

You don't need a restaurant for any of this. The season is the same season for everybody.

A few things that hold up:

• Buy what's piled high. Whatever there's too much of at the market this week is both the cheapest and the best thing there. That's the whole strategy.
• Pre-cook anything wet. Zucchini, mushrooms, fresh tomatoes in August: they all dump water onto a base. Roast or sear them first, or put them on after the bake.
• Put delicate things on at the end. Basil burns. Soft herbs, arugula, good olive oil and anything cured go on after the pizza comes out, not before it goes in.
• Two ingredients, in season, beats five out of it. Reliably, and by a wide margin.

If the dough is the part you're less sure about, crust matters explains why it gets the attention, and the overnight pizza dough is a recipe you can start tonight.

Why we bother

A menu that follows the season is more work than a fixed one. You're re-learning a pie every few weeks and throwing away things that worked.

The reason to do it anyway is that it's the only way to cook here that respects what the place actually produces. Spokane gives you a narrow, intense window of very good food and then takes it away for eight months. Building around that is more interesting than ignoring it, and it tastes better.

The current menu is wherever that's landed this week.