When you visit Bauman’s on Oaks, a bright new tasting room in Southeast Portland, you may be tempted by the quiet side garden while sipping a glass of a single varietal cider.
You can see what may be Portland’s most renowned oven, hidden behind the back staircase, across from the bamboo blinders, and largely hidden from the dozen or so picnic tables that line the crushed stone patio.
Its provenance is largely responsible for its fame. This large brick oven was owned by chefs Nancy Silverton and Mark Peel at their renowned Los Angeles restaurant Campanile, which has a sister bakery called La Brea that is still available at supermarkets around the country, before it was transported to the city. However, it also comes down to what chef Daniel Green has done at Bauman’s, where he and a small staff have been producing some of Portland’s greatest pizza once a month.
Additionally, some of them may already be out of a cop. I think this would be my favorite pizza in Portland if there were more Pizza on Oak events. In front of Lovely s. In front of Ken’s. Even Apizza Scholls is ahead.
The next pizza event will be when Green, Christine Walter, the owner of Bauman’s, Chris Leimena (Le Pigeon), and Alexandra Williams (Lovely’s Fifty Fifty), who works as a part-time chef, get together around that old Campanile oven to bake beautiful pizzas topped with seasonal ingredients that are either bought or picked at the height of their season.
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Green, like many skilled pizza makers, has a background in baking, and bread serves as a transitional dish between Bauman’s daily menu, which has its own subtle joys, and pizza nights. These include, above all, the sourdough bread with a crackling exterior, smeared with cultured butter, and fluffy in the middle. The sourdough, which is made using local grains and fresh spring water from a friend’s farm in Corbett, is worth the journey in and of itself. We just enthused about last month’s free bread at Le Clown. Bauman’s is superior.
With dishes that become more intriguing the more you learn about them, Green and sous chef Yakira Batres (Hiyu Wine Farm) are coming up with a ton of ideas for a kitchen this little. Indeed, the wine-bar-coded charcuterie, pickles, cheese, and crackers are better suited for lone diners wishing to sample Walter’s award-winning ciders than for a lavish double date. Of course, the buns used for Bauman’s similarly irregular burger evenings are cooked in-house, as are the pickles, crackers, and some of the charcuterie.
The Dungeness crab roll, served with miso mayo on a split-top potato bun cooked to a walnut brown, is another must-order item on Bauman’s regular menu in addition to the sourdough bread.Russell, Michael | The Oregonian
If chanterelles are present in a dish, Green and Leimena most likely foraged for them. During a fishing trip to Alaska, Green and Walter caught the salmon, which was then smoked and topped with cr me fra che over crispy rye toast or roasted and served with wild mushrooms over rice. Dessert may consist of buttermilk panna cotta or chocolate cake, but if there is pie, it was probably prepared by Walter herself using fruit from her family farm.
Besides the sourdough, the daily menu s other must-order is the crab roll, with sweet Dungeness tossed with miso mayo and stuffed into a split-top potato bun baked to a lovely walnut brown. It s Bauman s most popular dish, the inspiration behind the restaurant s stunning crab pizza and tasty enough that you can skip that trip to the lobster roll capital of coastal Maine.
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But if you only plan to visit Bauman s once, time it for the next pizza night. Though the menu has changed each time I ve gone, there s usually been a simple margherita with basil baked with the cheese and scattered fresh on top. In July, Williams topped a pizza with house pancetta, shishito peppers and juicy slices of peach for one of the best pies I ve ever had in Portland. In August, peaches were replaced by nectarines. In September, red grapes.
A pizza from July with pancetta, juicy peach and shishito peppers blistered in Bauman’s wood-fired oven.Russell, Michael | The Oregonian
You re also likely to find a crab pizza, each slice topped with tender leaves of broccoli spigarello and a big mound of Dungeness crab sinking slowly into pools of hand-pulled stracciatella cheese. This is the seventh wonder of the Portland pizza world, a creamy crab melt converted into pizza form.
If Portland pizzerias are known for anything, it s incorporating seasonal toppings fresh from the farmer s market onto their pies, a seed-to-slice movement that includes newcomers such as Bauman s, Cafe Olli and No Saint. The best known and most influential of these is Lovely s Fifty Fifty, though farmers market stalwart Tastebud preceded it. If your favorite pizzeria has a peach and hot pepper special in July, chances are it fits into thisculinary kneading network.
(This reputation ignores a different kind of diversity in the pizza scene: the carts, pop-ups and restaurants such asReeva,Pan Con QuesoandHapa Pizzathat are experimenting with recipes based on Mexican, South American and Southeast Asian dishes. But Portland s earth-to-hearth pizza scene has been around longer, and we do it better than anyone.)
Besides Green s pizza dough, which is exemplary, part of what makes Bauman s pizzas stand out is the relative restraint with these seasonal toppings. Sometimes, in their excitement over an overflowing crop of heirloom tomatoes or ripe summer peaches, Portland pizzerias can load up their pies to the point of sogginess. Though never stingy, Bauman s pizzas stick closer to the famous dictum at Apizza Scholls, where custom pies are limited to three toppings each.
Inspired by the Dungeness crab roll, the crab pizza has been a staple at Bauman’s monthly pizza nights. Order it with a side of spicy apple chile sauce.Russell, Michael | The Oregonian
Green hasn t yet joined the likes of Ken s Artisan Pizza founder Ken Forkish or Lovely s Fifty Fifty co-owner Sarah Minnick as a household name in the pizza world. But if you ve been paying close attention, you might recall him developing the dough for the party-cut pizza at Cicoria, back when he was baking bread at Ava Gene s next door. And that s his super-thin tomato pie with stracciatella at Cafe Olli, the one we calledthe single most impressive pizza in Portlandback in 2022.
That relative anonymity for someone who had a hand in three of Portland s best new pizzerias isn t entirely by accident. As much as he loved working in bakeries the early mornings, drinking coffee, breads coming out of the oven Green is just as passionate about cooking. And while pizza lies near the intersection of those two pursuits, he does worry about burnout if the pizza nights become more permanent.
I do love pizza, and I love that people enjoy it, Green told me. But if we were to do pizza more, would it dilute how good and successful it is? And there s the desire to do other things and have fun.
Green actually met Walter through his interest in cider. In addition to cooking at Bauman s, he and Batres just bottled their first cider under the label Little by Little, using apples harvested from a small orchard they manage on Sauvie Island. WhenWalter moved Bauman s cider productionto the former Base Camp Brewing, it made sense for Green to handle the tasting room s food menu (the two have differing accounts as to whose idea that was).
Plus, the pizza nights are a lot of work. During the most recent event in September, Walter told me she had stayed up late the night before with the team brushing dirt from foraged chanterelles for a corn and mushroom pizza. Bauman s doesn t have a commercial mixer, so Green has been mixing all the dough by hand. When the rain finally comes, the restaurant will have to build a covering for that famous oven, or install an electric one indoors.
With all that said, and the knowledge that Bauman s menu will be whatever Green, Batres and the rest of the team want it to be, here s hoping those pizza nights continue, or dare we dream? start happening more than once a month.
If you go:
Bauman s opens from 4 to 9 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays and 2 to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays at 930 S.E. Oak St., with pizza nights occurring roughly monthly (they re currently targeting November 17 for the next one, though it will likely be off-site at the Korean BBQ restaurant Jeju, with its indoor oven). Found near the 70 bus stop, Bauman s he tasting room is ADA accessible thanks to a wheelchair lift and features plentiful options for vegetarians and (especially) pescatarians, including breads, pickles, crackers, some lovely salads, cured sardines and the aforementioned salmon. Visitbaumanscider.comfor more information.
Michael Russell;[email protected]
Read more:
Portland didn t have America s best pizza in 2021 (or 2018). It might now
At Oregon s oldest pizzeria, 91-year-old owner Elsie McFarland still works weekends
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Each week, restaurant critic Michael Russell takes Oregonian/OregonLive subscribers along on his culinary explorations, including a visit to Bauman s for the peach and pancetta pie way back in July. Not a subscriber? You can receive a few weeks of The Best Thing I Ate This Week newsletter as a free trial.Sign up here.
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