Skip to main contentOver the past five years, Ristretto Roasters has made a name for itself as one of Portland's best roasters and coffeehouses. But with an ever-growing wealth of third-wave coffee bars, skilled baristas and high-quality local roasters, it takes more than just a perfectly poured shot of single-origin espresso to stand out from the rest of the city's caffeine-slinging crowd.
The shop may have found its secret weapon: Kim Boyce, a former pastry chef at L.A.'s Spago and Campanile restaurants, who is now living in Portland and baking some of the most unique and exciting pastries we've tasted in a long time.
Boyce moved to Portland in June with her children and husband, former Spago chef de cuisine Thomas Boyce, drawn by the city's mix of close-knit community, high-quality produce and passionate culinary scene. After a chance meeting in a park with food writer Nancy Rommelmann (who has written for WW in the past), who is also the wife of Ristretto Roasters owner Din Johnson, Boyce offered to bring in a few samples of her baked goods. Within a week, she was signed up to cater for both Ristretto coffee houses. But what sets Boyce's coffee concomitants apart from the offerings at other cafes isn't just that they were created by the hands of such an accomplished artisan—it's the remarkably rich and complex flavors she achieves by using whole-grain flours.
Boyce became "smitten" with whole-grain baking six years ago after picking up a bag of 10-grain waffle mix for her daughter. "I just couldn't believe the flavors," she says. "I'd never tasted that before—it was a nuttier flavor, a rounder flavor and the emphasis was no longer on the sugar. With white flour, that's all you taste."
She began breathing new life into old pastry recipes, experimenting with spelt, barley, oat, rye, kamut, corn, amaranth and teff flours, and turned the results into a cookbook, Good to the Grain, which was released in March this year.
Most of the pastries at Ristretto come straight out of the book.
Soft, flaky scones ($2.75) use rye, barley or spelt flour to imbue the simple British snack with an unashamedly wholesome flavor, which marries beautifully with her sweet, tart preserve fillings.
Crumble bars ($2.50) are a study in contrasts: a crisp, buttery rye flour shortbread base, layered with a good smear of thick fruity jam and topped with a rustic oatmeal crumble.
"I think when you're eating a pastry, you want it to hit you on so many different levels," says Boyce. "I love sugar, but I think it needs to be balanced just like all the other ingredients in the recipe."
The small pastry cabinet at Ristretto beckons with an array of other distinctively deep-colored cookies ($2), seasonal fruit hand-pies ($4) and cakes ($2.50) ("Sometimes I just go just to stand there and stare at it!" admits Rommelmann). But the surprising standout of the spread is her giant apple-bran muffins ($3.50), a hearty mix of moist, spicy, multi-textured meal, studded with juicy chunks of apple. It's not as healthy or hippie as the name would suggest—Boyce assures me that there's plenty of molasses, oil and "other good things" in the recipe—but the complex flavor and impeccable balance between savory and sweet has been a huge hit with Ristretto customers.
"The response has been phenomenal—we've probably doubled our pastry sales," says Rommelmann. "Kim is really unique. She kind of drills down to this granular level in terms of the flours and what is complementing what…she's obsessive in the best way. I'm over the moon to have her baking for us."
WWeek 2015