Author: Justin

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Some More Great Previews Written About Our Seattle Shop Opening

It’s been a busy week around here, thanks to some great reviews:

Seattle Magazine’s Allison Scheff wrote a nice roundup of some of our new products.  Anyone who mentions Allison’s story while in the shop will be invited into our test kitchen to sample all of the items that she wrote about.

The Queen Anne View blog’s Laura Fonda wrote a great story.  She touched on many of the things that I think make us distinct.  Check out her story here.  We certainly want to serve the entirety of Seattle, but we are particularly excited to get to know our Queen Anne neighbors.  Our neighborhood might just be going through a renaissance.  Come see us!

Thrillist Seattle also stopped by and liked what he saw.

And, Ronald Holden is at it again with this great story on Crosscut.

My mom is going to hate Surly Gourmand’s review.  My introduction to Surly Gourmand was when he left a comment on this blog post.  I was thinking: “wow, this chick has some serious dick envy.”  It turns out that Surly is a man, a man comfortable enough with his sexuality that he admits his desire to lick our butternut squash oil off of Mike Tyson or a dog (to be fair, he also wants to lick it off your mom – he likes our butternut squash oil that much).  This guy has tasted it all.  One can assume from his review of our shop that he knows the decadence of what “angels fucking” tastes like and he’s also tasted the dregs: “a stale muffin that rolled around on the floor of a Penzey’s”.

I think his review is right on the money, except for when it comes to panforte.  That might have been my fault.  I started our panforte tasting with a flavor that is dusted with spices that are very strong.  I can see why Surly imagined them to resemble something from Penzey’s floor.  I obviously agree with his raves and I also agree with his assessment of our macaron mixes as being the most ridiculous thing we sell.  I’m not being defensive, but want to explain my rationale: At our tasting panel, my guest panelists told me that entry-level bakers would appreciate the accessibility of the product since good macarons apparently are dependent on exacting measurements.  I can definitely see what he is saying though — $16 is a lot of money for a small quantity of inexpensive ingredients.  I won’t buy it either and I get it at cost.  I figured that getting him drunk and stoned would get me a perfect 10 review, but I’ll take his 7.5 out of 10 and I definitely look forward to his return.

Also, we are very proud to have been mentioned by Mark Bittman in The New York Times Magazine as a trusted source for dried mushrooms in his superb story on how to use dried wild mushrooms.  Bon Appetit’s December issue also included three of our dried chilies in their roundup of 50 essential pantry items and included our panforte (a “fruitcake puck” according to surly) in their roundup of Gifts that Wrap Themselves.

It’s been a good couple weeks of media exposure.  I’m so grateful.  Thanks to all for the warm welcome.

 

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3 Great News Stories about our Seattle Retail Shop!

We are so excited to get this specialty shop open.  We’ve given a couple journalists a sneek peak and two three great stories just went live.

Hanna Raskin’s (@hannaraskin) Seattle Weekly article has some great coverage of how we’ve found all our new specialties.  When she asked me whether I thought that Seattle artisans would be upset because we’ll be featuring out of town artisans (in addition to plenty of local ones), my first reaction was that I hope that Seattle’s artisans send me samples if they feel that way.  Our shop is quality-forward, but if any Seattle products are as good as what I have on my shelves I will put my existing inventory on sale to blow it out and immediately replace it with with a local product.  That’s a guarantee.  Bring it, Pacific Northwest!

Glenn Drosendahl (@gdrose) provides a great overview of where we came from, who we are, and where we’re hoping to go in his Puget Sound Business Journal article.  Check out his article for some information on how we’ll be integrating our online commerce with our brick & mortar shop.  Our goal is to bring our website to life and simultaneously bring our rich recipe and technique content into the shop for an enhanced shopping experience.

Ronald Holden (@ronaldholden) over at Eater calls our new store “A Manifesto for Serious Seattle Cooks” in his article of the same name, saying “…Marx has more than a few tricks up his sleeve, starting with a unique array of “specialty” meats not previously available to home cooks (elk, venison, bison, boar, kangaroo, poussin, poulet rouge, squab, quail, pheasant).” Check it out!

More info to come soon…  Oh, and if you live in Seattle, come see us next week because we’ll be open starting on Monday 11/26 from 11-7.  Happy Thanksgiving!

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Our Seattle Shop’s Food Art

Our retail roots are online, so our Seattle retail concept was dreamed through a digital lens.  It’s being implemented that way too.  Our retail shop will have a home page and a masthead and interactivity.

In that spirit, we endeavored: to leverage all of the content we have built over 5 years; to integrate technology in a useful (and hopefully not gratuitous) way to enhance the shopping experience; and to bring visual fluidity into a typically unchanging retail environment.

We can change our website design at our whim, but how do we incorporate change and changing art into our physical retail shop?  How do we showcase the artists that we have right here where our retail shop will be?

Stretching across the top of the shop walls is a masthead composed of big chalkboards.  It will be a place to create changing seasonal and contextual food art.  Ryan came up with our original concept: a seasonal timeline that stretches from now until the Spring… and then we’ll pull it down and design another chalk mural soon after the New Year.    Matt has been working on it for about a week, it’s about half way done, and it is coming out beautifully!!!

Check it out!  More on our digital integration later…

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We’re Opening a Retail Shop In Seattle!

Yup.  It’s finally happening.  18 months of planning.  We have tasted thousands of products.  We have endlessly brainstormed how to integrate our online presence and digital content into a classic retail environment.  We are having a ton of fun trying to take it to the next level, especially since cocktails are de rigeur for tastings.  But, it’s a lot of work too.  Thursday we selected 38 items out of the 127 we tasted, which is a higher ratio than normal.  It’s more exhausting than you would think, but I’m not complaining.  It’s a dream job.  And, hopefully in a few weeks our dream store will become your reality, Seattle!

Food Coma!!!  Or, maybe it’s from the cocktails, hehe.

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A Farewell to Chef Autumn

Having Autumn in the kitchen with her patterned aprons, pink-streaked hair and adorable nature made this past year of photo shoots a blast (not to mention she is extremely talented chef).  Here she is saying good bye with a kobe tomahawk steak for her chupacabras.

Sadly for us, she is leaving not only us, but the entire country! She and her family are packing up and moving to Thailand for her husband’s work and the opportunity to feed her children all kinds of crazy shit that you won’t find here.   Autumn, you will be missed.  Whenever you come home, please also come back to our kitchen.

 

 

 

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Calling All Exceptional & Undiscovered Food Products

We have about 2 months to add over 130 new items to our store. A tall order, I know…so we’d love your recommendations. Any great local goods in your area? Hidden gems that deserve national spotlight? Throw some ideas our way!

We’ve done 2 rounds of product tasting this summer and we’ve added roughly 55 new items so far, but we still have a ways to go.

Leave a comment or send us an email if you know of some items that should not be missed!

Also, I will be in the Bay Area, Sonoma, NYC, Denver and all over WA state this month scouting for some gems.  Let me know if you have any tips in those areas.

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To the Source: Visiting the Potato Harvest at Olsen Farms

Ryan, our photographer/graphic designer, took a trip to Olsen Farms, growers of our heirloom potatoes, to document the early stages of the 2012 harvest.

Meet Brent Olsen. He and his mother Merna produce our truly exceptional heirloom potatoes.

The Olsens’ potato farm starts about

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five miles outside Colville, a small community of about 4,700 people in eastern Washington State. In this gorgeous, sparsely-populated farmland, they grow over 20 different varieties of heirloom potatoes across 23 acres using dry land farming techniques.

Here’s a shot of one of their potato fields.

One fun fact I discovered while I was there: with heirloom potatoes, the color of their flowers often correspond to the color of the potatoes that variety produces. These flowers are probably on one of our purple varieties:

They plant their potatoes in early May, and the very first ones start coming out of the ground in July. The workers harvest from early morning until noon, so they can get a bunch of potatoes out of the ground before the hot mid-day sun hits.

When we visited, they were in the middle of the early harvest. At this point in the season, the potatoes are very delicate and have to be harvested by hand, because their skins are still very thin.

Brent was selling them to fine restaurants and at 17 farmers’ markets in Washington, but they were still too fragile to ship across the country for our customers. We’ll have potatoes to ship any day now, since it is late enough in the harvest that the potatoes’ skins have begun to set.

Believe it or not, these potatoes really did just come out of the ground. Dry land potatoes are naturally very clean.

But they are still washed.

While their skins are so thin they need to be washed and sorted by hand. Here’s another look at their washing & sorting tables in the fields:

As the season progresses and the skins thicken, they will be harvested and washed by machine. But they’ll still be hand sorted to ensure quality.

Once out of the ground, the potatoes are stored in a special electronically controlled storage room that keeps air moving and the temperature just right to ensure quality.


“The Meat and Potatoes Guy”

Olsen Farms isn’t just in the specialty potato business. You’ve heard the expression “meat and potatoes”? Well that’s the driving vision behind the farm – Brent wants to be “the meat and potatoes guy.”

In addition to potatoes, the Olsens also grow huge amounts of hay. They use this hay to feed 100 head of cattle that live on the farm, and sell the leftover bales. The cattle are rotated through the hay fields to replenish nutrients and promote growth (the cattle aerate and fertilize the fields).

Any potatoes that don’t pass muster during the sorting process aren’t wasted. Instead they are fed to the cattle as a special treat. The herd is trained to come when they hear the sound of potatoes shaking in buckets, allowing the farm workers to easily lead them around the farm.

Shaking potatoes:

And the result – the herd follows the truck into the next field.

Here’s Brent distributing some more taters for the cattle:

Olsen Farms will start shipping Marx Foods orders direct from the farm to you in late August. Of all their special varieties, the All Blue potatoes and Purple Majesty potatoes tend to sell the best, but each variety has a reason to recommend it.

Check out our heirloom potatoes category or our quick heirloom potato guide to see all the colors and varieties we offer, or browse our potato recipe collection for a bunch of great ways to use them.

Post Written by Justin Marx

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Marx Foods in the Sky

First we were in the July issue of Food & Wine magazine, then I had my TV debut with King 5, and now Marx Foods is all over the friendly skies!

Lori Stacy, the delightful editor of Celebrated Living magazine, wrote a piece on us in the quarterly publication of American Airlines’ First Class cabin. We’ll be in your seat-backs throughout the fall. If you aren’t taking

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a flight on American Airlines, download the pdf below to see what they said about us and which produce items I’m predicting to grow in popularity.

Five years after we started MarxFoods.com it is fantastic to be receiving this high level of recognition. Hopefully this is just the beginning!

Click the image below to download the PDF.

 

 

 

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Summer Company Picnic 2012

A winter holiday party isn’t enough for us.  My staff is so awesome (and we’ve recently had a lot of reasons to celebrate), that a summer picnic was in order. This year, I went all out with an epic feast and a day of games, boating and day-drunkery.

Even though the weather wasn’t quite as hot as expected, we made quite a few boating excursions in my Hobie 16, powerboat and other water toys.  Tara and Nyoki played search and rescue operator for all those who got pushed too far when the wind was high or got caught out sailing when the wind finally died.

Veronica and Diana both tried paddle-boarding and Katie & Adam ran off the dock to go swimming.   The water really isn’t that cold … especially when you’ve got a strong buzz going and a hot tub to retreat to.

We had some games and activities to get everyone in the party mood. Croquet was first on the docket. Katie & Katy were paired up and trying to strategize how to beat reigning champs Matthew & Diana, but to no avail – those two won yet again!

Here’s the proud 2nd consecutive croquet champs.

It didn’t matter though, everyone still had a great time, as proven by Katy’s uber-happy face.  I might not have been a croquet champ, but I gleefully took the only two oyster virgins at the party: Tory & Adam!!!!

Hey look, it’s Captain Whiskey hanging out with some of the ladies and, um, a stiff cocktail.

The food was divine. Heaven, really. Tons of fresh fruit from the U-District farmers’ market and lots of pre-meal snacks. I made Robert, Allie & Nicole stop grazing to smile for a snapshot.

No Marx Foods company party is complete without a little surf n’ turf. Sadly, we didn’t catch a photo of the lobster tails or the oysters, but we DID get this shot:

Look at that grill! It was just as beautiful when it was covered with 30 lobster tails…needless to say, we ate well.

The night ended with a fire in the firepit, s’mores, cocktails & story-time.

Summer party 2012 was a blast!

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My TV Debut

I had my first TV appearance yesterday! The cast and crew at King 5 New Day Northwest were so great to work with and I had an absolute blast. I’m so grateful for the experience and honored they invited me to be a part of their show…here’s to hoping they invite me back 😉 Big thanks to Ryan and Katie for their hard work to make my performance easy.

Check out the segment to see me in action demoing truffle salt, butternut squash seed oil, edible flowers, Szechuan buttons and Yuzu juice!

 

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Vinegar Samples for Seattle Bloggers

We have a smorgasbord of vinegar samples and we need a few Seattle bloggers to help us taste them. You get to help us decide which varieties to carry! There are a lot of flavors, including Walnut Champagne, D’Anjou Pear and Golden Balsamic, just to name a few…

If you want to take a couples bottles home to play with and give us your honest opinion, send an email to Katie at kwallace(at)marxfoods(dot)com to get in on the action. First come, first served!

Katie’s got a hold of one of the sample bottles (cute aren’t they?) and they’re just itching to find a happy home in your kitchen, so come and get ’em!

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Visiting Suppliers in Chicago

Just got back from Chicago where I dropped in on a couple of our vendors (and shot some mediocre photos on my camera phone).

First up was one of our suppliers of bulk pantry goods.  I have always regarded them as having top notch quality and touring through their new facility I learned a couple interesting things.

First, this is one of the most impeccable warehouses I have ever seen.  It was immaculate.

Second, the quality control is uber-stringent. I checked out their labs and was struck by the extensive testing that they do on all batches of product when they come in.  Depending on the product, it will go through metal detectors, scoville tests, moisture test, smell test, sizing/grading, bacteria tests, heavy metal tests and pesticide tests … not to mention excruciating visual examination.  Check out this inspection line.  That’s 5 sets of eyes looking through a stream of dried black trumpet mushrooms.

Finally, their traceability was on point.  Not only does a “lot code” follow the product from the two ton tote all the way to the smallest packaging, but they reserve a small sample of all of their lots in case they need to go back for more elaborate testing in the event of a problem or recall.  Check out this one shelf of samples.  Now realize that they are 3 rows deep in that shelf and there is drawer after drawer after drawer of these samples.  It was very impressive.

Next, I headed to one of our seafood purveyors.  Before we started doing business with these guys a few years ago, my reaction was the same.  Seafood in Chicago?  Keep in mind that we have a dozen seafood suppliers, but believe it or not, some of our best internationally sourced fish comes out of Chicago.  The reality of the global seafood chain is that so many species come from international markets.  Chicago has a huge airport, is centrally located in the country, and has a large cadre of world class restaurants.

Of course they have excellent product.  What makes these guys stand out is the way they handle and process fish.  Fish freshness is all about handling and handling is all about times and temperatures.  These guys know how to move product quickly and at constant temperatures appropriate to the species.

You probably don’t think to put tuna and Chicago together, but let me tell you, this fish is great.