The tour I went on was Savor Seattle's Pike Place Market Tour. It was a fun and different way to spend a vacation morning. As with the NYC tour, the guide was peppy and friendly and talked about enough history and local stories to be interesting but not so much as to be boring. There was a bunch of interesting history mixed with local myth/color but since this is a food blog I am mostly going to discuss the food. My perspective on Pike Place market itself is that while it is somewhat touristy it is definitely also a real working (and useful) market that locals visit despite the tourists. Other cities have similar markets (SF comes to mind) but from the limited exposure I had, Pike Place seems to be a much better market both in diversity and quality (like having a local farmer's market every day!). Anyway now on to the food! :)
The tour started at the Seattle's Best Coffee at the market, not like you couldn't have it someplace else but I guess at least it is from Seattle and it was an easy place to meet. As we got introduced to the tour, we got samples of their new Blackberry Creme Latte:
I don't really like Lattes in general (I prefer black coffee with sugar if needed if I want coffee, or some kind of mocha frappuccino(ie icecream drink) if I really want desert) so my opinion may be biased, but I was not a fan of these, they were REALLY REALLY sweet.
Anyway, next we walked through the market a bit and went to Daily Dozen Doughnuts which was a cool little stand with its own mini-doughnut machine:
These were great; warm, fresh mini-doughnuts hot out of the fryer.
Next we moved along to a really cool store called MarketSpice. This place is great! The have a really huge selection of specialty, fresh, handmade teas, spices, coffee's etc. I mean come on, they have 16 kinds of salt and 14 kinds of pepper alone! As someone who really likes adding interesting flavors to foods I really love finding a good spice shop. They sell almost nothing online, but fortunately I got their catalog and they ship; though it sounds like the selection changes regularly so hopefully they send out new catalogs! We tried their specialty "Market Spice Tea" which was really a interesting cinnamon, citrusy flavor plus some other hard to place tastes. In addition I learned that clay teapots should only be used for simple unflavored teas (mostly Chinese black, green and oolong teas) and only one type of tea should ever be used with a specific pot because the pours in the clay soak up the flavor. We also tried their 'Salish Alderwood Salt' which is a black large grained salt that has been smoked over alderwood to give it a really nice smokey flavor (real smoke gives a much richer flavor than the 'liquid smoke' you get sometimes). I bought some of the Alderwood Salt, some spicy Vindaloo blend, and some of their Shichimi blend(apparently it is actually spicy, the stuff I have gotten from Asian markets generally doesn't have enough pepper in it).
(forgot to get a picture of the salt, doh!)
Next we went around the corner to the famous "Pike Place Fish" stand where they yell and throw fish. They have a good selection of fresh caught fish and other seafood.
We tried some really good smoked salmon, some even better "garlic pepper smoked salmon" and some salmon jerky (which I didn't even know existed but was a cool twist). Note, it is hard to get pictures of any good to turn out looking good (professionals get paid a LOT of money to make food look good on tv) and smoked salmon definitely doesn't look as good as it tastes but I am going to include the pictures anyway for completeness and you can just take my word for it that it was delicious!
Regular:
Garlic Pepper:
Jerky:
Next we moved on to Frank's Quality Produce, a stand with various fresh local produce. Looked pretty good, your standard farmers market fare except that you can get it any day of the week! We tried a fresh and very flavorful local variety of pear and apple:
Next we walked over to Pike Place Chowder. This place was amazing! They have apparently won New England clam chowder completions all around the country including becoming a member of the "Great Chowder Cook-off Hall of Fame" in Newport Rhode Island after winning "Nation's Best Clam Chowder" three years in a row. Not bad for "New England" Clam Chowder from the west coast! We tried both their award winning new england clam chowder and their seafood bisque, both were rich, creamy and delicious:
Next stop was Chukar Cherries. A local cherry company that makes a variety of cherry related products.
The first one we tried was a cherry salsa, it was a nice change from your normal mango sweet salsa. As with most sweet salsa it could have benefited from a little more heat but it was fresh the flavors were there:
Next we tried a set of their chocolate covered treats, dark cabernet chocolate covered cherry, chocolate covered espresso bean, chocolate and powder sugar covered honey pecan, and a dark chocolate covered chipotle cherry (probably my favorite):
To be continued!
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