Bauman’s on Oak revives its epic pizza pop-up, now once a week (review)

You can eat well at Bauman’s on Oak

, but you already knew that. Visit today, and the tiny kitchen at this Southeast Portland cider maker might be dishing out house potato rolls stuffed with creamy bay shrimp, thick-cut slabs of pork schnitzel or Catalonian black rice with tender rings of squid nearly tasty enough to make us

forget the version at Ataula

(RIP).

Did we undersell Bauman’s everyday menu while

praising its monthly pizza pop-ups in our 2024 review

? Yes and no. As we wrote then, dinner is somewhat “wine-bar coded,” with its hazelnuts and charcuterie and cheese plates. Then again, those hazelnuts are perfectly roasted, some of the meats are cured upstairs and the cheeses — fine selections from the great cheesemonger

Cowbell

— come with olives and jams and crunchy,

Lembas

-hearty seeded crackers.

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Read more:

At Bauman’s on Oak, Portland gets another world-class pizzeria. It only happens once a month (review)

]

But as special as those dishes can be, the place where all of Bauman’s best aspects come together in a polycule of great bread, good cheese, fresh produce and house meats is the pizza.

Well, good news. After a roughly six month hiatus, pizza is back at Bauman’s, and not just as a monthly pop-up. Starting last month, chefs Daniel Green, Yakira Batres and their tight-knit team began making a slightly smaller version of

one of Portland’s very best pizzas

at the tasting room each Wednesday. (Hey, that’s today!)

No, the pizzas are no longer baked in the hulking wood-fired oven once owned — or so the story goes — by celebrated Los Angeles baker Nancy Silverton. And yes, the pizzas have shrunk from roughly 18” down to around 12”, owing to the size of Bauman’s new countertop Pizza Master oven. But the pizza remains fantastic, in no small part because of the dough, which is as good as, if not better than, any pizzeria in town.

Last month, I dropped by to try two pizzas, a verdant nettle pesto pie with guanciale strips and pine nuts and another with green garlic cream, prosciutto cotto, bits of raab and diced potato. Each was delicious, deeply charred and rustic in a way that reminded me, naturally, of Lovely’s Fifty Fifty. (Well, technically I had three pizzas, including a simple cheese I ordered for my kids that was, unsurprisingly, a universal hit.)

Both were good, though I look forward to the return of two standouts from last year’s pop-ups: the house pancetta with its shishito peppers and juicy slices of peach or nectarine in summer, and the crab pizza with its tender leaves of spigarello and big mounds of Dungeness sinking slowly into pools of hand-pulled stracciatella cheese (assuming crab prices ever fall).

Green trained as a baker, putting him in a long lineage of Portland pizza chefs. But despite impressing with both the party-cut Midwestern pizzas at Cicoria, which he developed, and the super-thin pies at Cafe Olli, including the one with tomato and mandatory stracciatella that we called “

the single most impressive pizza in Portland

,” he hasn’t yet become a household name ala Apizza Scholls’ Brian Spangler, Ken’s Artisan Pizza founder Ken Forkish or Lovely’s own Sarah Minnick, even among hard-core pizza fans.

That’s partly by choice: Green and Batres don’t just want to make pizza. They want to cook risotto, ferment quince, butcher pigs, make cider and bake outrageously good flatbreads and sourdough. Which also explains why Bauman’s hasn’t rushed to serve pizza every day.

“The minute we say, ‘Okay, we’re doing pizza,’ then everyone that comes that day is gonna come and order pizza,” Green said. “I want to keep the spirit of what we’re doing here alive. And we don’t really want to become a pizza shop.”

Part of that spirit means hosting events, like Bauman’s first anniversary party in April, last weekend’s “Springtoberfest” or a recent collaboration with Cowbell that included a leg of Spanish ham sliced for customers, free of charge.

Another thing Green doesn’t want to change: Bauman’s relationship with

Campfire Farms

, which sells the scratch restaurant half pigs to turn into salami, pancetta, coppa, arrotolata, nduja and other meats, many of which are now found topping pizzas on Wednesdays. Green is particularly proud of the prosciutto cotto — an Italian cooked ham that takes on the vibrant fuchsia color and white tips of sliced watermelon radish — a technique he learned while attending Alice Waters’ Rome Sustainable Food Project in Italy.

“We made the prosciutto cotto once a week,” Green said. “We would get pigs, brine them, then brush it with all these herbs from the garden and then just put it into a 160 degree oven at the end of the night and just let it go. You come in in the morning and all you smell is ham. And we would just slice it on a plate and serve it for lunch.”

Still, Green said bringing back pizza does take some of the guesswork out of running a restaurant, especially in these uncertain times.

“In some ways, deciding to do pizza has been a relief, because I don’t have to think about what goes on the menu,” Green said. “I just get the great stuff in, put it on a pizza and people will eat it. And at the end of the day, it’s fun.”

Try the pizza (or other dishes) yourself from 4 to 9 p.m. each Wednesday at

Bauman’s on Oak

, 930 S.E. Oak St.,

baumanscider.com/baumansonoak

— Michael Russell;

mrussell@oregonian.com

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