Children have a way of re-naming their world. Parents and siblings adopt it and suddenly nicknames change for grandma, for the dog, for the airplane arcing across the sky. A new lexicon is built that way, making a language of home. It’s immediately recognizable, even from the outside. This is how you know that La Porteña is truly a family business, built off family recipes, when the chimichurri in your hands is also proudly known as “Mom’s Green.”

Chimichurri is a traditional Argentinian sauce made from cilantro, parsley, garlic, oils, and chiles. The result is a tangy, savory green sauce that is ready for any dish. It can be used as a marinade, a topping, a salad dressing, or a stand-alone dip. Jessica Causey, the woman behind La Porteña describes chimichurri as an everything sauce – and it truly can be. Typically used in Argentina with barbecue, Jessica’s favorite way to eat chimichurri is with fresh bread. When this rich product in front of your eyes (and nose) it is easy to understand why Jessica grew up calling chimichurri “Mom’s green.”

“I’ve always had a passion for food,” Jessica says. “Growing up, my mom was the person that cooked for us, I learned from her. [My parents] were immigrants here and all we had was food and the community around it. We had barbecues and meals where my parents invited new friends. From a young age, food was how I shared culture.” The drive to share her culture was how La Porteña came to be. After a career of working in the food industry, Jessica was reacting to an obvious gap in Portland’s food scene. “La Porteña came from wanting to share my culture and South American flavor. I don’t see a lot of that.  I wanted to see a representation of it.”

For Jessica, chimichurri was the obvious product to represent her family’s roots. “I want to change the way people think about Argentine cuisine. A lot of people just associate [chimichurri] with meat but it definitely goes far beyond that. I get asked a lot at farmers’ markets, ‘what do I do with this?’ Tasting them at the market is everything.”

La Porteña offers three different varieties, all equally adaptable to the dishes you’re making at home. “Mom’s Green” is their classic chimichurri, bright and herbaceous. Then there is the red chimichurri, made with Peruvian chili flake. The red is “a little spicy on the finish and a little smokey.” Jessica has a warm spot in her heart for their red variation. “They’re very, very different. [The red chimichurri] is me in a bottle – flavors from growing up in LA, surrounded by different South American flavors.” Both versions are made using white wine vinegar as it’s natural preservative, meaning there is no need for added sugar. Her third offering is a Spanish aioli, known as alioli. “It’s something that in my family we always ate - my mom immigrating to Argentina and then to here, so Spanish influence was always in the kitchen.” La Porteña’s alioli is a collaboration with Mendez foods and derived from clarified oils, making it entirely vegan. “It tastes just like what I could eat in Spain. Anybody can eat it. I want it to be accessible to everyone. I want to see [these products] as a common staple in people’s refrigerators.”

That accessibility matters a lot to Jessica. She describes food as a love language, as a kind of transportive magic. “In a time where we can’t travel very much, it’s nice to travel with food. That’s one of my goals. I want people to really know where their food comes from. It changes the way people think about chimichurri.” Her business goals include staying hyper-local, offering chimichurri in local stores and working in farmers’ markets. Jessica values being able to see that magic play out with customers firsthand. When she has shoppers who have visited Argentina, she loves to see the taste of her product spark a memory. They look at her and nod as if to say, “ohhh this is it!”.

If you talk to Jessica at the market, her passion for her business is obvious. She is bright, just like her product, and she attributes it all to her work. La Porteña is about “honoring my family,” she says. “One of the best feelings for me as a small business, [was ] when my mom walked into Market of Choice and saw our sauce there. That was incredible.”

Get your own taste of “Mom’s Green” and La Porteña’s other offerings at Hillsdale Farmers’ Market this upcoming weekend.