Cooking Thoughts: I Want My, I Want My, I Want My HEB

I love Colorado: I want to be clear on that. The scenery, the climate, the people—all of it. It is indeed a wonderful place to live. But there’s one thing it definitely lacks: HEB.

Maybe it was when I realized that I couldn’t buy a package of hamburger at my local supermarket that hadn’t had “natural flavoring” added. That, along with the “enhanced” pork that’s all my grocery stocks. And then there’s the fact that although Colorado has a huge cherry industry, all the cherries my grocery sold came from the West Coast. I want my HEB back!

HEB, for those of you who haven’t been to South Texas, is a local grocery chain that dominates the area, extending down into northern Mexico and up into parts of North Texas as well. The founder of the chain, Herman E. Butts, came from Kerrville, in the Hill Country. It is, without question, the best grocery chain I’ve ever shopped.

There is no enhanced meat at HEB. No treated hamburger. Local produce is featured whenever it’s around. They even sell homegrown tomatoes occasionally. If a recipe is featured in the newspaper, you’ll find the ingredients at HEB the next day, no matter how exotic they are. HEB also pays attention to the neighborhood where the store is located. If there’s a demand for Asian veggies, those veggies will start showing up in the produce section. If you want Topo Chico in six packs, you’ll get it. I found a bag of Greek oregano twigs one week at HEB—I have no idea why they’d decided I’d like it, but I do know that I, along with a lot of other people, grabbed it.

Here in the Colorado foothills, I have my choice of three national chain groceries, along with a couple of meat markets. The chains stock their own merchandise, pretty much. I prefer Swanson’s organic chicken broth (the winner of Cook’s Illustrated’s tests). HEB stocked it. Neither chain stocks anything beyond the basic Swanson’s chicken broth because they use the shelf space for their house brand.

Moreover, the decisions about what gets stocked at my local grocery store are apparently made at Company Central, several thousand miles away. If I find a recipe I want to try, one, for example, that I found in the Denver Post, I can’t be guaranteed the ingredients will be around. I spent a fruitless morning trying to find Swiss chard for minestrone one autumn. The grocery didn’t stock it—they considered Swiss chard a winter vegetable, even though Colorado farmers markets had lots of it.

Those farmers markets are a viable option to supermarkets around here some of the time, and I hit one almost every week during the summer. But you’re pretty much limited to what’s in season there, and you can’t always depend on them having everything you need for a recipe. I’ve found a wonderful meat market where we buy in bulk for our freezer, but it’s a pain to have to go there every week along with the chain grocery for staples (not to mention a waste of gas since they’re in two different parts of town).

So I’m back to it again. There are a lot of things about Texas that I don’t miss—the weather and the politics chief among them. But boy, do I ever miss my HEB!