A fairly amazing-sounding Better Beer Society brown bag series event at Butcher & the Boar, some revised menus at local restaurants, a local foodie’s epic Mother’s Day feast, tasting notes for Summit Pilsner and Steel Toe’s Provider, the Star Tribune’s Taste 50, and a new urban farm in Minneapolis.
Philip Fuller
CSAs aren’t for everyone. When that box of vegetables — or meat, or bread, or cheese — shows up, it can feel like a burden — one more thing you’ve got to deal with in order to be a responsible consumer of post-industrial foods.
Or it can feel like a gift — a wholesome weekly or monthly treat you give yourself. Perhaps the most apt analogy is a hobby: When you choose a CSA — or community-supported agriculture membership — you’re choosing to invest not just your money, but your time, in a particular way of eating. Like all hobbies, though, it should be fun.
We talked to two CSA farmers about why Joe or Jane Consumer should consider a CSA and we got a surprising answer or two (Price? Really? Yes.) Both Stone’s Throw Urban Farm and Shepherd’s Way Farms will be at the Seward Co-op’s 11 Annual CSA Fair, along with nearly 30 other farmers.
STONE’S THROW URBAN FARM
stonesthrowurbanfarm.wordpress.com
Eric Larsen farms 15 urban lots in Minneapolis and St. Paul along with five other farmers. This is their first year together as Stone’s Throw, after Concrete Beet, Pig’s Eye Urban Farm, and Uptown Farmers merged. Their lots range from average city lots to about one-third of an acre. They grow between 15 and 20 crops and plan a 20-week CSA season, averaging 10–15 pounds of vegetables a week. Because of their easily accessible location, they may also be able to offer members U-pick opportunities of select crops.
Why should someone become a CSA member?
It’s a very affordable way for the consumer to get fresh vegetables and a variety of vegetables. I was just talking with one of my partners, and he was just saying that he took an average share [from his previous farm] in the middle of July and then bought the same things at Whole Foods. And it was about $120 worth of vegetables! [Stone’s Throw shares are $25 a week. — ed.] A lot of farmers are putting in salad mixes and tomatoes in CSA shares, things that can easily retail for double [the cost per pound through a CSA].
A CSA is also a great way for people to step out of their cooking comfort zone, explore new boundaries, and have more of a variety of vegetables than they’re putting in their diet right now.
What are the benefits for you as a grower?
We wanted the opportunity to grow a variety of produce. If you go by just what the market dictates, it’s hard to justify growing things like cabbage that you don’t get a good margin for, or things like peas and radishes. The other main advantage, of course, is the upfront payment for the farmer, when it’s really needed to buy seeds, buy compost, buy other infrastructure things. As a start-up we needed the capital investment.
Do you think CSAs are becoming more mainstream?
I think it’s still a niche product, but I don’t think it’s going to stay a niche product. I hope it’s going to go more mainstream. People are more familiar with the concept of a farmers market rather than a CSA. But when more people [with CSAs] are telling their friends about it and there’s that peer-to-peer education about the benefits of it, it will grow. A lot of it depends on how much a person likes to cook. And that’s not something people do a lot right now.
What should people ask before signing up for a CSA?
They can ask what variety of produce to expect, how many different vegetables they get per week and the quantity. Where it’s grown, obviously. And how to cook with it, because farmers know how to do something with every vegetable. They’re eating what they grow.
SHEPHERD’S WAY FARMS Continue reading Why Should You Sign Up for a CSA? »
by Sue Doeden on March 22, 2012
Rob Yuretich / Heavy Table
John Forrest expertly hefts bright red insulated sacks, the kind used by pizza delivery people, onto his shoulder. You won’t find pizza in these sacks, though — instead, there are several two-pound loaves of fluffy sourdough, each in its own round shaping basket. Forrest is carrying his load of dough with the careful nonchalance of an experienced server balancing a heavy tray of plates on one hand, as he moves toward his destination: a European-style wood-burning oven just 35 feet from the door of Pony Farm Artisan Bread.
John and his wife, Dotty, will tell you they are just as surprised as all of their friends that after they sold the RV park they owned for 14 years in Ogilvie, MN, they moved north and became artisan bread bakers in Bemidji.
Pony Farm Food LLC is owned by Dotty Forrest’s brother-in-law, Dave Olderman. He bought the 40-acre farm about 14 years ago — it came with a Shetland pony and a house that’s almost 100 years old. Olderman sold the pony but kept the farmhouse and turned it into a bakery that officially opened for business on January 1, 2012. Now, the full-time bakers are selling 90 to 100 loaves each week for $8 a loaf. The Forrests believe that number will continue to increase as tourist season eases into high gear in northern Minnesota.
Rob Yuretich / Heavy Table
The spark for creating the bakery was struck by an article in a 1995 issue of Smithsonian magazine. Olderman, retired from a career in finance, was impressed by the magazine’s story of Lionel Poilane, acclaimed as the world’s best bread baker.
It’s no easy feat to recreate Poilane’s efforts in the (sometimes) frozen North, but Olderman has made allowances for the local climate. So that the oven will hold its heat on cold winter days, it is housed in a building that looks like a tiny cabin. The oven, however, is just the end of the process that creates Pony Farm’s bread. The magic starts at about 11 o’clock the night before baking, when John Forrest leaves the bakery where he and Dotty have been mixing dough and adding water and organic flour to the starter.
Rob Yuretich / Heavy Table
The flours used are milled just a couple of hours from Bemidji at Natural Way Mills in Middle River, MN. The baker then loads the oven with wood harvested from local forests.
The next day, as the oven continues to heat, the Forrests work with the sourdough that gets its rising power from starter that originated 250 years ago in New England. In a bright room lined on facing sides with windows, John weighs the dough, making sure each creamy, soft, voluptuous mound is exactly two pounds. He hands the dough over to Dotty, who shapes on the thick slab of wood that tops their baker’s table. She positions a small wooden cut-out of a horse exactly in the center of a cloth-lined bread basket and gently places a hefty round of dough on top of it. Continue reading The Artisan Bread of Pony Farm Food in Bemidji, MN »
by Elizabeth Millard on March 19, 2012
When Karen Swanberg does a tour of her greenhouse space in Hugo, she seems a bit like a breathless kid about to show off a collection of treasures.
Crystal Liepa / Heavy Table
Plunked down along a stretch of busy road, the greenhouses look somewhat dilapidated from the outside, and some rusting equipment along the side just reinforces the image. But inside Swanberg’s rented space, the setup looks futuristic. Long tanks of water are fed by pipes and constantly gurgling pumps. The light inside the space is bright, pinging off all the steel and plastic like a 1970s movie about the sterility of space colonies.
Crystal Liepa / Heavy Table
“I know I’m biased, but I just think this is the most beautiful place ever,” says Swanberg. With yellow perch darting inside the tanks, and lettuces beginning to grow in March, it’s not hard to see why she thinks so.
Aquaponics brings together traditional aquaculture, where fish or other aquatic animals are farmed, with hydroponics. The system is closed loop and symbiotic, with the nutrient-rich fish waste recirculated into the plants.
Crystal Liepa / Heavy Table
Swanberg began her journey toward aquaponics four years ago, after reading an article about the systems. She built five small tanks at her house and planted greens on nights and weekends, while maintaining a computer security job at the University of Minnesota during the day. Pretty soon, she preferred the fish.
“Doing computer security, you’re always under attack, and all your users hate you,” she says. “You’re under pressure from all sides. I was really at my most relaxed around the tanks.” She quit over a year ago to focus on aquaponics full time, and says she may be poorer, but she’s also happier.
Less happy was the challenge it took to get to the point where she’d have greens to sell. Local food demand has been rising quickly, but putting together such an elaborate construction has required patience, funding, research, and more funding.
A few months ago, Swanberg brought on a business partner, Jerry Khan, and changed the name of her effort from Howling Moose Gardens to the more formal-sounding Swanberg and Khan Aquaponics.
“The local food movement is so huge, and aquaponics can have a strong place within it,” Swanberg says. “We haven’t tried growing in the winter yet, but I’m looking forward to trying that, too.” Continue reading Swanberg and Khan Aquaponics in Hugo, MN »
by Tricia Cornell on March 12, 2012
Kate N.G. Sommers / Heavy Table
“You’ve got to have a green salad on your menu,” Lenny Russo says. He’s right: Whether or not we order them, we diners expect to see some leafy greens, and we don’t give much thought to how they get on the plate.
That’s easy enough if you’re a restaurateur and the same produce truck shows up at your back door winter, spring, summer, and fall. It’s harder if you’re someone like Russo, chef and owner of Heartland in St. Paul, who has dedicated himself to serving foods from small, local purveyors.
And, yet, when the ground in Minnesota is still hard and cold, there is plenty of green on Heartland’s menu: a delicate tangle of upland cress alongside Russo’s mushroom terrine, a finely diced celery salad with his goose rillettes, even a celery stalk in a weekend bloody Mary. And, a few steps outside Russo’s dining room: heads of lettuce for sale in the Heartland Market. It was that lettuce that stopped me in my tracks one vitamin-deprived January day and made me call Russo to learn his secret to greens in winter.
Kate N.G. Sommers / Heavy Table
It’s Getting Easier to Be Green
That particular lettuce, I learned, along with the upland cress, tatsoi, and some other greens, comes from LaBore Farms, a hydroponic farm in Faribault, MN. The celery — some of it, anyway, along with some perch — comes from the Urban Farm Project, an aquaculture operation in an industrial area of south Minneapolis. No one small farm can supply all that Russo needs for his ever-changing menu, so he buys from dozens, many of them operating year-round in greenhouses or in a growing number of aquaculture setups.
Russo says the expansion of greenhouse farming in Minnesota has made it much easier to find the winter produce he needs, but adds, “I wouldn’t say that it’s substantial. You have to search high and low. Having greens for sale in the grocery is great, but as far as the restaurant is concerned, [greenhouse greens are] a lifesaver for us…. You really can’t not have greens.”
A lifesaver, huh? Having devoured that local lettuce like a sailor with scurvy, I’d have a hard time calling that an overstatement. So I set out to track down some of Russo’s miraculous winter greens at the source. And, along the way, I found the future of Minnesota agriculture.
Well, the future and the past.
John Erwin is a professor in the department of horticultural science and an extension educator at the University of Minnesota. He says that the fastest growing sector in Minnesota agriculture for the past three years has been in greenhouses — including year-round setups and ones just for the spring and the fall, as well as hydroponics, aquaponics, and more traditional farming. “You have to be careful, though,” Erwin warns, “because that’s a percent. Some of these people can put up one more greenhouse and they’ve increased 100 percent.”
We used to grow more this way, actually. Wagners, Bachman’s, Linder’s — all those local names you associate with picking up a flower arrangement or planting your own garden — they all started as hothouse vegetable growers. A hundred years ago, the Wagner family had a 4,000-square-foot glass building under which they grew tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, and more. Not year-round, but for a lot longer than they could in the regular growing season.
But then, says Erwin, President Eisenhower visited Germany and, impressed with the Autobahn, he came home and created America’s interstate highway system.
“When that happened, it allowed vegetables to be shipped here from California and Florida,” Erwin says. “That undercut all the vegetable production and [growers] switched over to flowers.”
Erwin cites several reasons why the new generation of greenhouse growers is coming full circle, back to vegetable production. Number one is that the price of diesel fuel — for trucks driving all those tomatoes from California — has gone up, while the price of natural gas — which greenhouse growers use for heat — has gone down. That hasn’t brought the cost of a local winter tomato into line with the trucked-in ones, but it has narrowed the gap.
Which brings us to reason two: We’ve entered a time when a certain segment of the population is willing to pay more for better food. That greenhouse tomato may not rival a sun-ripened August tomato, but it sure beats one picked green and gassed with ethylene. Also, people like to buy local. Bushel Boy, one of the largest greenhouse tomato growers in Minnesota, took off when they started packing their products in boxes labeled “The Minnesota Tomato.”
That’s the crux of it: Our collective hunger for “the Minnesota tomato” or the Minnesota bunch of arugula and our impatience with the winter cold together make this the right moment for alternative growing, from hydroponics to aquaponics, to covered high tunnels.
Kate N.G. Sommers / Heavy Table
Ladybugs and Winter Greens: LaBore Farms
Michelle Keller decided the time was right for hydroponics years ago, when she was studying plant biology at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls. After trying other career paths, she built her two-bay greenhouse outside Faribault seven years ago. Operating as LaBore Farms, she sells lettuce, cress, arugula, pak choi, and other greens to all the metro co-ops and about half a dozen restaurants, including Heartland. She says she sells out all her product and could easily sell twice as much, if she could just get the financing to double her space. Continue reading Greens in Winter: Cold-Weather Farming in Minnesota »
Crystal Liepa / Heavy Table
Chances are if you dig mushrooms, you’ve tasted some of Kevin Doyle’s. He is the hard-working guy behind Forest Mushrooms, the largest commercial mushroom farm in Minnesota (also check out The Mikeology Store and Cherry Tree House Mushrooms). We met Kevin Doyle at the 2012 SFA Conference in St. Joseph, MN, where he presented a session on growing mushrooms, with recipe developer Mary Jane Miller at his side making some delicious, relevant vittles. In front of a classroom packed with admirers, Miller caked a sirloin with shiitake powder (yeah, that exists) while the Kris Kringle-like Doyle calmly spread his arms and began to speak about what it means to care for fungi.
Crystal Liepa / Heavy Table
“I wish there was a seasonality to it,” says Doyle, who is kept busy growing oyster and shiitake mushrooms all year long on his farm in St. Joseph. In addition to growing and distributing several thousand pounds of mushrooms a week, Doyle also imports tens of thousands of pounds of specialty mushrooms from around the world, such as the spindly enoki and the brown, blossoming maitake (or, more adorably, the hen of the woods). He brought examples of these to the conference, as well as clusters of his own luminous, growing oysters and shiitakes.
“I was a botanist at a young age,” says Doyle, who, in lieu of a television, found entertainment in the woods when he was a kid. When he began growing commercially in 1985, white button mushrooms — or “Wonder Bread mushrooms” as he calls them — were the only sort you could find on grocery store shelves. Fungi nuance just wasn’t a reality for consumers.
Luckily, Doyle entered the market in the same year that the National Mushroom Growers’ Association was established in Illinois. The purpose of this group was to promote the sale and popularity of fresh mushrooms in the United States, so Doyle’s moment coincided with a pretty big marketing campaign to get more mushrooms in more grocery stores in more cities (check out this digression: a commercial for magic mushroom air fresheners). Before long, Doyle’s distributors were requesting a greater variety of exotic mushrooms, which led Doyle to diversify by importing.
When it comes to cultivation, mushrooms are like high-maintenance humans. They take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide the way we do, and require a cool, moist environment. Doyle’s “fruiting rooms” feel “like a fall day,” he says, and are regulated by a crucial air exchange system to keep fresh air in high supply. Continue reading Kevin Doyle of Forest Mushrooms »
by John Garland on February 28, 2012
John Garland / Heavy Table
Justin Osborne, winemaker at the newly opened Four Daughters Vineyard and Winery, used to be a construction manager. He was conscripted into the winemaker role by his mother-in-law, owner Vicky Vogt, and after a stint at the VESTA program, he’s off and running with a successful opening vintage.
Four Daughters sits at a lonely intersection of two county roads a few miles south of Rochester. There are some vines outside the winery — Frontenac, Marquette, Brianna, and Edelweiss — but they’re too young to have yielded much functional wine fruit. The tasting room is a large, warm, and modern space that seems designed with large dinners and event receptions in mind.
To make a decent product right away is rather notable for local wineries. It wouldn’t be constructive to advise people to go out and drink all the locally made wine they can get their hands on. Even someone like this author, who has an unabashed love for the industry, must admit that a significant portion of it is some pretty awful stuff.
“What I’ve seen with start-up wineries in Minnesota,” writes U of M Enology Project Leader Katie Cook, “ …most of them are coming from other industries and are learning about the wine industry as they go. It’s exciting to see that sort of enthusiasm, but the problem is that it’s easy to make mistakes while you’re learning.”
John Garland / Heavy Table
It seems that Osborne is on the right side of the learning curve. Tasting Four Daughters’ full flight would be a good primer for those not familiar with local wine. Their 2011 vintage is very representative of the quality that can be achieved with the best local grape varieties. Osborne says the majority of their grapes are sourced from four growers no more than 50 miles away (which he supplements with small amounts of juice from California and Washington). Sure, a few aren’t up to snuff, but no Minnesota winery is batting 1.000.
But if you’re just interested in knocking a few back over some food, Four Daughters has a chef on site turning out sophisticated, approachable cuisine. “Once they’ve had the wines,” Osborne says, “what’s going to bring them back?” That responsibility falls to Erik Kleven. A former sous-chef at Chester’s Kitchen & Bar, Kleven is putting out an agreeable assortment of snacks perfect for sharing over a few sips.
Osborne says the pizzas are the hot item right out of the gate, and it’s easy to see why. The crusts have a substantial flatbread consistency to them. Opt for the Shaved Asparagus — a lovely and indulgent mix of fresh asparagus and salty pancetta sprinkled around nicely set runny-yolk eggs and creamy parma grana. The winery has already begun a series of ambitious dinners on Thursday nights and special holidays, as well as Sunday brunch.
John Garland / Heavy Table
Another fun addition to the lineup is their Cider. Only available on draft at the winery, the apples are sourced from Wescott Orchards in Elgin, MN. Osborne nicknames it Barely Legal Cider because, at 6.9% ABV, it’s just under the 7% cut-off where it must be considered an apple wine. It’s tart with a hint of yeast-derived smoothness, and goes down altogether too easily.
“The wineries that have been around since the 90′s have had a number of vintages to get their ducks in a row, and most of them have worked through the trial and error stage of getting started in the business,” Cook continues. “Consumers are starting to recognize ‘top’ Minnesota wines and wineries, and are now able to differentiate between a good Minnesota wine and one that isn’t up to par.”
Four Daughters is most certainly still in the trial and error stage, but so far, consider them up to par. Osborne is currently experimenting with all kinds of barrel aging, even with whites where the current best practices call to avoid oak at all costs. “With a deft hand, a barrel will make anything better,” he claims. We’ll be sure to revisit that when the reserve whites are released down the road.
Here’s a quick tasting-note rundown of their 2011 Vintage (from best to worst in this author’s humble opinion), which is currently available for sale only on site. If you can’t make it down to Rochester anytime soon, they’ll be pouring and sampling food at the upcoming North Coast Nosh IV this April 14 at the Peace Coffee roastery (details on the event to be released in the coming weeks). Continue reading Four Daughters Vineyard & Winery, Spring Valley, MN »
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