The latest from Twitter: @Peace_Coffee plays cupid with “Caffeinate Your Cutie,” @triplerockmpls is serving @surlybrewing Mild at $3.50 a pint, @bittercube celebrates the long-anticipated opening of Eat Street Social, and @Masu_NE will feature a suggestive little Valentine’s Day roll through Tuesday.
by John Garland on March 30, 2011
John Garland / Heavy Table
There’s more to Iowa cheese than Maytag Blue. Yes, that raw-milk wonder may be the state’s most coveted, but in the softly rolling hills just miles from the Missouri border, the Musser family is producing cheese worthy of similar acclaim at the Milton Creamery. Their flagship specialty is Prairie Breeze, an award-winning Alpine-style cheddar, made with vegetarian rennet and milk from Amish farms no more than 15 miles from Milton (the bulk comes from within three).
Prairie Breeze accounts for around 3,000 of Milton’s current weekly output of 3,700 pounds of cheese. It’s a dry, sharp cheese, aged at least nine months, with a slight nuttiness and a tangy finish. Bridget Haugh at Lake Wine & Spirits, who sells it for $11.99 a pound, says, “In all the time we’ve been selling it, I think I’ve only had a couple people not like it. And we sell a lot of it.” It is a very accommodating cheese — non-pungent, slightly sweet, creamy, and flavorful.
Courtesy of Milton Creamery
Rufus and Jane Musser, Mennonites themselves, moved their family to Milton from Pennsylvania in 1992 looking for cheaper land to dairy farm. In the early 2000s, looking for a way to add value to his farm during a stretch of low milk prices, Rufus became set on cheese making, eventually breaking ground on the creamery in 2005. They started by producing cheese curds and commercial-grade cheeses, but soon figured they had to do better to make it a financial success.
“We thought, ‘How are we going to be lucky enough to hit a bullseye in the dark?’” he says, on the perils of entering the specialty cheese market. “People are in the cheese world for their whole life looking for breaks.” He dreamed of emulating a European-style aged cheddar that he felt no one was producing in the Midwest. With a consultant’s help he obtained the right cultures, made preliminary batches, and debuted it at farmers markets. When it was well received, he brought on a new investor, ramped up production, and obtained his first distributor: Classic Provisions in Plymouth.
Trying to get an Iowan, much less a Mennonite, to brag much about their work is next to impossible. Let’s instead allow their laurels to do the talking – Prairie Breeze was tops in the open hard cheese class at the 2009 US Championship Cheese Contest and in the 12-24 month cheddar class at the 2009 American Cheese Society championships. It also scored an impressive best-in-category on cheddar’s home turf at the 2010 World Cheese Awards in London – the only American entry along with 10 British cheddars to medal in the Mature Block Creamery Cheddar class. Musser’s son, head cheesemaker Galen, won that first gold at the age of 17.
John Garland / Heavy Table
“A lot of credit for our success has to go to the families who produce our milk,” says Rufus. The cows are hand-milked and pasture grazed on small family farms. Of course, this old-school process isn’t laboratory sterile. The bucket-under-the-cow method means a certain level of ambient additions to the milk. Rufus draws a parallel with Swiss cheese makers in the mid-20th century, who found that the move to milking machines during the winter excluded the natural bacteria from the milk that was essential to developing the unique characteristics of their cheese. “We’re doing the same thing, in a more controlled process,” he says.
That’s precisely what makes Prairie Breeze such a charming cheese – the flavor expresses the terroir of Southern Iowa and the people who make it. Rufus calls Prairie Breeze “consistent, within a range.” He personally enjoys the Prairie Breeze made from late autumn milk, when the cows have been eating the lush end-of-season grasses.
Milton Creamery is expanding to meet demand. A new aging room, currently under construction, will supplement their current set of refrigerated semi-trailers. It’s a nice mix of old and new world techniques in Milton. Try Prairie Breeze with your favorite Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, or brown ale.
Prairie Breeze can be found in most higher-end grocery stores and co-ops in the Metro.
by Elizabeth Millard on January 21, 2011
Lars Swanson / Heavy Table
“I’d have to say the one about killing and eating the squirrel was probably the most popular video,” says Daniel Klein, as he pauses over a comparatively prosaic bowl of corn chowder. “People were really interested in that for some reason. I guess because we see squirrels all the time, and it’s easy to wonder what they might taste like.” The answer, not surprisingly, is: like a gamey chicken.
As creator of the online documentary series The Perennial Plate, Klein has taken on all kinds of quirky adventures in eating, but not in the Andrew Zimmern, “Bizarre Foods” manner of exploration. Instead, he’s been interested in the type of sustainable, local activities that define traditional Minnesotan life, like hunting wild turkey, ice fishing, and dealing with road kill.
Along the way, he’s also shared recipes for apple bread pudding, captured a picnic held by opera singers, profiled small farms, and made cheese. He doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of life as a carnivore — in fact, he embraces the chance to really explore what it means to watch an animal go from woods or field to stewpot and plate — and some of his videos include a discussion of how to cut up a lamb, and what’s involved with butchering a pig.
Lars Swanson / Heavy Table
In looking for material, the videos fall in line with Klein’s mission to choose pursuits that he thinks are interesting or fun to learn. For example, he plans to go spear fishing in Grand Rapids, MN for an upcoming video, and picked the topic mainly because he met someone who would teach him the skill. Continue reading Daniel Klein and The Perennial Plate »
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Not too far from the Twin Cities, out on the now-frozen agricultural land surrounding Baldwin, WI, there are fish. Thousands of fish. They teem and circle, feed and jostle for space in big blue tanks located inside of a greenhouse complex run by an enterprise called Future Farm Food and Fuel.
Future Farm is a combination of aquaculture and hydroponics, which is to say fish raised for their meat and plants grown floating on rafts, their roots dangling into nutrient-rich water. But beyond being a place where things grow and are harvested, the Farm is a kind of commercial laboratory, an experiment to see if innovative energy strategies and sustainable bio-systems can produce a model for the agriculture of tomorrow.
The system used on the farm is mostly self-contained and extremely water efficient. “A typical head of lettuce in Arizona or California might take 22 gallons of water,” says Steve Meyer (above), who is Future Farm’s co-owner and director of operations. “In something like this, it’d be about four. It’s very green.”
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
The farm’s fish of choice is the tilapia, a freshwater-dweller that has become a global food staple. “It grows so fast,” notes Meyer. “You can take tilapia at half a gram and grow them to a pound and a quarter in six months.”
At the heart of the Future Farm’s operation are two big loops of water. The first loop transfers heat — it connects the farm to its neighbor and partner business, the Baldwin Dairy. The second loop transfers nutrients and connects large blue tanks teeming with tilapia to large floating rafts of hydroponic salad greens and herbs.
The heat-providing loop came online recently, in December 2010. An anaerobic digester on the nearby Baldwin Dairy takes its cows’ ample manure and turns it into methane gas, which is burned off to heat the loop’s water. That water is pumped over to the Future Farm, where it does two things:
First, it provides radiant heat to the building by running through its specially designed floor.
Second, it heats the water in the second loop without actually co-mingling with it; the pipes just run adjacent to one another and exchange heat.
Ryan Coghlan / Courtesy of Future Farm Food and Fuel
“The number one expense for aquaculture in this environment would be heat,” says Meyer. “The footprint of this building is 27,000 square feet. The estimate of heat loss for this building was about 4.5 million BTUs / hour heat loss — we’re heating it with about 1.3 million BTUs. We were able to design and run this place so it doesn’t need nearly the heat that you’d expect.” Continue reading Future Farm in Baldwin, Wisconsin »
by Elizabeth Millard on January 14, 2011
Elizabeth Millard / Heavy Table
Nestled in a bucolic, quiet landscape of rolling corn fields and stately barns, Angelica’s Garden seems like just another cozy, sweet farm house with a huge stack of wood for the stove inside, a trio of furry Highland cows, and a couple of dogs who pretend to be tough but turn into fast friends when you lean down to pet them. The farm is just one of several organic vegetable growers within driving distance of the Twin Cities, but farmer Angelica Hollstadt stands apart by making some of the most kickass kimchi, sauerkraut, and pickled beets in the Upper Midwest, maybe even on the planet.
If that sounds like hyperbole, you probably haven’t tried any yet. Hollstadt laughs affectionately as she describes some of her slightly obsessed, addicted customers, like the trucker who believes the kimchi keeps his cancer in remission, or the co-op shoppers who strip the shelves of her sauerkraut. Hollstadt herself has become zealous about drinking the kimchi juice that comes as a by-product of her production. She sets a large jar of it on her kitchen table, and the liquid’s reddish tint and murky consistency make it seem like a strange, wicked brew that could cure just about anything.
“Maybe this will be my next product, who knows?” she says, opening the jar so its pungent, fermented aroma can be fully appreciated. “Would people really drink kimchi juice? Personally, I think they should.”
Elizabeth Millard / Heavy Table
Hollstadt wasn’t always such a fierce advocate of the fermented life, but she did feel a pull to live off the land. In 1996, she began renting farmland near Stillwater while she lived in St. Paul with her future husband, Mike. She grew vegetables that could be made into two initial products, pizza and zucchini relish. As the operation grew, she and Mike eventually settled in Elmwood, WI on a 44-acre spread. Her husband works on the farm part-time when he’s not doing construction, but it’s mainly a one-woman, one-dream type of operation.
Although Hollstadt worked at some community supported agriculture (CSA) farms, she didn’t feel that the set-up was quite right for how she wanted to farm. “It’s a different mindset, in my opinion,” she says. “With a CSA, you have to work pretty hard at pleasing customers and interacting with them through events like ‘field days’ when they come to the farm. That’s great if that’s the kind of person you are, but we’re somewhat reserved and it just didn’t feel like a good fit. So, I began thinking about providing something for customers in another way.”
She noticed that as CSAs were booming, farm-made products like salsas, relish, and other canned goods were scarce in the marketplace. Called “value-added products” in farmer parlance, these types of items are sometimes part of a farm’s strategy, but rarely its sole focus. Hollstadt felt that by whipping up some goods based on her mother’s recipes, she could provide locally made, organic, wholesome foods that fell in line with her larger philosophies about health and wellness.
“Food really does matter,” she says. “The longer I do this, the more I see that eating in a healthy way is so integral to everything. It’s about finding food that sustains us, that nourishes us, and that’s what drives me to make what I make.”
Fermented foods, she points out, have health benefits galore, thanks to their mix of good bacteria and enzymes. They can help reduce high cholesterol levels, boost immunity, and create a stellar digestive system. The sharp tastes of kimchi and sauerkraut may not be for everyone, but those who love them will certainly appreciate the freshness of Hollstadt’s offerings. She’s meticulous about using only organic ingredients, getting the products from field to store in a timely manner, and chucking out whole batches if they don’t meet her approval. Just a few weeks ago, she rejected nearly 1,000 pounds of sauerkraut because she felt the batches were too mushy (the farm’s pigs, cattle, and chickens didn’t complain, though, since they love to eat the stuff).
Elizabeth Millard / Heavy Table
“People will occasionally tell me my stuff is too expensive, and I’ll just shake my head,” she says. “This is an art form, not a production line.”
In her diminutive commercial kitchen in the farmhouse’s basement, Hollstadt makes the kimchi and sauerkraut in large crocks that still retain a slight vinegar smell even after she’s scrubbed them. Garlic from her land is heaped to one side and a huge bag of ginger has to be shuffled aside so she can reach another best-selling product, pickled beets. Hollstadt also makes a distinctive blend of cabbage and ginger that’s popular at the co-ops that feature her items, and she’s continually thinking of potential new products.
Don’t look for that kimchi juice in the near future, but next summer, customers may find her Angelica’s Garden line expanded with fridge pickles, new combinations of fermented vegetables, and, most likely, plenty of cabbage options.
“The focus will continue to be on what’s best for my health, but also what’s fun to make,” she says, joking that she has no problem plunging her hands into crocks full of pungent, fermenting vegetables and smelling of garlic and onions most days. “Everything here is part of my wellness program.”
by John Garland on January 11, 2011
Courtesy of the University of Minnesota
Have you found it difficult to get into Minnesota wine? You’re certainly not alone and your skepticism is warranted. It’s often hard enough to determine if a certain California Cabernet will be any good, much less to figure out what Marechal Foch is. You’re content to pick up a bottle you’re familiar with, rather than spending $15 on some unknown grape from Minnesota and crossing your fingers that it doesn’t taste like drain cleaner.
Courtesy of the University of Minnesota
But if “try new things” is found anywhere on your 2011 resolutions list, Minnesota wines are a great place to start. If the Minneapolis microbrew renaissance has taught us anything, it’s that there are a lot of innovative and talented individuals making booze in our state, and it’s no different with wine. Our university is the preeminent research facility for the development of grapes bred to thrive in cold climates. These grapes have jumpstarted wine industries across America and one of these grapes holds what this author believes is the gateway for broader acceptance of local vino — La Crescent. It’s a grape that is painfully easy to enjoy and makes wines of a consistently high quality.
A quick primer on cold climate grapes: For the most part, they tend to have a more fruit-forward flavor profile, higher levels of acidity and, for reds, a smaller amount of noticeable tannin than European grape varieties. This is extremely beneficial for white grapes like La Crescent, the paragon of cold-climate breeding. “It’s an extremely cold-hardy grape,” says Peter Hemstad, U of M Horticultural Scientist, owner of St. Croix Vineyards in Stillwater, and original breeder of the grape. “If one were to graph the 100 top grape varieties for quality vs. cold hardiness, La Crescent would be the outlier — the greatest combination of both.”
La Crescent has very high levels of natural sugars and acidity, and therefore lends itself to be finished as an off-dry or semi-sweet wine. The aromatic structure of the grape is delightful — apricot is most noticeable in the field. Tangerine, lime, and other citrus are common flavors in the finished wine, while tropical fruits like pineapple and even herbal notes sometimes enter the fold. It’s fruity and crisp while not being overwhelming. “The fact that it is very aromatic and often sweet makes it a wine that’s easy for people to drink,” says Katie Cook, U of M Enology Project Leader. “It works well for those who don’t consider themselves wine drinkers, as well as those who appreciate a good sweet white wine paired with dessert.” La Crescent’s acidity, flavors, and stylistic profile draw striking comparisons to Riesling (and you’ll often find it in the same skinny, Mosel-style bottle).
La Crescent is gaining traction all over the Northern US, with great examples coming from Wisconsin, Michigan, and Vermont, among others. Hemstad is even in the process of introducing the grape overseas, most recently in China. “Wine snobs can’t look down their noses at [La Crescent],” he says. “They can’t say it’s a poor quality wine. If it’s properly grown and made, it’s irrefutably good. It really reflects the potential that Minnesota wine grapes have.” Select from the following list to decide for yourself.
John Garland / Heavy Table
Five nice La Crescents to get you started:
Saint Croix Vineyards La Crescent, Stillwater, MN. [list of retailers] As you might expect the original breeder of the grape to do, Hemstad makes a spectacular La Crescent. It’s full of orange citrus and an almost tropical sweetness nicely balanced by biting acidity throughout the sip. A very refreshing, crisp, and structured wine. His dessert-style La Crescent is also worth a try, having won the Minnesota Governor’s Cup at the 2010 International Cold Climate Wine Competition (ICCWC).
Fieldstone Vineyards La Crescent, Redwood Falls, MN. [list of retailers] This gold medal winner at the 2010 ICCWC is quite similar to Saint Croix’s. It has a brilliant citrus nose and a sip full of apricot in a pleasantly sweet body with a tangy finish. It’s not sweet enough to be a dessert wine, but would be perfectly interchangeable with Riesling at the dinner table (think Thai dishes, baked ham, and seafood).
Northern Vineyards “White,” Stillwater, MN. [website] Northern Vineyards also bottles a 100% La Crescent called Yellow Moccasin. It’s a fine effort, but not as good as their most popular bottle, simply termed “White.” It’s La Crescent with other blending grapes made into a barely-there, clean and fruity style much reminiscent of the Symphony grape from California or Ugni Blanc-Colombard blends from Southwestern France.
John Garland / Heavy Table
Morgan Creek Vineyards “Zeitgeist,” New Ulm, MN. [list of retailers] It’s unfortunate that it’s not marketed by its varietal name, but Zeitgeist is a fine La Crescent. The nose is lightly perfumed with apricot / tangerine flavors while the sip tends more towards apples, with a sweetness that slowly builds to a nice off-dry finish.
Crofut Family Winery La Crescent, Jordan, MN. [list of retailers] A slightly sweeter tasting offering, Crofut’s 2008 La Crescent (they actually vintage-date some wines) is a lot like a late harvest-style Riesling. The sweetness is more pronounced, the acidity more of a supporting player. It’s full of sweet apricot and orange fruit, drying off a bit to a more acidic finish. It may taste cloying to fans of dry wines, but would be a fine choice with an apple tart for dessert.
Scott Theisen / Heavy Table
Nearly a decade ago, Julie and Vince Maro started raising 25 chickens to educate their young sons and create healthy, organic food for the family. Now, their Coon Creek Family Farm near Eau Claire, WI, raises 800 to 1,000 chickens and 300 turkeys per year, and their operation has earned praise from Andrew Zimmern, who called their turkeys “the best I have ever had,” and The Cornucopia Institute*, which ranked Coon Creek’s eggs as the nation’s best.
Impressive, considering the Maros practically started on a whim and sell their wares at the local farmers market only when they’re not attending their son’s cross country meets. The couple heartily invites customers out to their farm to chat, see the birds in the field, and buy their turkeys and chickens and eggs — accomplishing a small-town feel with chef-quality products.
Scott Theisen / Heavy Table
Over the years, the Maros have learned what works on their little farm, relying on the highest quality upbringing for the best-tasting birds.
Their philosophy is to “know you have taken the best possible care of them, treated them with respect all the way up to the point of death,” Vince said.
Video produced by Scott Theisen
The early stage of a bird’s life is the most critical. Having the chicks develop in the right brooder creates a blueprint for their eventual lives, and the Maros’ brooder, inspired by a 1940s model, is two square frames, stacked cockeyed, with lamps inside. If the chicks are too hot, they leave. If they’re too cold, they come inside directly under the lamps.
“We keep a careful eye on everything, especially when they’re tiny, because what happens in this room will impact the rest of their lives,” Julie said. “We are really vigilant about keeping them clean and healthy and dry.” Continue reading Coon Creek Family Farm of Mondovi, WI »
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