The latest from Twitter: @BirchwoodCafe is featuring artwork by WACSO (check out his lively contributions to some of our stories), @fultonbeer’s Sweet Child of Vine is only $3 a pint @ZenBoxIzakaya, @RickNelsonStrib wants to know how you tip, and @MNBeerActivists ask about the best beer for breakfast time.
Emily Schnobrich / Heavy Table
Ryan Taylor loves cake so much he used to make a weekly pilgrimage to Cub for a big fat personal slice. In 2011, Taylor’s enthusiasm morphed into a company called Cakedy (pronounced cake-uh-dee, a sound that mimics Taylor’s playful attitude) and a mission to create a candy bar that equals the joy of a dense piece of your favorite cake.
A Cakedy candy bar is thick and stubby and kind of charmingly misshapen here and there. Its “cake nougat” filling has a decadent, under-baked quality and a pleasant stickiness that doesn’t overwhelm the way many candy bars can with their oozing caramel and super-sweet edge. The nougat is flecked with teeny candy chips and covered in a thick candy shell.
We tasted the Peanutter and the RedHead, two of Cakedy’s three current flavors. The third is a double chocolate bar with mint candy chips called Choco Chocatus.
The Peanutter is the company’s best seller, and it’s no surprise. Its soft peanut butter cake nougat has all the allure of those childhood Little Debbie Nutty Bars without the thick, mouth-coating quality. It’s subtle and delicately sweetened by butterscotch chips and a chocolate shell.
The RedHead bar pays funky homage to the red velvet cake craze, with bright strawberry cake nougat, strawberry candy chips, and a vanilla candy shell. The combination leans more toward the cloying and artificial, but strawberry is a devil of flavor to convincingly recreate, and the bar’s moist, center-of-the-brownie texture keeps it from entering crappy candy land.
Emily Schnobrich / Heavy Table
Taylor’s sister Krystal is the woman behind the Cakedy recipes, and it was her idea to add mini candy chips to each bar’s filling. Taylor’s small but enthusiastic team did loads of consumer research (on local and national levels) before getting started, down to holding a large public tasting on Nicollet Avenue last year. “Honestly, we’re always tinkering with new things in the kitchen,” says Taylor.
The production team sources ingredients from grocery store chains and Lynn’s Cake and Candy Supplies, and right now they’re working on a caramel-based bar for release this spring. According to Taylor, a consumer flavor contest yielded 100 fancy flavor ideas, “all of which I would like to explore,” he says, “much to Krystal’s chagrin.”
Although he’s new to the Minneapolis-St. Paul food scene, Taylor’s got a big vision: “I’m very ambitious. My ultimate goal is to have Cakedy bars sold everywhere you can find a Snickers. If Snickers is in the UK, I want the Brits chowing down on RedHead. If Snickers is ‘A1′ in the vending machine, then Cakedy is ‘A2.’” After selling Cakedy at local craft markets, Taylor’s small team quickly headed for a wholesale license and began peddling candy to local retailers. Their current target market is large grocery chains, but they hope to also plant seeds in more specialized spots like Sugar Sugar.
You can buy Cakedy in bulk on the company’s website, and you can also find them on the shelves at Sentyrz Grocery in Northeast Minneapolis, as well as a smattering of convenience stores and coffee shops in the metro area. Ann Yin of Local D’Lish has recently begun test-selling Cakedy products in her shop. As a perennial proponent of the small and local food vendor, Yin says, “I want to be a resource for [Cakedy]” by encouraging them to begin using higher quality and local ingredients. She thinks “they have a fun product,” with the goofy, party-favor appeal of a cake pop, and she’d love to see them succeed as a truly local confection.
While Cakedy is reaching out to franchises in the Carolinas and Florida, Taylor feels his product will do especially well here in Minnesota. His spirited foray into candy land has opened his eyes to all that’s bursting on the local food scene: “I think [Minnesotans] enjoy new and unique food experiences, and that’s just what Cakedy delivers.”
Scott Theisen / Heavy Table
Going into the “food entrepreneur” business can be risky: You’re putting your palate, time, and creativity on the line. We talked to three local entrepreneurs with dreams of making it big with their food products.
Scott Theisen / Heavy Table
Lee Zwiefelhofer and Chad Gillard, l.c. finn’s extracts
A beer-fueled conversation in 2009 gave Chad Gillard (above, left) and Lee Zwiefelhofer (above, right) the idea to start making and selling homemade extracts. The two St. Anthony neighbors were talking about the products available at local farmers markets and what kind of products they could come up with to fill an unserved niche.
Not long after that, they came across a recipe for making homemade vanilla extract. Zwiefelhofer recalls, “I just bought some vanilla beans, threw in some alcohol, and let it sit.”
The two were inspired to keep going after that first batch. “If [Lee] could come up with the formula, I’ll be able to sell this,” Gillard recalls thinking. As one of the founders of Aunt Else’s Æbleskivers, Gillard had the marketing experience to get the product out into the public eye. That left Zwiefelhofer, a photojournalist at KSTP-TV (full disclosure: he’s also my co-worker), to try and nail down the perfect formula.
Scott Theisen / Heavy Table
Because extracts are highly regulated, they had to have a specific vanilla bean-to-vodka ratio. They also started trying other ingredients. Soon, they had three recipes ready to go to market: a vanilla extract, a cinnamon extract, and a cardamom extract. They officially launched l.c. finn’s extracts in 2010.
The guys make the extracts in small batches. A batch of vanilla extract takes 30 days to create. The cinnamon takes the longest (six weeks) while the cardamom takes the shortest (four days). They pride themselves on using as many local ingredients as possible. They don’t put additives, sugar, or water in their extracts. “We want it to be local, we want it to be pure, we want it to be about the flavor,” says Gillard.
Scott Theisen / Heavy Table
Right now, the cardamom extract is their biggest seller. Zwiefelhofer and Gillard will soon have an anise extract ready to sell in stores and on their website. They’re also working on a few other flavors, including a pecan, an almond, and a chocolate extract. By the end of the year, they hope to have three more extracts to add to their lineup.
“If we can keep finding the niche [extracts]…I think that’s what will set us apart,” Gillard says.
And they want to be good community stewards, too. Using some of the l.c. finn proceeds, Zwiefelhofer and Gillard plan to create a scholarship to help someone attend Kindred Kitchen, a training program in north Minneapolis that helps food entrepreneurs start their own businesses.
Where to get it: $7.49 a bottle online at www.lcfinns.com, Golden Fig in St. Paul, Local D’Lish in Minneapolis, Byerly’s Culinary Shop in St. Louis Park, Annona Gourmet in St. Anthony, Ferndale Market in Cannon Falls.
Scott Theisen / Heavy Table
Donna Cavanaugh and Bonnie Alton, A Gourmet Thyme Too
This year, Donna Cavanaugh (above, right) will celebrate 20 years since launching her catering company, A Gourmet Thyme. She says her focus on high-end, gourmet food for home-based dinners and parties has caught on, earning her a loyal following without any advertising. Her menus consist of everything from open-faced tenderloin sandwiches and grilled shrimp to spiced beef skewers and elegantly displayed cheese platters. “The flavor is important, but how it looks is just as important,” she says.
Over the years, Cavanaugh developed more recipes, including a cayenne-flavored shortbread (to use as an hors d’oeuvres base) and a brownie. Her clients loved them so much, they suggested she sell them as a side business. She first took that idea up three or four years ago, renting out kitchen space to bake shortbreads and brownies, and selling them at Coastal Seafoods in St. Paul. Continue reading Three Food Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2012 »
by Tricia Cornell on January 16, 2012
Images courtesy of John Ivanko
John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist run Inn Serendipity, an eco-friendly bed and breakfast on their farm in southwestern Wisconsin. It’s where they grow most of their own food, raise their son Liam, earn their living, educate others, write their books, and live their passions.
Ivanko and Kivirist’s passions are many: sustainable energy, integrated communities, vibrant rural life, lively conversations, and, of course, good food.
The couple’s latest book, Farmstead Chef (New Society Publishers, 2011) includes 150 recipes inspired by life on the farm, dishes they cook for their guests and their family. These are homey, personal dishes, some of which, like Latvian pirages (bacon rolls), pierogies, and sauerkraut, reach back into their Baltic and Eastern European heritage. Others are international favorites that have become staples on the American table, like sushi and spring rolls. For the most part, they are temptingly familiar and unintimidating recipes, light on technique and easy to accomplish with ingredients right out of your fridge — or farm.
Tricia Cornell / Heavy Table
Scattered among the recipes are 10 profiles of people from around the country who have inspired — or been inspired by — the principles Ivanko and Kivirist practice at Inn Serendipity.
We talked with John about their new book, their life in an eco-tourism haven, and eating well through a Midwestern winter.
Tell us the story of how Farmstead Chef came to be.
It is the culmination of years of effort here, of experimenting and relearning how to eat local, seasonal, sustainable, fresh foods, and to do it year-round. We’re always limited in resources, so we learned frugality and self-reliance, how to be more mindful and incorporate local foods into recipes over the years.
Our backgrounds are not rural. I grew up in Detroit and Lisa in the Chicago suburbs. The scope of our growing things was annual flowers you put in a pot. Our backgrounds are in marketing; we met in Chicago at an ad agency. Then we went through a really premature midlife crisis. I decided I’d better go walk about and figure out what I wanted to do with my life — and it wasn’t selling Super Nintendo entertainment systems, which is what I was doing at the time. Continue reading Farmstead Chef: Interview with John Ivanko of Inn Serendipity »
Natalie Champa Jennings / Heavy Table
Sometime around late August every red-blooded Minnesota has some variation of this thought, “I could do this. I could set up shop at the Fair. I’d work hard for two weeks and be set for the remaining 50. Maybe go fishing.”
Back in the mid-nineties, Tom Ruhland had that same thought. “I was playing around with puff pastry at the time. That evolved into apple strudel,” Ruhland says. It’s exactly the sort of dish you can imagine buying, on a stick, just off the Midway.
But Ruhland, like most of us, eventually shelved his State Fair dreams. The difference is that he kept refining his apple strudel. In 2002 he and his brother bought a concession trailer and took Ruhland’s Strudel Haus on the road to small fairs and community events. Happy customers kept asking where else they could buy the strudel, so, five years ago, Ruhland’s Strudel Haus jumped on the farmers market circuit.
“The carnie life is a hard life,” Ruhland says. “Now I like making food, freezing it, and having people take it home to feed their families.” Ruhland still takes the concession trailer to a dozen or so events each year, and sells at seven farmers markets during the summer, but you can also find his strudels at a handful of retail outlets and through the grocery delivery service Coborn’s. He even has a growing stream of fundraising clients. It all adds up to 10 to 15,000 strudels a year in 35 varieties.
Natalie Champa Jennings / Heavy Table
On a cold day in December, Ruhland and his friend and assistant Fred Wysoki are at Bonus Vivus, a small shared commercial kitchen in St. Paul, making 60 apple strudels for a German immersion school’s fundraiser. They had ordered 250 in all.
Wysoki arranges sheets of parchment on the metal work surface, and on top of each of those a sheet of frozen puff pastry. Best Brands, in Eagan, makes the dough to Ruhland’s specifications, without trans fats. “It took them a while to get on board with that,” Ruhland says. But he had already talked with enough potential customers to know that’s what his product had to be to find a foothold.
Wysoki, who’s a bigger guy, hefts a 30-pound box of frozen Pepin Heights Haralsons lightly onto his shoulders and takes it out the back door to the sidewalk. Dropping it a few times loosens the apple slices. Ruhland tosses the apples with big, meaty handfuls of what he calls “magic dust”: a mix of flour, sugar, cinnamon, and generous amounts of nutmeg. And maybe a secret ingredient or two. Continue reading Tom Ruhland of Ruhland’s Strudel Haus »
by Tricia Cornell on December 19, 2011
Kate N.G. Sommers/Heavy Table
Joe Gamache figures he’s sharpened close to a million knives in his 20-year career. And he’s seen it all — blades that have lost a quarter-inch or more in width thanks to overzealous sharpening, tips broken off in stubborn screws, and then people like me. I showed up on a recent morning with two full sets of knives, both as dull as cardboard. When the first got too dull, I switched to the second. When the second got dull, I wrote “sharpen knives” on the kitchen message board. That was months ago.
Gamache grumbles good-naturedly about my Cutco bread knife. “These are my least favorite,” he says, “so many notches. But it’s a good knife.” Just minutes later, he and his tapered, diamond-tipped sharpening tool have sharpened every notch in all my blades.
Gamache’s boss at Eversharp, Tom Jensen, got into the knife business almost by accident. His company, Triple C, builds out convenience store and deli interiors, fitting them with fixtures and display cases. Years ago, he built a lot of cases for the Wüsthof distributorship, which used to be next door. “When that closed, I thought, ‘Oh, shoot, I’ve lost a really good customer.’” But he kept building cases for Wüsthof nationwide (still does, as a matter of fact) and the company even gave him a knife set. An avid home cook, Jensen appreciated the quality.
Kate N.G. Sommers/Heavy Table
That convinced Jensen to reopen the Wüsthof distributorship as Eversharp. He brought Gamache, who had worked at the original business, back onto the team. Now Eversharp is the go-to place for professionals and home cooks. It’s also one of two places in the country where you can get a reconditioned Wüsthof. These are department store display models that have been cleaned up and now sell for half the usual retail price.
“If Wüsthof makes it, we sell it,” Jensen says. He also carries Helle hunting knives from Sweden and hand-forged Kikuichi knives from Japan, as well as factory seconds from Duluth-based Epicurean. These are high-quality dishwasher-safe wood cutting boards that pro chefs love. Jensen says shoppers make the trip from Madison, from Iowa, even one chef from Hawaii. He has shipped products out to all 50 states and even to Australia.
This is a busy time of year for Eversharp. There are holiday shoppers, of course, but people are also spending more time in their kitchens. “We get a lot of people who plan ahead and bring in their knives before Thanksgiving,” Jensen says. “But we also get a lot of people the day after Thanksgiving.” So a long day in the kitchen has shown them just how dull their knives have gotten? “Yep. They say, ‘My wife says not to come home until I’ve got the knives sharpened.’”
While Gamache (pictured below) tackled my knives, Jensen and I spent some time talking about proper knife care.
Should I sharpen my own knives at home or do I risk ruining my knives?
You’ll never ruin your knife unless you use an electric sharpener. But using a ceramic sharpener, well, that’s quite an art.
We do teach everyone who comes in here how to use their honing steel. When you’re spending that kind of money on a knife, you should take care of it. A steel won’t sharpen a blade; it doesn’t take any metal off at all. But it will straighten out the fibers. You can’t really see it, but the fibers on a metal blade start to separate with use. It’s something you should do just about every time you pull out your knife. A professional chef will use a honing steel maybe five or 10 or more times a day.
Kate N.G. Sommers/Heavy Table
Sometimes I’m in the middle of a project and I’ll start to feel the resistance — I’ll get nice, clean slices and then it will start to kind of drag. So I’ll wipe off the blade, pull out the steel and then I instantly feel the difference.
What you want to do is hold your steel [perpendicular to] the cutting board, then hold the blade at a 15 to 20-degree angle. You find 90 degrees, half of that is 45, half of that is 22 and a half, so somewhere inside that. It doesn’t have to be exact. Then, with a nice, light pressure, you pull back toward you seven to nine times.
We talk to some people who really aren’t comfortable with the steel, so we tell them to use a tabletop [non-electric] sharpener and run the blade through the fine side two or three times, lightly. Continue reading Tom Jensen of Eversharp Knives in Northeast Minneapolis »
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Spices are important. Wars have been fought over them, fortunes gained and lost by speculating on them, and many a great dish made – or ruined – by their use. The author of the Bible’s Song of Solomon compares his lover to spices, saying: “Your plants are an orchard of pomegranates with choice fruits… with myrrh and aloes and all the finest spices.”
As a chef, the author of 660 Curries, and arguably the state’s reigning authority on Indian food, Raghavan Iyer has had some serious skin in the spice game for quite some time now. But with the launch of his hand-roasted line of spice blends, Iyer has taken that commitment to a new level.
We caught up with Iyer at Midtown Global Market, where he walked us through the creation of his blends and shared with us the awe- and fear-inspiring fact that each individual spice can present up to eight distinct flavors.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
“When it’s used raw as is, you get one flavor,” says Iyer, who speaks with the precision and clarity of a veteran instructor. “When it’s ground, you get a second flavor. When it’s toasted, you get a third flavor. When it’s ground after it has been dry toasted, you get a fourth flavor.”
He pauses for a moment, and then presents the remaining options.
“When it’s sauteed in some kind of a fat, you get flavor number five,” he says. “If it’s ground after it’s sauteed, you get flavor number six. If it’s soaked in some liquid while it’s in the seed form, you get flavor number seven. If it’s ground after it has been soaked in liquid, you get flavor number eight.
“These are not subtleties, these are very distinct flavors,” he adds, emphatically. “All of a sudden… you take that and multiply it by the hundreds of different spices out there, and you’ve peeked into the world of Indian cooking. It’s that sophistication of flavors that come through from using the same ingredient in different ways.”
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
The Subtle Power of Roasted Spices
It’s that profound capacity for complexity that led Iyer to embark upon his latest project: an affordable line of roasted spice blends produced by his own labor at the Kitchen in the Market at Midtown Global Market. The four blends are collectively known as Turmeric Trail — sold online, they retail for $7.50 for a generous 2-oz. package, except for the much more potent Chai Masala, which comes in a third-of-an-ounce size.
Iyer says the idea for the spice line (which shares a name with one of his books) came from his experience as a culinary instructor.
“One of the biggest challenges for my students has always been the whole concept of creating the complexity without being complex,” says Iyer. “They’ve always said: ‘I love the blends of spices, but I don’t know how to do them…’ I’ve taken the mysticism out of it completely and given you the finished product.” Continue reading Turmeric Trail: The Spices of Raghavan Iyer »
Recent Comments