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.
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
Sausage might be nature’s perfect food. It provides nearly every culture with a way to use up otherwise unappetizing meat bits, as can be attested by the much maligned blood sausage, haggis, and hot dog. It can be as haute cuisine as the cassoulet and as humble as the beef stick. It will submit without fuss to frying, steaming, smoking, boiling, or barbecuing. Yet in its dry-cured form, sausage requires neither a refrigerator nor a stove, which makes it an excellent travel companion. It performs admirably at the center of the plate, but can play a bit part in a jambalaya without stealing the show. And sausage offers protein in a seemingly endless variety of flavors, from a brown sugar and cloves link at breakfast to a chicken and pistachio boudin blanc at dinner.
Perhaps it’s this possibility of infinite variety that’s driving Chef Matt Paulson of The Sample Room in his recently announced mission to create 100 wholly unique sausages. It may also be a little bit of one-upmanship: Apparently, a customer came in talking up Wisconsin sausages and letting drop that Madison Chef Adam Naumann of La Brioche True Food was trying to create 100. “You know what? I thought, I can do that,” says Paulson, “and it will give me a reason to make more sausage.”
Naumann recently put his 74th sausage on the True Food menu, an English-style figgy pudding, which he described as a looser sausage filled with kalamata crown figs, championship 1,000-day-old Gouda, caramelized onions, a little port, and pork. With all these premium ingredients, his sausages sell at about $14 a pound, but that just seems to make folks buy more of them — he’s selling out of 100-pound batches. As an evangelist of the sausage, Naumann was surprised but pleased to hear there might be some competition. He kind of chortled when we told him: “At least people are starting to make sausage again. It’s a shame what’s been put out there.”
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
On his side, Paulson has eight successful sausages under his belt so far, the relative freedom to do as he likes in the kitchen — as long as it sells — and an admirable dedication, much like Naumann, to making high-quality sausage.
When we reviewed the Sample Room nearly a year and a half ago, Paulson says, they had recently overhauled the menu and were just getting the restaurant’s meat program off the ground. “We developed it slowly but surely,” he says, “but now we get raw cuts in and grind all of our own meat, so I can get the fat ratios I want and make the burgers and sausages the way I think is ideal.”
Paulson says they initially struggled with charcuterie, especially with the sausages. “We started playing around with it back in 2009, but a lot of them would break,” he says. “You’d put a hot liquid in there, maybe a wine reduction, put it in your sausage press — and suddenly it’s ground beef in a tube. You’re like: ‘What the hell did I do wrong?’ It turns out it was temperature and salt. Every little thing that goes into a sausage adds up; get one thing wrong and it fails. We were failing all the time, so we had to stop and reassess.”
What is a sausage failure? A “broken” sausage, as Paulson describes, is like a hollandaise sauce that refuses to emulsify; the ingredients separate and the meat is grainy or crumbles. A sausage like that may not be served as such, but can definitely be repurposed in a chili or a hot dish. According to Paulson, a good sausage doesn’t even need a casing. “It’s dense, but it’s fluffy,” he says. “You bite into it and you get a snap — whether it’s in a casing or not. And there’s no crumble: You can wave it around and it will flap back and forth in your hand. And, whether it’s chicken, beef, or pork, it should have a slightly briny flavor, but the meat should stand on its own.” Continue reading The Sample Room: 100 Sausages or Bust »
Tricia Cornell / Heavy Table
A couple of weeks ago, during the height of cabin season, when lines of cars stretch northward from the Twin Cities, a traveler stopped in Little Falls for a pound of coffee from Reality Roasters.
“Picking up bacon and coffee, eh?” asked owner and roaster Mark Norgren.
Bacon? The traveler’s ears perked up. Bacon would be just the thing.
“Yep. Everybody stops in Little Falls for coffee and bacon,” he explained. Bacon so good that Martha Stewart has been known to order a pound or two. Bacon once noted in a New York Times review, which set off a tsunami of mail orders carrying a flood of Minnesota smoked pork eastward.
This bacon could be found on the main road out of town. Just head back to the highway and follow the line of SUVs, trailers, boats, and pickups packed with coolers to Thielen Meats.
Sure enough. Between the highway overpass and the Holiday gas station is a squat, warehouse-y building with a parking lot that at first seems too big for it, but quickly fills up. Experienced shoppers bring their coolers into the shop. The newly initiated will need to pick up a foam box at the checkout.
Because, while you think you’re just going into Thielen Meats for the bacon, you will, almost inevitably grab some cottage bacon (so hard to find), a package or three of brats (more than a dozen kinds, mixed in house), a summer sausage for snacking at the cabin, a pack of salami sticks for the road, and, heck — they’re an excellent price and you’ve already got the cooler — a couple of Amish-raised whole chickens.
Tricia Cornell / Heavy Table
John and Linda Thielen built the Little Falls store in 1990, but the Thielen meat dynasty began in nearby Pierz in 1909. John’s grandfather, Phil Thielen, ran a general store there, selling furniture, appliances, and other household goods, in addition to meat. When Phil retired he sold the appliance and furniture business to one son and the meat business to the other. John’s father, Lerald Thielen, got the meat side of the business. After Lerald died of a heart attack, John and his brother Keith ran the Pierz store together until 1988. Today Keith’s sons, Matt, Andy, and Joe, run the store in Pierz and John runs the store in Little Falls.
That New York Times article that made Thielen Meats famous and still warrants a mention when out-of-towners come through? It ran in 2002 and actually refers to the Pierz store, which does mail orders (it used to ship nationwide and now only ships in Minnesota). But the bacon it praises is essentially the same, as both Thielen brothers learned the secrets of great bacon from their father.
First the pork: not too fatty, not too lean. And the smoke comes entirely from maple chips, nothing added. “It’s a pretty flavorful smoke. Not as harsh as oak and not as soft and sweet as apple,” John Thielen explains. “We smoke all our own sausage products, bacon, fish, hams, summer sausage, jerkies. If it can be smoked, we smoke it.”
Thielen keeps three smokehouses running full tilt. Each has the capacity to smoke 3,000 pounds of meat a day. Three times 3,000 pounds of smoked meat, that’s what he sells in his retail shop alone. Let’s double-check that: Thielen Meats in Little Falls, MN, sells an average of 9,000 pounds of meat a day? “Yep, that’s about right,” Thielen confirms. “I only have my retail operation,” he adds. Taking orders for shipping would add new layers of inspection and, since he’s busy enough in the shop, he doesn’t have to do that.
Little Falls and its satellite communities have a population of about 25,000, Thielen explains. And the store sits almost exactly where Highways 10 and 371 split, carrying holiday travelers to north and north central Minnesota. Those cabin-goers make up a good portion of Thielen’s weekend business, but, as the woman at the checkout confirms, it’s also a popular stop for locals after church, picking up something special for Sunday dinner.
Tricia Cornell / Heavy Table
What the customers are picking up, Thielen says, has changed quite a bit in the past decade or so. “Fifteen years ago, we probably made one kind of fresh brat. Now we make a dozen or so,” he says. “Country and Polish sausage are still favorites, but we make a lot of sausages we never used to, with wild rice, jalapenos, and cheese. We probably make 15 different kinds of summer sausage, some with blueberries, even. It’s a tremendous variety of products.”
“In this area,” he adds, “it’s mainly German and Polish ancestry. But now we have a fairly large Mexican population, so we make chorizo and other products that German and Polish people are not that familiar with. It’s a never-ending process of change.”
For getting that process rolling and making the Thielen name what it is today, John Thielen gives credit to his parents, Lerald and Dorothy, who built a huge modern processing facility after they bought the business from Phil Thielen. “That was a pretty risky business in a small community in the 1960s.” Dorothy Thielen is now 84 years old and still does the books for the Pierz store.
And when the next generation of cabin-goers heads north, eager for brats and bacon to enjoy by the lake, they will probably be able to pick up smoked meats from Thielen’s.
“My son Michael and daughter Jessie work for me now,” Thielen says. “Hopefully they will both take over when I’m ready to retire.”
Tricia Cornell / Heavy Table
Thielen Meats
Butcher shop and grocery store in Little Falls
300 13th St NE, Little Falls, MN 56345
320.632.2821
OWNERS: John and Linda Thielen
HOURS:
Mon-Thurs 8am-5:30pm
Fri 8am-8pm
Sat 8am-5pm
Sun 10am-4:30pm
Scott Theisen / Heavy Table
Turkey and I go way back. I can easily say I’ve eaten it a whopping 27 times in my life. Since I could chew, I’ve had the bird once a year on Thanksgiving (sadly, I’m not that into the sandwich form).
Like most American-born, English-bred kids, the holiday was synonymous with an outpouring of friends, family, and good food. As my parents live in England, it ended up being more friends than family, and more Brits than Americans; but the turkey was always there, barely fitting into the oven.
Turkey is native to the Americas but has long been the bird of choice at Christmas time in England, so my mom never had trouble finding a big bird. No doubt what we ate was the Broad Breasted White that is ubiquitous on tables across the US. Over the years, I usually made my way back overseas for the Thanksgiving celebrations, and if not, I’ve found some way to enjoy the recurrent feast at a friend’s home in the states.
Scott Theisen / Heavy Table
This year’s holiday was a little different. I had recently moved from New York to Minnesota where apparently turkey is the new pigeon — I’d seen them on the side of the road, scared them into the woods, and heard their signature gobble in the distance. These birds are the offspring of a trade between Minnesota and Missouri (among other states) back in the ’70s. Walleye and other wild birds were exchanged for repopulating Minnesota’s extinct turkey landscape. Given the apparent abundance of birds now inhabiting my home state, I figured it was high time to wrangle one on my own. So, with the game conditions intact, I tried my hand at bow hunting. And for the first time, squirrels were the only creatures I saw. Continue reading Turkey and Me »
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
Karen Cross, Liz Hare, Peat Willcutt, and their neighbors are living a revolution, but it would be near impossible to notice unless you sneak into their shared backyard on Nicollet Island. They and other members of their low-income housing co-op worked to turn it and a nearby vacant lot into a fruit and vegetable garden and barnyard populated by a sundry congregation of ducks, geese, chickens, and rabbits. The residents are just as diverse, ranging from artists to cooks to musicians, and many of them hold at least an amateur-level interest in low-impact living. Soon, their operation won’t be the only one: Two more rabbitries will be starting up on the island this year.
While it’s fairly easy for a hip urbanite to understand the appeal of raising laying hens in the city (or the suburbs), the practice of raising and slaughtering meat rabbits, which is known as cuniculture, can be somewhat off-putting. Willcutt credits his interest in urban agriculture to his maternal grandmother, who spent her childhood living in wartime Germany. “You were given a 1,000-calorie-a-day ration card, so they had chickens, ducks, and geese, and the neighbor had a milk goat and kept rabbits and pigeons too. Without those alternative food sources, they would have had very little protein for a family of four. If it weren’t for those animals, I wouldn’t be here!” Hare, who incidentally has difficulty stomaching rabbit meat due to their uncanny link to her last name, grew up in a community of hunters. She remembers “coming home from school to find something dead on the doorstep… that was food.”
Raising your own meat is about taking ownership, says Willcutt. “Food is more intimate than sex, to take a phrase from [The Splendid Table host] Lynne Rossetto Kasper. If you’re going to put that into your body, it becomes a part of you.” For him, eating factory-farmed, anonymous meat would be akin to internalizing the horrific conditions at most commercial stockyards and slaughterhouses. By rearing rabbits and poultry, it is possible to become completely self-reliant for one’s protein needs. “What’s important,” says Willcutt, “is giving the animal a full, rich, natural life and a quick, humane death.”
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
Not many Americans can (or want to) reminisce about their food before it became food; Cross, Hare, and Willcutt cherish their ability to say, “This hen was a good hen up until we turned her into soup!” Cross laments the majority of Americans’ alienation from their food, for whom “milk comes from a carton and meat comes in styrofoam.” To counter that kind of depersonalization, Willcutt names all of the animals: For example, the rabbits all have vegetable-inspired names, such as Sugar Beet and Parsnip. An acquaintance of mine who raises meat rabbits in Britain gives her rabbits excruciatingly dorky British names like Mr. Plantagenet, Lord GaGa, and the names of pretty much every character in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.
The rabbits on the Nicollet Islanders’ property come in two breeds: Creme d’Argent and Champagne d’Argent. Champagne d’Argents are known as one of the oldest breeds of domesticated rabbit, and Cremes are derived from that breed. According to Willcutt and the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, the first true rabbit breeders were Medieval French monks, who raised them to eat as meat “alternatives” during fasting periods such as Lent. The story goes that fetal and newborn rabbits, known as “laurices,” were declared to be fish by papal authorities in order to lessen to burden of fasting. This effectively circumvents the dietary restrictions laid out in Deuteronomy 14:7, which prohibit Catholics from eating rabbits due to their “unclean” nature. In a similar vein, the Vatican officially found capybaras to be fish as well in a concession to the Church’s South American followers. Makes sense. If Jesus can turn water into wine, why not lagomorphs and rodents into fish? These days, most rabbit enthusiasts prefer to eat slightly older rabbits.
Though the most typical meat rabbit breeds are the Californians and New Zealands, Willcutt chooses to raise Argente types because of their historical significance and contemporary rarity. According to the American Rabbit Breeders Association, there are only 1,000 Creme d’Argents left in the world. Flatland Farm, based in southern Minnesota, raises both breeds. The Argente types owe their rarity to the overwhelming popularity of white rabbits, whose flesh turns out pinker. Argente rabbits’ flesh, on the contrary, is darker and is viewed by retailers and consumers as less appetizing. Otherwise, their taste and size are very similar to other types of domesticated meat rabbit.
For the fledgling urban agrarian, it might be useful to note that rabbits are much easier to keep than chickens. They don’t require special feed: just grass clippings and hay. Compared to, say, cows and pigs, rabbits are much more efficient metabolizers. Their famous breeding habits are quite efficient as well. Once pregnant, a rabbit doe will give birth in about a month. Rabbits’ space requirements are also modest: Willcutt and company keep theirs in a small section of a shed, though most cuniculturalists prefer to keep them in individual stackable cages. Thanks to the breeds’ compatibility with colder climates, Willcutt only needs to bring the rabbits indoors during periods of severe (i.e., -20°F) weather. An excellent guide to raising rabbits may be found at Rudolph’s Rabbit Ranch. Novella Carpenter’s book, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, also goes into great detail regarding her adventures in rabbit husbandry.
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
Depending on the age of a given rabbit, it can be classified as either a “fryer” or “roaster.” Fryers are young rabbits, about 3 months in age, and can be substituted for chicken in any preparation. Roasters are more mature and should really only be stewed or braised. They can weigh up to 9 or 10 pounds, with enough meat to feed several people. Depending on the rabbit, the taste can be bland and chickenesque or pungent. Wild rabbits tend to taste gamier overall, as many hunters and friends-of-hunters can testify.
Fortunately for Minneapolitan rabbit farmers, city ordinances allow residents to keep a maximum of three rabbits that are over four months old at any given time. (St. Paul is noticeably more relaxed when it comes to non-traditional pets.) As most meat rabbits are supposed to be slaughtered at three months anyway, Minneapolis law works very well with a backyard rabbitry’s schedule.
Killing a rabbit is a piece of cake, as absolutely terrible as that sounds. You could go for a swift blow to the back of the neck with your hands or a broomstick, which also correlated to an illegal move known as the “rabbit punch” in boxing circles. Willcutt either smashes the rabbit’s brains in with a brick or quickly decapitates it. One tool that is gaining in popularity is the Rabbit Wringer, a device which enables one to slaughter a rabbit with a simple pulling motion. Unless you opt to send your animals away to a slaughterhouse, there’s really no way to get around the ugly fact that you’re killing an animal for its flesh.
Rabbit meat is growing in popularity in urban centers — New York City’s Babbo Ristorante and the Napa Valley’s French Laundry frequently feature rabbit dishes. Several restaurants in the Upper Midwest have also embraced it, including The Creamery in Menomonie, WI and Twin Cities restaurants Bar La Grassa (Orecchiette with Braised Rabbit, $8 / $16), The Craftsman (rabbit confit, $24), Restaurant Alma (Rabbit & Polenta, $13), and St. Paul’s Little Szechuan (Big Sister Diced Rabbit, $8.95). In fact, Chef Mike Phillips of The Craftsman is actively trying to track down rabbit breeders in the Twin Cities in order to bulk up his supply.
Continue reading Raising and Eating Rabbits in the Big City »
Kate NG Sommers / Heavy Table
Editor’s note: Readers may find certain descriptions and photos included in this story to be unsettling.
The choice used to be simple: Either you ate meat or you were one of those new-age granola types who had nothing better to do with their time than wail about the poor animals who died to support such a degenerate habit. But every new blow to the conventional meat industry inspires a new option – a new way of turning your back on the modern mass-production of meat.
Those who fear the now-routine E. coli outbreaks in hamburger choose not to eat ground beef, or choose to grind it themselves. Those appalled by the treatment of confined animals choose to eat meat only from those that range freely. Those skeptical about the health of animals fed hormones and antibiotics choose to eat only organic. And whether you participate in any of these alternatives or not, there’s not much to be said against them. Nothing wrong, after all, with knowing your farmer, or grinding your own burger.
In fact, the very attractiveness of the “better meat” movement, if we can group all of these options under that title, creates its biggest PR problem. The main criticism of the shift toward purer, less processed, more humanely raised meat is that not everyone can enjoy it. Better meat, the argument goes, is inaccessible to the large majority of the population, who simply can’t afford to indulge in $15 pastured chickens or $5 pounds of custom-ground beef.
Kate NG Sommers / Heavy Table
It’s a well-meant criticism, and true in many ways, but it does ignore one small piece of the puzzle. Even those of modest means can hop off the industrial bandwagon and get fresh, minimally processed meat on the cheap. The cash-strapped consumer can verify personally that the animal she’s getting the meat from is healthy and that its slaughter, cleaning, and preparation meet her requirements. The catch? She has to kill it herself. That’s the way it goes in the self-slaughter business, on display in living color at Jeffries Chicken Farm in Inver Grove Heights.
Kate NG Sommers / Heavy Table
She just won’t come in. Mike Lorentz and I survey the scene from a viewing deck above the kill floor of the meat processing plant he and his brother Rob own. Thirty to forty animals a day come through here, destined to be someone’s pork roast, ribeye, or hamburger, but this one refuses to play along. The cow stands just outside the knock box, the pen which holds the animal closely so that the stunner can do his job and render her senseless before she is bled out and begins the transition from animal to meat. We can’t hear the stunner, but we can see him leaning over the knock box, waving his arms, shaking a rattle stick to startle the cow into movement. He has a prod (not an electric one; Mike can’t remember the last time they used one of those) that he taps her back and sides with, to again try to jolt her to move forward. But she won’t go. So in the end, he takes the captive bolt gun, leans over the far end of the pen one last time, and fires. The cow collapses in the entryway, and all four people working on the kill floor leave their stations to drag what is now perhaps 1,200 pounds of dead weight into the room.
Between the coaxing and the hauling, no small feat even for four men toughened by daily eight-hour shifts of manual labor, just getting the cow into the room takes about fifteen minutes. “Can you imagine if you had to get 5,000 done today,” Mike turns to me and says, referring to the major processors that produce most of the meat in this country, “you couldn’t afford the luxury of this much time…but here, this is the way we do things. It’s inconvenient, it’s a lot more work for the guys to do it this way, but they did it instead of just beating on the animal.”
Lorentz Meats has been doing things a little bit differently from the mainstream ever since the Lorentz family started the business in Cannon Falls in 1967. During decades when the industry’s focus was on building ever-bigger plants to handle the mass production of inexpensive meat, Lorentz stayed small, partnering with local farmers who might only bring one animal a month to slaughter. It wasn’t until the year 2000 that the Lorentz brothers, who had taken over the family business from their parents a few years before, built a bigger, more modern plant. With the new building, they were able to meet requirements for USDA approval, which in addition to their organic certification made them an attractive partner for farms in the booming market for natural and organic meat. Now they process about 10,000 animals a year with a staff of 60 employees.
Kate NG Sommers / Heavy Table
But as they’ve grown – and they’re still tiny relative to the Cargills and Smithfields of the world – they’ve stayed unique. The existence of the viewing deck on which Mike and I stand is ample evidence of that. The Lorentz brothers built it so that their customers could verify with their own eyes how Lorentz goes about its business. What’s more, they make it available to anyone who wants to drive out to Cannon Falls and see for themselves what the slaughter and processing of meat entails. In an industry whose main marketing strategy is to stay out of the public eye, this sort of transparency is unheard of. It won kudos from none other than Michael Pollan, who gave Lorentz an honorable mention for what he calls their “glass abattoir” in the foodie bible The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Partly as a result of this exposure, Lorentz gets hundreds of visits a year from people curious about just how their food makes it to their table.
Of course, that’s not to say that everyone who wants to eat natural or organic or humanely-raised food wishes to be personally acquainted with every detail of its production. However, even those who don’t want to think about what happens to their grass-fed beef after it’s done frolicking on the green pastures of home would probably like to assume that its end befitted its life. Lorentz Meats is there to ensure that that happens; to complete the circle between the good farm and the consumer who goes out of his way to support it.
Recent Comments