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.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
It’s almost summer and what do we want? Ice cream dripping down our arms, hot dogs in our hands, and all kinds of crap fried on sticks. Yeah, we want to hold our food in our hands. Lucky for us, the list of portable snack spots just keeps on growing. A new restaurant, called Pupuseria La Palmera, is now serving that snack without a season, the El Salvadoran pupusa. Similar to the Mexican gordita and the South American arepa, a pupusa is a thick corn tortilla filled with goodies and fried in a pan.
California native Mauricio Prieto opened La Palmera just two weeks ago, in the old Stabby’s Cafe spot across from the Colossal Cafe in Minneapolis. And while his is a sit-down restaurant, the pupusas his El Salvadoran mother, Ana, makes are perfectly palm-sized, and almost cheaper than a pack of gum.
The restaurant’s full menu offers just three varieties of pupusas: bean and cheese ($1.75, top); a combination of pork, cheese, garlic, onion, and peppers called revueltas ($1.75, bottom); and the classic cheese and loroco ($2). Loroco is a green, tropical flower specific to Salvadoran cooking. It gives the pupusa a unique pungency, something like spinach mixed with okra mixed with parmesan cheese. La Palmera’s loroco pupusa is thick, oozing, and earthy. The revueltas is slightly sweet and never too salty, and the bean and cheese version is highly seasoned and would make a satisfying breakfast (which La Palmera serves every day). The restaurant’s accompanying curtido de repollo, a fermented slaw of cabbage and carrots typically served with pupusas, adds a welcome heat and contrasting crunch to the soft masa cakes.
Then there’s the sun-filled dining room in which you’ll enjoy your pupusas. I guess that’s why they call it “the palm tree.”
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Pupuseria La Palmera
El Salvadoran food in South Minneapolis
4157 Cedar Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55407
612.729.2025
HOURS:
Closed Mon
Tues-Thurs 8am-9pm
Fri 8am-9:30pm
Sat 7am-9:30pm
Sun 8am-7:30pm
CHEF / OWNER: Ana Prieto / Mauricio Prieto
RESERVATIONS / RECOMMENDED: No / No
BAR: None
VEGETARIAN / VEGAN: Yes / Limited
ENTREE RANGE: $1.75-$11
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Susan Pagani / Heavy Table
A tasty nut is a fuel for all things. Like a loyal pet, this small but satisfying portion of protein tucks neatly into our pockets while we adventure outdoors, stays piled at our elbow while we work, and provides a natural complement — and ballast — to our beer while we relax. Lately, our nut of choice has been Barsy’s Almonds “Smokies,” a combination of soy sauce, hickory, and brewers yeast on a roasted almond so addictive that, although we buy them in bulk, they have to be hidden around the house in small quantities so that certain people do not consume the entirety in one sitting.
Barsy’s Almonds are produced by Minneapolis locals Barbara Spenader and Jason Hendrycks. Like many a small-batch food project, Smokies were originally created to be given out as Christmas gifts. “I found a recipe for smoked almonds,” says Spenader, “and I thought, ‘Well, I can do that — and do it better.’ So I started tinkering. The Smokies recipe doesn’t bear any relation to the original, but that was what made me want to see if I could do it.”
Susan Pagani / Heavy Table
Needless to say, friends and relatives went nuts for the savory holiday treat. At that time, Spenader and Hendrycks, good friends as well as business partners, were both working in the creative department of a mail order company. They spent their lunch breaks walking around the neighborhood, talking about how great it would be to start their own company. When people started telling them to sell the nuts, they took it as a sign.
In 2008, they introduced Smokies at the Midtown Farmers Market, where they were warmly received. Soon, the kind people of Corcoran neighborhood were offering up suggestions for new flavors. “They’d say, ‘How about something with cinnamon?’ and we’d try to come up with something familiar, but a little more exotic,” says Spenader.
Recipe development at Barsy’s is a slow and painstaking process, sometimes months of trial and error. Neither Spenader nor Hendryks have any professional cooking experience to draw upon, almonds can be a challenging medium — and then there are the parameters they’ve set for themselves: “We never add preservatives or fats,” Spenader says, “we cook them lighter than you’d find in something at the drugstore, and they have to be dry enough to store, but we also have to find ways to keep the ingredients on because we don’t have fat to deliver that flavor.”
Susan Pagani / Heavy Table
So far, in addition to the Smokies, they’ve successfully created two more savories — Hotties and Stuffies — and a couple of sweets aptly named Sweeties and Naughties. The team is currently working on a cumin and garlic almond and something Spenader calls the “double almond,” an intense combination of vanilla and almond flavors. And there’s a honey mustard project that has them both completely stymied: “It’s so easy for it to turn bitter — we can’t seem to stop it from tasting like a like a vitamin capsule came open, which is not the effect we’re looking for!” Spenader says. “The stuff you buy in the store is made with a creepy powder. We don’t want to do that — we want to use real mustard and horseradish.”
Spenader and Hendryks are experimenting with other nut varieties that can be grown locally. Sunflower seeds are easy to source from Minnesota or the Dakotas, but roast so quickly they present a whole new set of challenges. “We’re also looking at hazelnuts,” says Spenader, “but the hazelnut industry is just beginning here. We would need for it to mature to the point where we could get consistent availability and size. But we’re watching it closely — I think we’re going to plant hazelnuts in the yard and see how it goes.”
In the meantime, there are the existing five flavors, which are a fine snack on their own or paired with beer, hard cider, and root beer, as we have done here.
Susan Pagani / Heavy Table
Hotties
Hotties taste of really good barbecue, spicy hot with plenty of smoke, a flash of vinegar, and a lingering sweetness. We like a handful with the fresh, lightly sweet, and peppery Saison Nourrice from Harriet Brewing — though the two do seem to bring out the hot in one another. If you prefer to downplay the spice, you might like the Crispin Cider Lansdowne, which smooths down the heat with mellow fruit and a subtle sweetness that reminds us of graham crackers (in a good way). Continue reading Barsy’s Almonds: A Local Nut for Your Local Beer »
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Anyone who knows a bit about gardening or can find their way around a farmer’s market knows that a tomato is not a tomato is not a tomato — they vary in terms of size, flavor, lifespan, and so forth. Bushel Boy Farms, the Owatonna-based grower that puts fresh tomatoes on local shelves on a year-round basis, have begun marketing a new variety of tomato: bigger, supposedly more “fresh-from-the-garden”-tasting Bubba tomatoes.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
The first thing we noticed upon approaching our Bubba samples were that they had the fragrance of garden tomatoes — they were redolent with the volatile compounds that makes tomatoes smell, well, so tomato-y. It was a welcome change from the standard-issue store tomato, and a sign of what was to come: Bubbas pack moderate but noticeable flavor, and are not merely crispy and wet, nor hard and fibrous as some durable but unpleasant store tomatoes tend to be. In terms of their innards, Bubbas are a deep, consistent red with evenly distributed seeds.
According to Bushel Boy, the tomatoes vary from $2-3 a pound this time of year, priced similarly to other Bushel Boy vine-ons. They also last about as long on the shelf.
Tricia Cornell / Heavy Table
There’s not a whole lot going on in the crab cakes at Sea Salt Eatery. And that’s exactly as it should be. Each forkful is soft and sweet and just the slightest bit briny.
What makes them so good?
Kyle Krueger, a manager at Sea Salt, says, “It’s probably the fact that we use only fresh crab. Also, a heavy amount of butter, which we’re not really shy about.”
- Aaron Landry / File Photo / Heavy Table
Sea Salt starts with the claw and back meat from a blue-swimming crab, a smaller species that comes from Asia and Australia. A little cilantro, a little onion, some sea salt, a little panko, and that’s it. “We don’t add too much to our crab cakes,” Krueger says. “We want the crab flavor to come out and so you’re not eating a pile of bread.” A dollop of corn salsa and a little — okay, a very generous — drizzle of mayo, and they’re done.
We were there on opening day and saw several other orders of crab cakes go out, among the mountains of fried shrimp and clams. Most people order them on their own with just a little tangy slaw ($10.95 for one, $18.95 for two). You can get also them on a sandwich, as a sort of po’ boy ($11.95), but slapping these deliciously light and un-bready cakes between two pieces of bread seems to miss the point.
(By the way, a perfect side dish with the soft and sweet crab cakes is a basket of crunchy, salty clam fries, $9.95, below.)
Tricia Cornell / Heavy Table
Krueger and his team make between 50 and 200 crab cakes a day, which means… quick calculation… they’ve got as many as 36,000 to go before that sad day in October when Sea Salt closes again.
Sea Salt Eatery
Seafood in Longfellow
4801 Minnehaha Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55417
612.721.8990
OWNERS: John Blood and Chris Weglinski
HOURS:
Open April through October
Daily 11am-8pm
BAR: Wine and beer
RESERVATIONS / RECOMMENDED?: No
VEGETARIAN / VEGAN: Yes / No
ENTREE RANGE: $5-19
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Poorboy Candy founder Kevin Halgrimson started his Champlin-based caramel business earlier this year with a bit of a chip on his shoulder — the company’s name refers to the struggles that small businesses face when they start up, when doing even simple things seems to involve a blizzard of regulations and expenses.
“Buying a [food-safe, state-approved] spatula cost us $15,” says Halgrimson with a touch of amused annoyance. After working with founding partner Mike LaPoint to clear the various hurdles involved in getting Poorboy up and running, Halgrimson (who has a day job as a commercial photographer) set his sights on making his product pop in the marketplace.
Caramels can easily go wrong one of two ways: by being corn syrup-forward and lacking any dairy creaminess and depth, or by being so tough as to be mostly inedible. Poorboy caramels pass both checks with flying colors — although not corn syrup-free, the use of Kemps heavy cream gives them a mellow creaminess, and their texture is both solid enough to offer a satisfying chew and soft enough to avoid destroying fillings.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Poorboy’s prices are competitive with other local upscale caramels (ranging from $8 a quarter pound for classic up to $8.75 a quarter pound for turtle pecan), and at the moment the company’s main challenge is gaining exposure in a big, crowded market and carving out retail space.
At present, the company offers five flavors of small-batch, handmade caramels: Classic, Fleur de Sel, Turtle Pecan, Chocolate Infused, and Espresso Infused. The three flavors we sampled were all strong in their own distinctive ways.
The Poorboy Classic caramel is exactly that — a buttery, rich, deeply flavored treat that is balanced on all fronts. Continue reading Poorboy Candy Caramels of Champlin, MN »
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
At Heavy Table HQ, we get a lot of press releases. Some are immediately intriguing, others baffling — as in, why would CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta’s endorsement of a burrito make us want to eat it? But when we received one about the Stadium Burger at Gold Nugget Tavern & Grille being named the best burger by Metromix Twin Cities for the second year of the row, we decided to check it out for ourselves. With all the hoopla over hamburgers in this area over the past few years, it’s hard to take any “best burger” claim with more than a grain of salt. But hey, we love burgers, so we were up for a field trip to Minnetonka for a taste.
And you know what? The Stadium Burger ($12) is a damn good burger. Does it achieve the Juicy Nookie’s level of gooey-oozy-cheesey-beefy nirvana? Well, no, but it’s a hearty, juicy, and well-seasoned burger that merits a drive from anywhere in the Twin Cities.
Katie Cannon / Heavy Table
Let’s start with the beef. The Stadium Burger features a thick patty grilled on a flat top cooked either “pink” or “no pink.” Unless you enjoy dried-out ground beef, go with pink so you can relish the flavorful juices that flow with each bite. The shiny, crusty, appropriately chewy pretzel bun encasing the burger stands up nicely to the patty’s heft and doesn’t crumble under the squeeze of your fingers — who can stand a wimpy bun, anyway? The slice of American cheese slipped in between the bun and burger isn’t fancy, but it gets the job done with its melty, milky flavor, and if you pay the extra dollar for caramelized onions, which you should, you’ll get a delightful burst of sweetness that balances the saltiness of the beef and cheese. A cup of nacho cheese sauce accompanies the burger, but it’s totally superfluous. Instead, use it as a dip for the top-notch fries — you can’t go wrong with either the traditional or sweet potato variety — and savor your burger as is.
Gold Nugget also likes to call out its special burger of the week — a new one every week of the year, no repeats — but honestly, the Stadium Burger is all you need for a satisfying burger experience. After all, once you go pretzel bun, it’s hard to go back.
Gold Nugget Tavern & Grille, 14401 Excelsior Blvd, Minnetonka; 952.935.3600.
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