No-mayo potato salad, grass-fed mini burgers, crunchy swai with basil-goat cheese potato puree, curried pea soup, pickled rhubarb (etc.), white bean ragout, Italian sausage grill with gnocchi, leftover oatmeal pancakes, and cheddar chive buttermilk biscuits with extra creamy scrambled eggs.
by James Norton on October 27, 2009
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Earlier this month, Heavy Table photographer Becca Dilley took a day to visit Wisconsin cranberry country and watched the harvest come in. Wetherby Cranberry Company is one of most publicly accessible cranberry marshes in the state of Wisconsin, which in turn provides 55 percent of the world’s supply of the fruit.
A ramp (above) is set up for the purpose of giving a modified tractor access to the marsh.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
The harvester then enters the shallow water.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Once in the marsh, the harvester agitates the cranberry plants, knocking the berries loose. In a good year, each acre of Wetherby marsh produces about 200 100-pound barrels of berries (about 20,000 pounds).
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
The berries float to the surface, where they are corralled, pumped up, and trucked to a gravity sorter that brings them into the processing plant. Here, they’re sized, further sorted, and packaged for retail and direct sales.
For more on Wisconsin cranberries, check out our cranberry blossom tour and recipes.
by James Norton on July 23, 2009
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
If you plan to marry a Wisconsin cranberry farmer, prepare for a double commitment.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
“My husband Jim was from the old school where you get down on your knees and propose,” recalls Wetherby Cranberry Company co-owner Nodji Van Wychen. “And I said: ‘Well, you have to marry the marsh and myself, because we go together.’”
Jim took Nodji up on the offer, and the two have spent decades operating one of the most publicly accessible cranberry marshes in the state of Wisconsin.
Van Wychen’s family relationship with her 110-acre farm, located near the intersection of highways 90 and 94, goes back nearly a century. “This marsh was established in 1903,” she says. “My mother has lived here all but two weeks of her life, and she’s 94. She was born on another marsh, and then they moved here, and she’s been here ever since.”
If you want to buy bags of fresh cranberries, straight from the grower, the Wetherby operation in Warrens, WI is your destination. Not merely because the quality or price concerns, mind you — there simply isn’t an alternative.
While their many cranberry farming colleagues solely produce fruit for juice and dried cranberries for big co-ops such as Ocean Spray, the Van Wychens of Wetherby have doggedly stuck to the fussier method of production that yields bags of large, intact berries — perfect for sales to the consumer.
For the serious home cook, cranberries are the fall and winter counterpart to rhubarb — they can be added to almost any dish, sweet or savory, to bring a bright, tart note that brings depth to pie or salad, and complements just about anything pork- or fowl-related.
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
Before they hit the typical Thanksgiving turkey breast, the berries are harvested by flooding the rectangular marshes, which are sunk several feet below the surrounding terrain.
A mechanical raking machine rides the marshes to harvest fresh fruit — resembling a miniature combine, it shakes the fruit loose and deposits it into harvest boats which are gently lifted via hydraulics and emptied into dump trucks. The trucks then back up a rather sizable man-made sand hill so that the fruit can spill down a chute through the roof of the Wetherby plant; cold air fans dry the fruit out, and various mechanical sorting processes ensure that large, debris-free berries are selected.
New FDA regulations spelled an end to the use of traditional wooden machinery to sort the berries — now Wetherby uses a digital behemoth, an optical sorter that costs as much as a house.
“We used to have 10-12 ladies who were all hand sorting when we had the wooden mills,” recalls Van Wychen. “The younger women still had full-time jobs, so we had to rely on our elderly women, and they got so elderly they had to retire, and you couldn’t find replacements.”
Becca Dilley / Heavy Table
The Marsh in Bloom
In late June, harvest is still months away, and the fields are in full flower, carpeted with waves of tiny pink and red blossoms that resemble the heads of birds.
“Early Dutch settlers, when they saw cranberry blossoms, thought they resembled the head of a sandhill crane,” says Van Wychen. “So they named them ‘crane-berries,’ later shortened to cranberries.”
For a few weeks in early summer, the fields abound with bees working out of crate-like hives imported by beekeepers. Beekeepers reap a few for helping to polinate the crop, and make locally popular cranberry honey; cranberry growers see their yield increase dramatically thanks to the bees’ efforts.
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