Wild rice in northern Minnesota is often cooked with venison, which is sometimes ground with pork fat to enrich the lean meat. But fatty ground beef and lamb are more widely available substitutes. Dried local sumac berries are used in the Ojibwe diet to add a citrusy tang, but you can buy the spice pre-ground.

Featured in: The True Story of Wild Rice, North America’s Most Misunderstood Grain

Equipment

• Fine Sieve
• Small Pot
• Medium Skillet or Roasting Pan
• Large Cast-Iron Skillet
• Small Heat-Resistant Bowl

The post Wild Rice Hash with Beef, Lentils, and Sumac-Roasted Tomatoes appeared first on Saveur.

On a sunny afternoon in the last days of summer, I broke the first rule I had ever been taught about watercraft and stood up in a canoe. Mike Magney and Moon Jacobson of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe had offered to take me out onto Little Elbow Lake and show me the wild-rice harvest—not as a past-tense reenactment, we agreed, but in a present-tense this is how we do it sort of way. So as their canoe shot surely ahead into a thick stand of rice, I heaved my weight onto a 12-foot-long pole in an attempt to keep up. The wind took fierce bites out of the water, working against me. Cotton-­batting clouds sped across the blue gel of the sky. The northern Minnesota wild-rice harvest takes place during a two-week sliver of September, and the racing wind heightened our urgency.

We were at Sahkahtay, an annual wild-rice camp hosted by members of the Ojibwe tribe, one of the largest groups of Indigenous people north of Mexico, most of whom live in a long arc that stretches from the upper Midwest to Quebec.

Jacobson was at the three-day festival to teach ricing skills to the next generation and to harvest his own 50 pounds—”about half of what my grandma calls a year’s supply.” He grew up in Minneapolis but spent a lot of time with his grandmother in Mahnomen, a nearby town of 1,200. He followed her around, helping her put up her year’s worth of food: harvesting berries, foraging for medicinal plants, and filling a buried chest freezer in her yard with whole walleye, which the arctic Minnesota temperatures swiftly preserved to stiffness.

Magney stood at the back of the canoe, pushing his pole into the thick chocolate mud of the lake bottom, using its lever action to propel them across the water. Jacobson sat in the front with a short wooden stick—called a knocker—in each hand. The stands of rice are thickest 20 feet from shore, and we rolled into them as if into a darkened forest of pencil-thin bamboo, the rice seed heads rattling like a dorm-room bead curtain. Plunging one knocker into the rice stand, Jacobson parted the stalks like hair, bending a thick hank over his lap with one hand and neatly sweeping off its loose seed heads with the other. Rice rained down obediently into the canoe as they moved forward, his poles tapping out a click-click-click rhythm born of years of repetition.

Wild rice is one of the only grains native to North America, and definitely its most misunderstood. It is not directly related to Asian rice. What’s more, the black rice you see in countless Thanksgiving stuffing recipes every fall is an imposter. Here in northern Minnesota, at the center of the genetic reserve of wild-rice seedstock, where it grows naturally in lakes and creeks, we call that black stuff by its proper name: paddy rice. In the 1960s, the University of Minnesota began domesticating wild rice. They planted it in rows in flooded paddies, which they drained to harvest by combine like any other field crop. Ironically, paddy-grown rice isn’t wild at all.

Real wild rice varies in shape and color from lake to lake, but once cooked, it is always some shade of luminescent milky brown—the color of tea spilled onto a saucer. It curls into loose ringlets that pop delicately between your teeth. It tastes the way a morning campfire smells: of smoldering wood coals and lake fog at dawn.

I’d been a guest of Sahkahtay as a curious local once before—I live 20 miles down the road—but this time I was more attuned to the language of this harvest. Some people there referred to the grain we were harvesting—a foundation of Ojibwe culture and ceremony—as manoomin, “the food that grows on water.” No one called it “wild.” Mostly, everyone just called it rice.

We headed to the shore, where a group was cooking the green rice in a giant cast-iron kettle. Like coffee beans, wild-rice kernels need to be roasted, or parched, over heat to firm their tawny core and dry for long-term storage.

Jacobson introduced me to Logan Cloud, an artfully tattooed, soft-voiced 20-something member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. While parching rice in an iron kettle over a birch-wood fire, he described the difference between wild rice and paddy rice in blunt terms: “Paddy rice is the Western mindset, in edible form,” he said.

The story of how real wild rice lost its name is a long tale of appropriation—­nothing less than one of the greatest identity thefts in American food history. Its story is braided tightly into the history of this region, a remote area where the economy, for both Native peoples and white settlers, has generally been one of subsistence. But it was the mostly white-owned paddy-rice industry, centered in California, that pushed to make wild rice a marketable commodity. In the ’70s, wild-rice prices soared, sending both tribe members and whites out onto the lakes in record numbers. Money—or at least the prospect of it—drove everyone to excess. People harvested too early, before the rice had a chance to reseed itself, wiping out once-flush stands. Tribe leaders moved without consensus to sow spent reservoirs with seeds from other waterways, wiping out age-old varieties. The University of Minnesota bred a rice with a thick stem that could handle mechanical harvesting, without any thought to the way it would cross-pollinate with the native plants.

Cloud bounced some hot, smoking rice onto the canoe paddle he was using as a stir stick, and lobbed a few kernels into his mouth to test for doneness, crunching audibly and spitting out the hulls. He threw another log onto his fire and described how he knew that the rice was getting close when it turned the toffee color of Golden Crisp cereal, “the one with the bear on the box.” He first went ricing at age 9 with his best friend, a portable radio set up in their canoe, to make some extra cash to buy the sneakers and jeans that fourth grade required. At his dad’s backyard rice camp, they parched rice over live fire in a steel drum.

At the point of first colonial contact, the Ojibwe smoke-dried their rice in birch-bark vessels strung up high over the fire. Cloud explained that these gave way to kettles sometime after “the invaders arrived and we realized that we could take something useful from them.”

Cloud moved to a treading pit lined with birch bark and filled it with about 6 inches of parched rice, then asked a volunteer in high moccasins to “jig” the rice, to loosen its hulls. She danced in short, halting steps, light and twisting at the hip. A drummer hammered out a bass beat, steady and hypnotic, the tempo set to keep the jigger jigging. Cloud transferred the rice to a shallow birch-bark basket and tossed it in the wind. This method was surprisingly effective at winnowing away the hulls, but still, it was hardly a speedy process. By the time it was finished, every grain of rice had passed through someone’s hands and every stray hull had been flicked out onto the grass.

Camps like this one anchor traditional ricing knowledge in the present, but they also function as social gatherings. Every- one I talk to at Sahkahtay remembers going to rice camps as children, where they moved through the harvest as if in reverse: first sitting next to the elders sorting out hulls, jigging as they got older, harvesting and parching as young adults. The people who come to Sahkahtay want to parch 50 or 60 pounds of rice for their own extended family in the most traditional and flavorful way, and preserve the social history.

Given that many local Ojibwe now parch in large steel-drum barrels over wood fires, Cloud’s iron kettle seems like a throwback. I asked him: In the long history of rice parching, from birch-bark vessels to the larger barrel parchers used today, why stop here? Why parch in the iron kettle? He smirked. “Doing it this way is like fixing your own car.” Then he said, more seriously: “When we began to mechanize the parching, we started thinking in a colonized way. Processing rice became easier, but our lives did not get easier.”

As we talked about large-batch parching, the age-old battle lines drawn between mechanization and handcraft, science and intuition, we ate wild rice from foam bowls. “Paddy rice is like chewing on wood chips,” he said. “It’ll stab your gums.” But his real wild rice, cooked simply and sauced with maple syrup, fell lightly from my spoon like snow, and melted almost instantly on my tongue. My small bowlful somehow filled me up. Simultaneous lightness and heft is one of its gifts.

Cloud, throwing fresh logs under a batch of green rice, described his small-scale parching in a sensory way. But his narrative quickly made tracks down the path of his people’s history: the original prophecy that led them to the rice beds; Ojibwe astrology; the Christian missionaries intent on converting the natives; the boarding schools that separated children from their families, their language, and their ceremonies. And he circled back to where we began: the enormous paddy rice operations that inject science and greed into what should perhaps remain an intuitive process. “Both the scientist and the preacher, they want to know everything. They want to remake rice in their image.”
Machinery and temperature gauges can break, making you question your own good judgment. And these modern methods can distance you from your culture. “If it weren’t for the rice, Ojibwe culture wouldn’t be here today,” he said, moving a log with his boot, squinting from the glare of the white sun sinking toward the lake. “And if we lose it, we won’t exist as a people for long. We’ll be done too.”

Even here, where wild rice grows abundantly, it can be hard to find a bag of the real thing. The grocery stores stock jet-black paddy rice and, occasionally, a few bags of sturdy, wood-parched Canadian wild rice. To get my yearly 10 pounds of the soft rice harvested nearby, I have to rely on my local connections.

Twenty miles down the road, in a parching shed near the town of ­Ponsford, on the White Earth Reservation, a fat black iron barrel the size of a commercial propane tank rolled on its spit over a jumping fire. The thick sweat of rice parching hung in the air, a mixture of smoke and water and grain. The toasting rice in the barrel exhaled humidity in quick, short bursts. Like a priest’s swinging censer, it gave off a thick smudge that rose up to the high crease of the shed’s peak. I’ve been buying rice from the Dewandeler’s parching operation for years—first from Lewy, now passed on, then from his son Richard, and now from Lewy’s grandson, Aaron. Among local wood-parched wild-rice processors, their shed is the cathedral. They parch in machines they’ve fabricated over the years. A 90-year-old engine pulled from a Ford Model A powers the huge barrel that spins over the wood fire. A cylinder painted sky blue houses a flywheel of soft paddles engineered to gently knock off the loosened hulls. And now Aaron has a new baby: a giant mechanical separator. It gyrated in the middle of the room, its screen plate shaking the good, beautiful finished rice to one end and the broken, undesirable rice to the other.

Three generations of parchers, and they all judge doneness differently. “You know how you don’t listen to your parents? My dad wouldn’t listen to his, and I didn’t listen to mine. My grandpa, he could see the doneness in the smoke, in the blue haze coming off the hot barrel. My dad can smell when it’s done. Me, I have a laser. And I taste it.”

He shot the laser into the rice to test temperature, then dipped a broom into the barrel, vigorously rubbed some loose kernels between his hands, and threw the rice into his mouth. Like most parchers, he can taste which body of water the rice came from. “This is heavy rice—mostly from Shell and Basswood lakes, but I like small-creek rice best. The little kernels take on more of the smoke.”

Aaron is white but has a complicated interface with Native culture common in the area. His kids are White Earth members; his grandparent’s farm is on the reservation, but only because the majority of White Earth land has been owned by non-native people since its inception.

He parches rice very differently from Logan Cloud, but they have some things in common: a desire to protect the genetic diversity of local rice, and a hatred for paddy rice—and for sand. Sand that gets in the rice, whether in the canoe or in the parching shed, is the enemy. Once it’s in, you can’t get it out. Every chance he gets, Aaron sweeps his cement floor clean.

He paused when a black Chevy Tahoe rolled up. “It’s the tribe, here to collect their rice,” he said, and started heaving the first of 15 burlap sacks toward the door. He loaded 900 pounds of finished rice into the back end, and the Tahoe slumped.

Aaron’s operation is as big as it gets around here. He parches tens of thousands of pounds of rice each fall, all within three weeks—possibly the limit for a solo operation. He usually sells out before Thanksgiving.

Two weeks later, Aaron texted me: “Come get your rice. It’s sitting there making my grandma nervous.” When I arrived, I found Bette Dewandeler in a housecoat at the kitchen table, sorting scrap-paper orders, her wit as dry as ever. Once a fixture behind the counter of the local post office, Bette would send me boxes of rice when I lived in New York City. As she is recently retired, everyone must now come to her.

As we talked, two trucks pulled up. My neighbors Adeline and Winnie walked into the kitchen, followed by some other guys I didn’t recognize, all of them with checkbooks in hand. Here, under the bright light of Bette’s kitchen, her table piled with plastic bags of rice and checks and wrinkled magazines, the transaction has the warm veneer of an illicit thrill, as if we’re buying something that will get taken away.

And it might. While the rice still grows wild on many local lakes and creeks, clogging up open channels the first week of September, its future is in question. Climate change and genetically modified rice threaten the manoomin seedstock. In this area alone, seven distinct varieties are at risk of being reseeded with hybridized rice, which ducks move from lake to lake. State wildlife management workers blow up beaver lodges, interfering with the natural water-level consistency that wild rice requires. Runoff seeps into the soil, raising sulfide levels above what this sensitive plant can handle.

The tribes continue to sell and ship out rice—some of it coming straight from Dewandeler’s parching shed—via their websites. And yet it feels like the local interest in hand-harvested, wood-parched rice—the smoky, good stuff—is on the wane. Most small-town gas stations used to sell a few bags in the fall but rarely continued the practice when they gave way to national chains. Meanwhile, health-food advocates—the same people who talk a big game about high-protein organic grains—ignore the one right under their noses.

But viewed another way, the rice has returned to the tribes and to the small parchers. It sits where it always has: in sheds and garages, tightly sheltered in burlap sacks, far from the masses—­perhaps just where it belongs.

The post The True Story of Wild Rice, North America’s Most Misunderstood Grain appeared first on Saveur.

The Bachelor Farmer
50 Second Ave. N

Haute Dish
119 Washington Ave. N

Heyday
2700 Lyndale Ave. S

Kramarczuk’s
215 E. Hennepin Ave.

Patisserie 46
4552 Grand Ave. S

Red Table Meat Co.
1401 Marshall St. NE

Spoon and Stable
211 First St. N

Tilia
2726 W. 43rd St.

Travail Kitchen & Amusements
4124 W. Broadway Ave.

Explore the flavors of Minneapolis in your own kitchen with these North Country Fare Recipes &raquo

The post Travel Guide: Minneapolis, Minnesota appeared first on Saveur.

I’m in the middle of the area known locally as “the Finnish Triangle,” sampling a highly unusual yogurt whose active culture arrived here 100-some years ago on a sun-dried rag. Every surface in Miriam Yliniemi’s bright kitchen is covered with a bowl or platter wearing a crinkled beret of aluminum foil. The bluish February sunshine shoots low through the large plate glass window, jumping from foil top to foil top and lighting up her kitchen like a disco. Even though I’d asked Miriam to just make the karjalan piirakka, traditional rye hand pies, she’s chosen to override me and instead make a feast that charts a day in the life of a Minnesota Finn, from morning to midnight snack. There’s a pile of flour-dusted ruis, Finnish rye bread; joulutorttu, flaky cream-rich star-shaped pastries with prune jam centers; a towering whipped cream cake topped with a mosaic of fresh fruit; and in the center of her stove, a large disk of “squeaky cheese,” fresh curds broiled to a speckled brown, still warm and weeping whey at the edges. Before I can wedge off my winter boots, she peels a soft plastic lid from a sky-blue Tupperware container and hands me the traditional Finnish breakfast: a cup of homemade yogurt dusted with a flurry of cinnamon sugar. “This is viili. Our yogurt. It sets at room temperature.” The viili has the consistency of custard but falls from my spoon in a long slithering cord. Stretchy like mastic, it has a disarmingly glutinous quality—a muscularity to it that suggests it might just keep on moving on its own. But that tension-hold breaks in the mouth, where it dissolves in a sweet puddle, its tartness soft like background noise. “What does viili mean in Finnish?” I ask, my crush on this yogurt progressing from flirtation to full-blown love by the third spoonful. “Wild,” Miriam says. And it is. The sourdough of yogurts, this culture needs no coddling or extra heat to activate. Stirred into milk, it gels on its own. “Miriam,” her husband, Elmer, coaxes from his easy chair in the nearby living room, “tell her the story!” But Miriam, a highly articulate woman who has nearly single-handedly kept Finnish food traditions alive for the area youth, who has translated three academic books from Finnish into English, waves him off with a tsk-tsk flip of her manicured silver hair. Turning her attention back to spooning creamy ovals of rice pudding onto thin coaster-size circles of rye dough, she quickly lines up rows of ruffled rye pies—machine-perfect karjalan piirakka.

She can’t talk while she’s making them, I get it. Her knuckles flash, her fingertips pinch the dough into even pleats, her eyes rarely lift off the counter­top horizon. She has a good hand, I think. Her fingers know the difference between right and wrong, good enough and great.

So Elmer, the retired pastor of the Apostolic Lutheran church in Wolf Lake, and a vivid storyteller, tells me instead.

“When our relatives first moved here from Finland at the turn of the 20th century, they found that after a while, their viili culture weakened, so they wrote to their relatives back home. The women there soaked clean rags in viili—”

“Not rags,” Miriam interjects. “Probably something handwoven. Weaving is very important to Finnish culture.”

“Right, woven cloths. They soaked them in viili, dried them in the sun until they were stiff, and then mailed them to Wolf Lake.”

“And you’ve kept it going ever since?”

“Yes, of course,” Elmer says, dropping a wobbly cube of the now-cool squeaky cheese into his hot coffee, the tiny Finnish cup almost disappearing inside his large hand.

“This is traditional?” I ask, dropping a cube into my own cup. A shimmery constellation of fat droplets rises to the surface. I sip quickly and tip the warm cheese into my mouth. Not as weird as it sounds, the coffee tastes toffee-tinged but not sweet, a bit like Bulletproof coffee studded with cubes of soft gum—squeaky, milk-flavored gum.

“Sure, when you’re having a coffee break, you want to warm up the cheese to make it squeak again, so you drop it in the coffee,” she says.

We sit down at the table formally set with Finnish tableware, designs not only inspired by winter but seemingly constructed from its raw materials: glassware molded from icicles; blue glass candleholders the color of a sky slinking into twilight; a tablecloth woven in alternating bands of white and tan, fresh snow and old snow. Finns know that the beauty of the North lives in its contradictory extremes: searing sunlight, insulating snowbanks against the house, air so cold it burns your cheeks.

Miriam pulls a tray of karjalan piirakka from the oven, brushing the browned frilled tops with a final glaze of melted butter. I take one and smear a clod of butter mashed with hard-boiled eggs into the gash of hot steaming rice, as instructed, which melts instantly into a silky yellow puddle. At the bite, the crisp rye pastry crumbles, and I think it’s just about the oddest, most hard-to-categorize, weirdly delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. Both feminine and earthy, the rye pies look like a fancy pastry a child might whip up out of her mother’s kitchen scraps for her dolls at teatime, and they taste just as otherworldly perfect.

We conclude the breakfast feast with slices of delicate sponge cake sopped with fresh fruit and juice and held together with an inch-thick grout of whipped cream. My belly dares me to finish it, and I do, picking up every light, staticky crumb on the plate with my fingertips. I get the sense that no occasion around here goes down without cake.

Before I go, she fills a clean pill jar with viili, what she calls “the seed.” With this precious culture in hand—my sorely needed prescription—I feel as though I’ve been given a glimpse into the greater subculture of the Wolf Lake Finns.

My husband, Aaron, and I live about 20 miles from here. I’m reminded of a moment a few years back while skiing on our trails when we passed over a curious cluster of snow mounds before realizing that we had skied right into a wolf pack’s home den, all of whose members were likely napping peacefully in their snow caves. Discovering this underground cuisine, hidden in plain sight, is just as thrilling. I’ve always considered this tightly knit and self-sustaining community of hardworking people to be protective of their values, their faith, and their families, but now that I’ve tasted their food I wonder if my assumption was wrong: Maybe they didn’t move here to keep their culture intact and unspoiled. Maybe they moved here to keep it wild.

Three towns—Sebeka, Menahga, and New York Mills—form the points of the Finnish Triangle, which was homesteaded almost exclusively by Finns at the turn of the 19th century. The jokesy Finnish culture present in the towns of Menahga and Sebeka is the one I’m familiar with: the St. Urho’s Day parade that celebrates the made-up saint who drove the grasshoppers from Finland, the Wife Carry Competition (the victor wins his wife’s weight in beer), and the famous Changing of the Guard, a line of men ceremonially peeling off the one-piece long underwear they’ve worn all winter long. They call themselves “Finlanders,” and they’re rowdier than the Apostolics, more apt to hang out at the Menahga Muni (the municipal bar). But the more traditional cultural heart of the Finnish community resides among the dairy farms of Wolf Lake Township. My own Two Inlets area, just two townships over, feels a world away. The hills are higher here, the roads windier, the winter light hotter and more unreal.

Many of the area’s dairy farms are certified organic—eight at last count. At Salmen farm, 10 miles from Miriam’s house, the world might be frozen, the noonday temperature hovering at 20 below zero, but the milk in the barn still flows.

As a Minnesotan without a drop of Scandinavian heritage inside her, I realize that my dairy senses need some tuning—a feeling that increases when I arrive in Tyyni Salmen’s kitchen. I can tell that I don’t see milk the way that Tyyni sees milk. Like the veteran skier she is, she scopes out the bucket of fresh milk as she does the latest snowfall; she looks beyond the whiteness to see conditions. The five-gallon bucket full of milk fresh from the bulk tank is crying out to be made into cheese.

As Miriam did, Tyyni raises my simple request for squeaky cheese to the third power and also makes the star-shaped prune pastries, plus a pot of smooth yellow pea soup, and of course brings out a fresh jar of viili. Hers, made from unpasteurized milk, is clotted heavily at the top, due to the higher butterfat content of the farm’s organic milk, 4.2 percent butterfat as opposed to the average conventional 3.6. The flavor is kaleidoscopic in comparison to store-bought milk, with a bit of barn floor on the nose. Earthier, yes, but lustier too. As I experienced walking past the milking stalls filled with sweet, unblinking cows, the aroma initially shocks but quickly fades.

Tyyni, a small woman with a girlish voice and a gray-blonde bob, stands at the stove in a knit skirt and wool knee socks. As we talk about Christmas traditions, she tells me that she’s the proud grandmother of 40, and I try to conceal my shock. Her face is as unlined as a teenager’s.

“For Christmas, what do you make for the main meat?” I ask.

“Usually more than one ham!” she replies, while cracking open a two-gallon plastic bucket to reveal a slow wave of creamy milk.

“And many pans of squeaky cheese.”

She sets a wire hanger bent into a star shape on top of her electric burner to diffuse the heat, pours the milk into a large well-worn pot, and seasons it with a big pinch of salt and a smaller pinch of sugar. I recognize this as the typical Scandinavian restraint with dairy. Similar to the way my Norwegian-American mother-in-law sweetens her whipped cream—with just a wink from the sugar—Tyyni keeps her cheese pure and chaste.

As the milk heats, I admire her shiny painted wood floors, her potted plants rambling everywhere, her wide-slatted dining-room table, bleached and sanded down to raw smooth wood in the Finnish way. As at Miriam’s, the winter light beams like a stage light through the place.

Tynni scoops out the cheese curds into a rectangular cheesecloth-lined wire sieve, pushes on the curds with a backhanded ladle to remove the standing whey, and then flops the contents expertly into a baking pan and pops it under the broiler. We stand at the oven door and watch it frizzle under the heat, the brown spots spreading across the surface of the cheese. As we watch, members of Tyyni’s family stream into the house and ladle goldenrod-colored soup into bowls. Four cousins who seem to be all the same age pile into one living-room chair to wait for the cheese. When it’s done, she cuts it into cubes and the kids make swift work of it, swabbing the cheese through a saucer of her homemade raspberry jam. The fresh curds, sweet and salty, squeak in my teeth.

“You have time for a sauna?” Tyyni asks, pointing to the whitewashed building across the driveway, its chimney puffing steam. Built in the 1930s, the sauna has the traditional two rooms: a front changing room, lit by a kerosene lamp, and a dark back room lit by a curtained window and a raging woodstove fire. Usually, men and women sauna separately, in the nude. Today, the little boys volunteer, in swim trunks for my benefit, and scamper in. Tyyni drops grapefruits into the snow to chill and says, “So refreshing after a sauna.”

After about 10 minutes, the boys, their skin as pink as boiled crab shells, blow out of the sauna door and hit the snow, rolling down the hill like a bunch of bear cubs. Shaking off snow, they each take a wedge of cut grapefruit and go back in.

I laugh, and Tyyni says, “You think that’s funny, the teenage boys down the road are really crazy. They drive their snowmobiles after their saunas to cool off, and one night they came all the way to our driveway—two miles away!” “They were riding naked?”

“Of course!” She tucks a plastic-wrapped wedge of squeaky cheese into my hand, squints out at the closest rolling white hill, gives me a quick hug and says, “I think I still have time today for a ski.”

As I leave, I turn back to take a picture with my phone and see that it has turned itself off because I’ve been standing out so long in the cold.

Wild.

The third stop on my Wolf Lake Finn tour takes me down an even skinnier trail, to the house of my friends Bruce and Budd at the end of a forest road in the south Smoky Hills. Bruce Engebretsen is Swedish-American but grew up 20 minutes west of Wolf Lake amid a number of Finnish ladies who schooled him in their domestic arts. A dedicated handweaver, he and his spouse, Budd Parker, moved here a couple of years ago with their collection of antique wooden looms, spinning wheels, history books, old cooking tools, and Budd’s enviable stash of enameled Dansk cookware. Here in the summer months, in the middle of the woods, they hold weekly weaving workshops that are open to anyone. In his studio, Bruce demonstrates everything from spinning flax into linen to Sami belt weaving; they make a cauldron of soup, pull a mountain of bread from their outdoor wood-fired clay oven, and call potluck for the rest. The evenings often end with Bruce at the piano leading a sing-along of old-timey songs while the crowd passes around a bottle of homemade pea-pod wine.

I came here to round out my Wolf Lake education not only because Bruce is a disciple of Finnish food and weaving but because he’s promised to make me vispipuuro, whipped cranberry pudding, and to help cook a Finnish feast in their clay oven—in the middle of February. He’s invited yet another cold-hardy Minnesotan, Amy Tervola-Hultberg, a Finnish language and culture educator from New York Mills who is eager to make her wood-fired ruis, or traditional Finnish sour rye.

She begins with a porridge of cooked rolled rye, called rye chops, then adds a lump of her bubbling rye starter and enough flour to make a sponge. After it rises, she adds just enough flour to make a sticky dough and pats it out onto a heavily floured surface in two shapes: flattened rounds, for sandwiches, and the more traditional donut shape. The central hole is essential, for these breads were traditionally made all at once, stacked on a dowel, and stored for months.

“Didn’t the bread get hard?” I ask. “How did they eat it?”

“Oh yes, it got hard, as hard as wood, but then they would shave it off in thin slices with a handheld wood planer, you see,” Bruce says, demonstrating the slide on the countertop, “and soften it in a bowl with sour milk.”

“Sounds delicious,” I say, and we all laugh. Then Bruce says, “Remember, these people were no strangers to famine. In food, sometimes there’s hardship, too.”

Amy holds up her hands, furred with sticky dough. “But not today,” she says. “We’re going to eat it fresh, when it’s perfectly soft and chewy.”

Bruce whips the vispipuuro pudding made with foraged cranberries. “The wild highbush cranberries that grow here taste a lot like the traditional lingonberries,” he explains. The dark cranberry juice, thickened into a slurry with farina, lightens as it whips until its shiny, pink meringue-like cloud rises up over the rim of the bowl. Across from him, I roll a pork belly that I’ve pre-salted and rubbed with herbs to go into the clay oven. When it’s tender, we’ll slice it, fry it until crispy, and dress it with blackened leeks and mushrooms. This, together with a dish of creamed spinach and a huge pan full of wood-roasted cabbage cooked in horseradish cream, will give us plenty of fatty, creamy juices to sop up with the bread.

When Budd calls the oven ready, we take turns hustling outside. Inside for more food, outside to cook and stand around the oven, back inside to grab another dish, back outside for another snow-chilled cocktail. Those of us with glasses are blinded by hot-house fog, the bane of our Minnesota winter existence.

Amy takes hers off and says, “This meal takes sisu!” and everyone but me knows what the word means.

“Sisu,” Amy says. “Finnish perseverance. Grit. It means digging down within yourself to tap into a heroic will to succeed, even in the most adverse of circumstances.”

“The cool thing,” Bruce adds, “is that sisu is personal, but it usually benefits the group.”

Finnish or not, I think, sisu has got to kick in at 20 below. I’ve never heard the Finnish character described this way, but I recognize this tenacity deep down in my rural Minnesotan bones. Bruce and Budd, with their house full of utilitarian old relics and their backwoods cultural community-building, have sisu. The Wolf Lake Finns, preserving their wild, natural foodways in a beautiful patch of hill country in Minnesota, have sisu. Amy, driven to bake loaf after loaf of rye until the chew feels just right, has sisu.

We toast to that, with a pink-grapefruit champagne cocktail I’ve improvised. It has no Finnish connection beyond that it simply reminds me of Tyyni’s sauna grapefruits in the snow and reflects extremes: bitter and sweet, healthyish but potent.

We may not be devout, and not even altogether Finnish, but today we feel it.

Feasts of the Finnish Midwest

Roasted Cabbage with Horseradish Cream

Finnish Twice-Cooked Pork Belly with Pickled Mushrooms and Leeks

The post The Midwest’s “Finnish Triangle” is a Land of Saunas and Squeaky Cheeses appeared first on Saveur.

The saturated blue night sky dilates rapidly to chambray like an old TV coming to life. After color, we get sound. The first shot from the woods detonates from a distance, sounding like the low beat of a pillow-stuffed bass drum; the next two, as sharp as rim shots, crack off a lot closer to the house. A bolt of excitement rolls through me, equal parts greed and reverence, two feelings that merge during our annual deer hunting weekend as naturally as sour mix and whiskey, and I think, I hope that was one of ours.

Our band of deer campers, as I call our hunting party, have been settled in their cold, open tree stands for over an hour, so it’s possible. I’ve been awake much longer, having risen before dawn on the most ceremonious of days, the deer hunting firearm-season opener, to send them off with a proper breakfast. I don’t get up to cook this early unless it’s a holiday, which is telling; after seven ritualistic seasons that’s pretty much what this weekend has become. In true holiday fashion, the morning meal contains enough riches to raise the body temperature by a few degrees: a couple of skeins of smoked sausage that I pan-steam until the bottoms darken and the juices evaporate into a ropy caramel; a leaning tower of buttered toast; tar-dark coffee, two thermoses’ worth.

After breakfast our hunters—my husband, Aaron, five of his friends, and one of their teenage boys, all of whom were so festive and raucous last night—silently draw on their safety-orange regalia, each donning their own unique arrangement of bright vests, overcoats, and chaps. Glowing like neon signs in the dark house, they pick up their rifles from the garage and tromp out to their various stands in the trees to sit and watch and wait.

It likely won’t be long. Our 150 acres swarms with what some of my neighbors refer to as “too many deer.” From my driveway, I usually see only the does. They cock their heads at me, as if trying to discern my species, and then come to their senses and jump into the woods in three graceful, storybook arcs, their white fluffy tails flipping up defiantly behind them.

But the fall hunting season coincides with the mating season—more elegantly known as the rut. This is the time of year that the does lose their reticence and the bucks, generally as elusive as ghosts, let down their guard and show themselves. Gripped by the mating instinct, the bucks grind the musk gland at the base of their antlers against trees until the bark is rubbed raw; they paw roughly into the ground, leaving behind divots and pheromones, a trail of crumbs for cute young does to follow. During the rut, even the shrewdest bucks get sloppy. The horniest among them get the sloppiest, and the most starry-eyed get strung up on the high beam between our son’s playhouse and our thickest oak.

If it sounds brutal—well, unfortunately, most protein gathering is. Even when one is armed with a rifle (patently unfair human advantage), bringing in a deer is not a given. It takes dedication, and preseason tracking, and skill. And a little luck.

When Aaron comes in for his midmorning coffee break, he reports that he saw not a single deer from his 10-foot-high tree perch but witnessed a number of loud, drunken crashes through the leaves that all turned out to be squirrels, and that around the same time that his toes began to freeze and go numb the sun started to melt the snow and the woods fell silent. And it was peaceful. After a few cold hours of sitting, surveillance turns into meditation. I imagine our seven hunters, together with the 10 hunters on our neighbor’s land, hands clasped on rifles, standing watch like ushers over a hushed crowd of observant animals fidgeting in the dry underbrush. As rituals go, hunting is simultaneously singular and plural, individual and communal.

It’s like woods church.

Throughout my childhood, the ceremonies practiced during deer hunting season dawned on me peripherally, like someone else’s religion.

I grew up in this town—Park Rapids, Minnesota, an hour-and-a-half drive due east from Fargo—in a nonhunting family, squarely in the cultural minority. The only red meat my mom ever set on our table was beef. If my dad ever took a walk in the woods I don’t remember it. It would have been rough going in his wing tips. We lived in town, in an aspirationally suburban island within a coniferous sea of outdoorsy northwoods folks, most of whom possessed deep freezers filled with their own venison.

But I clearly remember the signs of the season. Then as now, two weeks before the official firearms opener, you could see it coming. Bludgeoned target bucks stood as lawn decoration in front yards across town. Bright orange hats curled up on the dashes of passing trucks like cats in a warm nook. Bakeries sold doe-eyed deer cookies and cupcakes topped with tiny plastic rifles, and the farm and fleet store hawked pink camouflage lingerie. (Even though plenty of women hunt, the deer hunting merry widow joke never dies.) Men started wearing knives on their belts, and school absenteeism, for both students and teachers, was largely ignored.

So when I sat at my fourth-grade desk and watched the kid across the aisle needle a column of numbers into the soft skin of his forearm with a Bic pen, and asked him about it, he looked at me with bewilderment. “Countdown to deer hunting opener,” he said, turning back to his calendar tattoo, sucking in his spit in great anticipation. “When I will be ab-sent.”

I was curious: boys—hunting—venison. In that order.

When, 20-some years later, Aaron suggested that we put our land to good use by hosting deer camp, I agreed, my curiosity piqued. I didn’t want to hunt myself—I enjoy butchering and won’t hesitate to trim a deer liver or butterfly a heart, but I remain squeamish about guns and their cold metal triggers. Basically, I’m one of those hypocritical kinds of carnivores who’d rather not turn out the lights if I can get someone else to do it for me.

Aaron and his friends, including his bandmate Darrin Bruse and his two brothers, who grew up hunting with their departed dad, are drawn to the historical romance of the deer hunting tradition. My collection of old cookbooks is what reels me in. Fernand Point, for example, includes pages of venison and wild bird recipes, with multiple variations of murky, gutsy pan sauces. All of my American books over 50 years old contain entire chapters devoted to game. I realize that the meat I eat shouldn’t be a narrow multiple choice, but should reflect the wider aperture of what surrounds me: bear, wild ducks, rabbits, and mostly venison.

Ever since we moved back home to this cabin in the woods, eight years ago, I’d wanted to crack the mystery of what they ate in the mythical hunting shacks and forest huts I’d always heard about. Were all hunters like our neighbors, keeping a steady diet of venison steaks and fried potatoes, or were some of them more ambitious? I’d heard stories of sourdough, homebrew, and braised deer hearts with wild rice, and other camp cooks who, like me, didn’t hunt but instead worked the stove. I turned to my favorite deer-shack photo from an old book of heartland cooking, in which a plaid-shirted gentleman fried potatoes in one black iron pan and slipped a venison roast into the wood oven in another. Give these hunters glasses of wine in place of their canned beer, and the scene could pass for a secret Basque cooking society.

Figuring that any holiday this revered had to revolve around food, I swiftly appointed myself camp cook and began dreaming up the menu. None of us can take off the traditional week for the hunt, so we pack our harvest into a single long weekend. This torques the pressure to bring in enough deer to share among us during the weekend, but still, we are loose about it, as casual as family. The hunting day may look like a lot of napping, snacking, and coffee drinking, but the preservation of energy is an art—and we’re fairly regimented about it.

In time, my menu has grown mossier and earthier, darker, heavier in flavor, and thicker with place. This year we have teak-colored teriyaki ducks. Fried onions imprinted with the cast-iron pan. A winy sauce for the venison so dark it looks like it might taste rusty. Apples roasted right in the coals of the campfire. Spiced coffee spike, fragrant with whiskey, should anyone’s toes remain stubbornly cold after the hunt. And, as always, if we get a deer, I will make fresh deer liver pâté and strive to have it made, chilled, and on the table before they finish cleaning the carcass.

In the kitchen, Beth, one of our hunter’s wives, and I fret over the hunt. Just in case we don’t have a deer in time to harvest the backstraps I need for our Saturday dinner, I’ve mined my deep freezer for feral animals, thawing two meticulously plucked wild ducks our neighbor Kenny gave me a few weeks back. I also forage my cupboards, finding treasures I’ve been putting aside all fall: fermented pickles, fermented beets, homemade sauerkraut, our own birch syrup, the wild rice that Aaron harvested from the creek. These jars are a record of my days, the nuts in my cave, and they cost me nothing but time, so I squander freely.

As with hunting, our feast always contains an unpredictable wild card. When I reach up into the cavity of one of Kenny’s ducks, I find it: a cache of gizzards from his entire hunt, the ruby jewels from at least 10 ducks. I rub them with salt and herbs and set them to cure while I look around for a bunch of fat in which to slow-bake them.

I fry onions until they’re tarnished and sweet and tip them out over a taupe pile of our own wild rice. I go down to the garden to grab some rutabagas, yanking the last two corpulent ones from a row full of runts. I dip into my back pantry and pull out my fermented beet kvass. When it’s mixed with vodka and lemon the cocktails glow a radioactive magenta, and as the hunters straggle in, creaky from the cold but happy, they accept them like a cure.

They bring with them the word we’ve been waiting for: Todd got the first deer, a buck. Hallelujah, we rejoice. Todd, the oldest Bruse brother, is an actor, a fermentation fiend—he loves my kvass—and wears a hat made from the fabric of his father’s favorite La-Z-Boy chair. He’s been moping for years, quite vocally, about not getting a deer, so this is a big one.

When Todd brings me the floppy fresh venison liver, the color of a black eye, things get serious. This is not just seasonal food, but urgent food. Even two days’ sitting in the fridge turns deer liver bitter, but if trimmed and cubed and immediately sautéed with bacon, brandy, and butter, the liver tastes uncommonly sweet and minerally. As the juices pool on my board I realize that in comparison, my daily cooking is rather bloodless. This weekend definitely rights that wrong.

When we sit down at the table, I look around at our crew, their plates crowded with more side dishes than at Thanksgiving, nibbling on birch syrup—glazed duck legs like lollipops, and on lettuce dressed with duck pan juices and dark coins of gizzard confit. Rough and unpredictable and just a shade too blessedly decadent, this weekend perfectly captures the complications of the woods around us. I understand the devotion behind deer camp. I see the romance.

In the glow from the oil lamps, goodwill flows through me from my head to my toes. In fact, my feet overflow with it, turning red and overheating, as they often do after such epic meals. I wonder, is their pulsating due to the triple punch of ruby-red things I’ve consumed—red venison and liver and red wine—or a surplus of salt or, fear of fears, the first twinge of gout? It’s always hard to tell. I ask my tablemate to my left to squirt the cook some more merlot from the box, if you please, and I shuck off my socks by hooking each down with one toe. (I’ll find them tomorrow morning, beneath my chair.)

Shortly after dawn tomorrow, we’ll trim the meat and make big batches of merguez, spicy Italian, and plain venison ground with a constellation of backfat, and scrub my kitchen down to the nub, before commencing the final peg in our weekend, the champagne toast and division of meaty loot among coolers; that’s everyone’s favorite ritual. The last-minute liver pâté, the hawking of backroom ferments, the general excess of cooking and overeating (and inevitable sock-shucking) are mine.

Amy Thielen’s Thanksgiving Recipes

The post A Midwestern Hunter’s Thanksgiving appeared first on Saveur.

You wouldn’t believe how hard it has been to explain what indigenous food is,” chef Sean Sherman tells me. “I’ve had the same conversation over and over. I have to go back to the beginning all the time.”

For Sherman, a Sioux chef championing indigenous food, going back to the beginning means talking about the unbroken presence of Native people in the Americas, and the food systems that once nourished them. It means peeling back the layers of colonial foods that, over centuries, have coated indigenous diets—sugar, industrial meat, processed grains. It means finding a way to express these traditions in the context of modern urban dining in the restaurant he and his business and romantic partner Dana Thompson plan to open early next year.

The restaurant will be called Sioux Chef: An Indigenous Kitchen, and it won’t serve salmon on a cedar plank or fry bread or macaroni. Sherman’s more straightforward notion of indigenous comfort food includes dishes like smoked turkey soup with burnt sage, bison slow-cooked in spruce boughs, and a sunflower and hazelnut crisp. Using modern combinations and ancient ingredients and methods, he’s after something simultaneously old, and yet new.

Sherman grinds cornmeal for flint corn cakes. He smokes trout and walleye. He pops heirloom corn. He avoids pork, chicken, and beef. No sugar or eggs. These American staples weren’t historically available to indigenous tribes. Sherman’s cooking is a reclamation of identity.

“That’s amaranth,” the chef says, pointing to a brown sorghum-looking weed in a ditch on the side of the road. We’re driving south of the city toward Wozupi Tribal Gardens, a 16-acre farm that specializes in American heirloom fruits and vegetables. “Amaranth grows all around here.” So does goosefoot. And sorrel. Not to mention berries, wild rice, squash, and corn.

Sherman grew up identifying plants. He lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota until moving west to Spearfish when he was 13. He worked in restaurants to help support his family and for the U.S. Forest Service in the Black Hills as a field surveyor sampling and memorizing the canon of Dakota flora.

Angelica Adams, Wozupi’s program coordinator, greets us. Established in 2010, the farm grows and sells an incredible array of organic, indigenous plants and products—some of America’s oldest. Cherokee beans. Potawatomi lima. Oneida corn. Arikara yellow squash. Hidatsa shield beans. Lakota squash. Gete-okosimaan (Ojibwe for “old-time squash”). Maple sugar and syrup. Honey. Chokecherries. Wild plums. Apples. Apricots. Tomatoes. And Juneberries. Dark, tart, and plump, the ten pints of Juneberries that Adams brought out for Sherman were the most I’d ever seen in one place. And the first bite transported me back to the ditches of northern Minnesota, grasshoppers clacking in the grass, where my brother and I sought them as kids.

For those of us who grew up with them, these flavors evoke nostalgia. For many others, they will be new and unfamiliar. Tatanka Truck, a Native American food truck on whose opening menu Sherman consulted, has become a point of first encounter for the wider Minneapolis community. Here, the menu includes things like manoomin (wild rice) salad, sumac popcorn, and cedar-maple iced tea, all simple in preparation but surprising to many in their seeming foreignness. Owned and operated by the Little Earth Housing Authority, the first and only urban Indian housing project, Tatanka is—like Sherman’s projects—adamantly indigenous and inherently political.

All over the country, Indian communities that were forcefully divorced from their traditional foodways have suffered from poverty, colonialism, and a lack of fresh food for the better part of a century. In the Plains in the late 1800s, the U.S. Army hunted tens of millions of bison to the point of extinction, specifically to defeat the region’s tribes. In the Northwest, salmon were diminished because of man-made dams along the rivers. In Minnesota, cultivated cranberry marshes and rice beds were maliciously drowned to free up land for logging, forcing Indians to relocate to the White Earth Reservation. By killing the food—from coast to coast—the government defeated Native Americans.

And in turn, these tribes became dependent on the government for cheap, rationed foods—macaroni, white rice, lard, flour, bacon. Over time, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and cancer, afflictions previously absent from Indian life, came to plague reservations. When Sherman prepares bison, turkey, walleye, pike, squash, and hominy for a chronically malnourished community—returning to the earth and, in doing so, eschewing the system—it’s something of a revolution.

Sherman preps most of his meals for pop-ups, catered events, and food summits at the Little Earth kitchen, which has exposed its diverse population of reservation residents and city dwellers to his food. Many have expressed a feeling of connecting to it on a primal level. Sherman’s food gets at the private worry of all modern Indians—that our story is one defined by loss: loss of land, loss of culture, loss of a way of life. And yet we remain. We exist as modern Americans and Indians, but how much is left? How authentic, really, are we? At what point do we cease being Indians, and become people simply descended from Indians?

Sherman’s food suggests that all is not lost. In fact, it says much remains. It’s around us—the amaranth on the side of the road, the berries and fruit growing over our head. Of course, ingredients alone don’t make a cuisine, much less a political statement. Rather, Sherman and Thompson’s intentional approach is a reminder to focus on the richness of our surroundings and the earth from which we came.

So often, when Sherman introduces the idea of Native American food to a crowd, someone asks: “There’s Native American food?” He smiles and nods. His food is an answer to that question: It and we have always been here.

Correction, September 13th, 2016: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Angelica Adams as a Mdewakanton tribal member and the founder Wozupi. We’ve updated the story to reflect her position at Wozupi.

The post The Sioux Chef Spreading the Gospel of America’s First Food appeared first on Saveur.

“I can’t believe you’ve never brought us here before,” says Gavin Kaysen to his pastry chef Diane Yang as they stroll the Hmongtown Marketplace in St. Paul, Minnesota. Kaysen, Yang, and chef de cuisine Chris Nye, the trio that heads up Spoon and Stable in neighboring Minneapolis, are marveling at lush produce they’ve never cooked or seen before, like piles of bulbous foreign squash and wiry stalks of winter melon. This is Kaysen’s first time in the market, a sprawling 200 booths that fill three indoor and two outdoor spaces within an area that plays home to 65,000 Hmong, the largest urban concentration in the United States.

The Hmong are a rural Asian ethnic group that date back to ancient China, who then migrated into neighboring Laos, Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam during the 18th century. During the Vietnam War and the Secret War in Laos, many Hmong sided with American efforts to combat communism, and when the U.S. withdrew from Laos, a sizable group of Hmong were sent into internment camps in Thailand. The American government gave contracts to Christian groups to take in refugees in the following decades, Yang’s family among them, and the Twin Cities became a major resettlement area through Christian Charity and Lutheran Social Service programs.

The local Hmong population started to explode in the early 1980s, with Hmong opening restaurants, small service-oriented businesses, and retail shops. Hmongtown Marketplace, a pillar of the Hmong community, opened at its current site in 2004, and it’s since become a destination not just for groceries and prepared food, but also medicinal herbs, textiles, and, of course, community.

The indoor spaces are wild to explore. You’ll find bright red rambutan, crisp bok choy, and small, dense bananas; an outdoor market teems with locally grown gigantic Asian yellow cucumbers, bright bitter melons, and massive stalks of lemongrass and sugar cane. Many vendors don’t speak English, but are more than happy to gesticulate, smile, and assist anyone who shows the right enthusiasm.

In a small corner of one of the buildings, a grab-bag of Southeast Asian cuisines come together for Hmong in a few stalls of freshly prepared foods: The melding of a chile pepper with bundles of herbs and softened bamboo in chicken soup; a slightly-sweet tapioca pudding in coconut milk laced with chunks of softened taro; a papaya salad made to order that’s spicy, sour, salty, and sweet, with no one flavor dominating another.

Vendors sell more than food; there’s also dried roots and herbs which have no name in English, but are “good for the stomach” or “good for your head.” Imported over-the-counter medicines sit next to large knives and scythes: “Everyone has ten of these knives in their kitchen to cut bones and such,” Yang explains. Tables are stacked two-feet high with Hmong ceremonial burial clothing: long colorful stripes running down dark, thick robes, and shoes meant to “guide feet through one of the stages of getting to the afterlife, where you walk through a patch of caterpillars.”

After picking up stalks of pea eggplant to decorate Spoon and Stable, and some natural Thai medicines, the team sat to feast on their haul from the food stalls.

“Tell the whiteys, ‘If they don’t like it, they can’t complain,” a smiling vendor joked to Yang.

They liked it all.

A Tour of Hmongtown

Thai Chiles

Hmongtown teems with these tiny spicy chiles. A common Hmong sauce, served with braised meats and greens, soups, fried chicken, or roasted offal, is a simple combination of chopped chiles and fish sauce topped with salt, occasionally cut with a little oil.

Pea Eggplant (a.k.a. “Bitter Balls”)

“What are you going to do with those?” several amused Hmong women asked Kaysen as he walked through the market with two giant stalks of red and green vegetables. Very few knew how to define them, other than as a cross between melons, eggplant, and pepper they sometimes refer to as “bitter balls.” They’re actually a form of pea eggplant, but the bitter description is fitting, as these tiny orbs are extremely bitter when eaten raw. Their snappy skins burst into a somewhat medicinal flavor that coats the throat and doesn’t ease up for a long time. The ladies suggested he stew them down with wild meat like rabbit, venison, or squirrel. Or, for the American palate: “put in a pot with chicken and beef and boil it.”

Purple Lemongrass

Smell this locally-grown purple lemongrass and you’ll understand why it’s more expensive than its commercial yellow counterpart: The bulbs are smaller, the flavor is far more sharp and potent, and the fragrance is pungent and intoxicating. Lemongrass is essential in Hmong cooking; it’s most simply cooked into broth by simmering the trimmed stalks that forms the base of braised green dishes and various soups.

Dried Bamboo

This bamboo is dehydrated for export, and rehydrating it takes some time; the stalks must be continually soaked in boiling water, drained, and soaked again for several days before they’re ready for cooking. But they add a wonderful fragrance and resilient texture to soups, stews, and braises. At the market, you can fittingly buy dried bamboo at the Bamboo No. 5 food stall, where it’s cooked with ground chicken and broth. While the bamboo itself is a little bitter, Yang notes it’s because the soup is often served to the elderly or sick, who prefer it that way.

Roots and Herbs for Tea

Hmong use all kinds of herbs as medicine, and you’ll find an abundance of medicinal herbs at various stalls. Most only loosely translate from Hmong into English, and some aren’t even referenced individually: ko taw qos liab (duck foot), tshuaj rog (fat medicine), and ntiv (sweet fern) have their own translatable names, but other than the Hmong who grow them, most don’t even know what they are. Instead, they’re referred to together as “cook with chicken herbs.” Bags of the fresh herbs, containing whatever is growing according to the current season, are so ubiquitous with chicken soup that many Hmong buy the bags when fresh and immediately freeze them, so they have them on hand to make chicken soup when people are sick or a woman has just given birth.

Other roots and herbs are dried and used directly as medicine. Some, like burdock and ginseng, are somewhat easy to identify and describe to American buyers. Others, like the delicate leaves of the “twisted leaf” herb, are defined first as “good for stomach”: Two or three leaves steeped in hot water relieve upset stomachs and cramping. Combinations of the above are sometimes dehydrated, ground, and compressed with honey, which can then be shaved onto dishes or melted into medicinal teas.

Winter Melon

Hmong love winter melons’ thick, waxy skins so much that they carve dragons and other symbols into the surfaces. Or the melons, sometimes dubbed “Hmong pumpkin,” get hollowed out to use as soup terrines. “It’s really porous,” Yang says, “so when you cook it, it gets really spongy and doesn’t have much flavor.” Because of the high water content, winter melons are often juiced or candied for celebrations, and the skins get dehydrated and crystallized.

Radish Tops

Hmong eat lots of boiled and sautéed greens, so they let their radish greens grow thick and wild as a bonus vegetable. The green pods that emerge with the leaves are a little tough and chewy, “but Hmong people love chewy things,” Yang says. “They’re like radishes, but without the pepperiness and not as hot.”

Stuffed Chicken Wings

Food vendors at the market pay a flat $17,000 plus yearly fees to own their stalls, but high foot traffic means good food is well rewarded. And there’s plenty of good food. Cooks make papaya salad is made to order, balancing spicy, sweet, acidic, and salty flavors.Herbs are braised with pork, bamboo is tossed in chicken soup, and a local purveyor provides the stalls with a slightly spicy sausage. But one of the best dishes at the market is an order of stuffed chicken wings. The wings are skillfully deboned, then the skins stretched to the border of tearing. They’re filled with sautéed ground pork, vermicelli noodles, and herbs, and baked until the skin is crispy. It bites with a rich snap, yielding to the salty and bright filling.

Hmongtown Marketplace
217 Como Avenue, St Paul, MN 55103
(651) 487-3700

Jacqueline Raposo writes about chefs, food culture and chronic illness for outlets including Serious Eats, Tasting Table, Plate Magazine, The Village Voice, Cosmopolitan, and Elle. She’s the host of Love Bites Radio on Heritage Radio Network and is the gluten-free baker behind The Dusty Baker. Find her work at Words Food Art and gab away with her on Twitter and Instagram.

The post Taste Stuffed Chicken Wings and Magical Herbs at St. Paul’s Hmongtown Marketplace appeared first on Saveur.

Entertaining. As much as I love to do it, I dislike the word itself. It sounds so matronly—saying it out loud makes me break out in polka dots of cold deviled quail eggs. Hospitality is just as buttoned up, but a step better because it contains the suggestion of generosity, which is really what throwing a party is about. My social contract is pretty simple: I make way too much food and invite too many people, and in turn they bring too much wine and we stay up too late. I provide the dinner, and they, en masse, provide the din that soothes my excess-loving soul.

When my husband, Aaron Spangler, and I moved back home to rural Minnesota after nearly ten years of living in Brooklyn—swapping a small apartment on a hopping urban street corner for a rustic house on 150 acres of lonely Northern wilderness—we started having more parties. It happened naturally: Inviting a throng to drive down our snaking dirt road was a consequence of our sudden rural isolation and our newfound space.

Not that we didn’t throw lots of parties in the city. I’d regularly set out buffets for 20 on our tiny kitchen counter. Having cooked on the line at restaurants for years, I expected to keep up my game at home, which meant my party food was either derivative of the restaurants I cooked in (shallots confited in red wine sauce—delicious but fussy) or channeled someone else’s more storied rural roots (smoky Southern-style pork butt). I rarely served Midwestern food, which I thought of at the time as stodgy and stuck in the past. (I have since become one of its fiercest advocates.) Back then I dreamed about throwing classy parties—proper ones with champagne in flutes, individual appetizers, two to three courses, and well-behaved children. That dream died fast and, truth be told, painlessly, when I moved back to Minnesota. Any guests who come with expectations of haute cuisine stand corrected when they arrive to find me still peeling carrots, kicking the oven door shut with my house mocs, and taking breaks to sip a cocktail as I pound out a sauce in my mortar.

Why I Love Buffets

No matter how ambitious the dinner, I always lean on my Midwestern roots and serve the food in a single buffet line. Buffets comfort me, and not just for their convenience, or because the word rhymes with duvet. A buffet reassures me that no dish—especially something foundational like rice or, in this case, polenta—will languish, cooling, at some talkative someone’s elbow. Not to be a nag, but I like to see the dishes erode and disappear evenly. Buffets give good sight lines, easing the fears of even the most fretful of cooks. To read my tips and tricks to throwing you best buffet-style party, head here.

No matter what mood I’m currently chasing, I stick with a casual format, having learned that failures of the informal approach are few. As long as the food contains some ambition, some evidence of striving, the nonchalance of everything else balances out. If you like to cook, it’s easy: Fixate all your obsessions on the food and let the rest of the details slide. The few times I’ve really tried to cover all bases of hospitality—neurotically over-tidying, or ironing cloth napkins—I’ve lost sight of the food. I remember sitting beneath my own gray storm cloud at the table, trying not to deflate the party by saying something derisive about the wiry duck tendrils on my plate that had turned to frizzle over too-high heat. Suddenly it didn’t matter that all those flat napkins matched. When the duck went down, it took my fancy dreams with it.

Though I used to try to control the scene, now I let things happen. Blame it on middle age or becoming a mom, but I’ve given up on trying to herd people. When I have a party, I let them wander where they may, and I’ve found that guests at our house tend to follow the fire. The congregation that begins in the kitchen around my working burners often moves after dinner to Aaron’s studio, where folks idle happily around the wood stove like bugs around a late-night lightbulb. Naturally, it makes sense sometimes to just throw the party in the garage, as we’re doing today.

Aaron’s studio is actually more hive than garage. Here he makes sculptures—some freestanding 3-D pieces, some bas-reliefs that hang on the wall—from local basswood. The studio is filled with chunks of wood in various states of creation and demise, not least of which is an enormous basswood log that he’ll peel and cut into long curling cylinders. Freshly glued-up basswood panels line the walls, and the wood chips litter the ground, making a shuffly foot mulch as reassuring as peanut shells on the floor of a dive bar.

I’m still fine-tuning the menu, which changed several times according to my mood and what I had available in the garden. The meal that eventually emerges is not what most people would peg as typically Midwestern, and it is composed of locally sourced ingredients, some so local I pulled them from the front yard. Buffet-friendly but full of competing personalities, these dishes have no pre-planned seating chart: They can mingle on the plate like old acquaintances.

I’ve intended the parsley bagna cauda to be eaten with the jumbo roast of slow-cooked pork, but I won’t mind if the fleecy green sauce slides into my mound of wild rice-flecked polenta. And the grilled leek tops and greens come with their own sauce, a slick of bright red chile-garlic business, but if it rubs up against the pork, that’s okay, too. The shredded turnips got an unexpected grape vinaigrette when I ran out of lemons, started looking around for replacement acidity, and found a few conveniently unripe grapes hanging on the vine. I don’t know if they’ll ever mature into a drinkable juice, but for now I’m excited to have found a cool use for the sour verjuice. As is traditional at a Midwestern feast, there’s so much food that the salad can hardly fit on the plate. (The more civilized among us will go back for it after clearing some real estate and eat it last, as Europeans do.)

The reality of dessert is that some folks only want another drink (hummingbirds after nectar!) and some will wait patiently for a solid confectionary to arrive. Eventually it does: The fermented berry juice that sat for days in my back pantry, growing fizzier and tarter and ever more purposeless, finally finds its calling in a pretty little ice cream float topped with a cap of homemade marshmallow crème, its silvery pompadour like a space-age antidote to all of this garden goodness. Conveniently, because we’re in the woodshop, a handy-dandy blowtorch sits by the stove, so I put it to use brûléeing the meringue float tops.

Hot and cold, fancy and gritty, airy and dense, sweet and tangy—all the contrasts that work in a successful dessert work for a party, too. Polarity can be liberating; it creates some space into which the unexpected can flow.

My restaurant professionalism is fading as quickly as the dawn stars in the sky. I am now a domesticated home cook. I have a designated “cracker bowl”; an appetizer means a hastily made dip that soon wears the tracks of a sledding hill; we always run out of wine glasses and have to use the jelly jars; and the kids are never quiet unless they’re suspiciously quiet.

The garage party confirms the weird theory I lit on when I moved back home: The deeper you move into the country, the farther the party travels from the formal heart of the house. Fancy dining rooms give way to bright kitchens, and when you get to really rural areas such as ours, you find people accustomed to throwing parties in cement-floored shops and garages. Now that I’ve logged time here, I get it: When the meter dips to super-casual, the social-barometric pressure falls. It might seem like this kind of informality is one lazy lady’s excuse, but I don’t think so. When it comes to dinner parties, a lack of rules in an unconventional space feels rather electric.

And just when all this extreme informality begins to sound dangerously close to a set of commandments, remember that party rules work best when they are noted but then subversively trespassed—which also applies to the rules of English grammar. So iron your linen napkins if you must, but remember: Parties are fun, but parties in the garage are always funner.

Spicy Pickle Brine Shots

Smoky Baba Ghannouj with Oil-Cured Black Olives

Turnip Salad with Green Grape Vinaigrette

Slow-Roasted Pork Shoulder with Parsley Bagna Cauda

Polenta with Corn and Wild Rice

Grilled Greens and Leek Tops with Chile-Garlic Sauce

Cola Syrup

Sour Raspberry Floats with Marshmallow Cream

The post A Midwest Dinner Party With Author Amy Theilen appeared first on Saveur.

There’s a new dynamism in the Twin Cities culinary scene, thanks to a deeply food-engaged populace supporting not only restaurants, cocktail bars, and taphouses, but a dozen independent food cooperatives (supermarkets with a focus on organic and local produce). Our feature in the June/July issue of Saveur visits four Minneapolis chefs in their kitchens and comes away with some kick-ass new recipes for summer. In the course of reporting the story, we visited many more restaurants, salumi makers, bakers, and food trucks than we had room in the story for. So we’ve put together this list of some our favorite finds.

Bachelor Farmer
In this warm, post-and-beam former warehouse, James Beard Award-winning chef Paul Berglund fashions boldly flavored food from north country ingredients. Your roasted celeriac soup with toasted walnuts and lemon might be served in a clay bowl thrown by Berglund—an amateur potter—himself.

Bachelor Farmer
50 2nd Avenue N
(612) 206-3920

Octopus at Borough

Borough
Drew Yancey serves globe-trotting plates like raw tuna with miso, pineapple, sesame, and lime at this chefs’ hangout in the North Loop. And barkeep Jesse Held, a seasoned veteran of the Minneapolis mixology scene, shakes cocktails for adventurous sippers, viz. the Awkward Silence, made with bourbon, peach-pit liqueur, yerba mate honey, artichoke liqueur, and “salt solution.”

Borough
730 N. Washington Avenue
(612) 354-3135

Burgers at The Curious Goat

Curious Goat
Torqued-up comforts with refined technique (think purple potatoes with sunchoke cream or a meatloaf sandwich with onion jam and gravy) are this food truck’s calling card. And you don’t have to hunt far and wide for this mobile operation because it’s in residence semi-permanently at Sociable Cider Werks.

Curious Goat
1500 Fillmore Street NE
(612) 229-2364

Haute Dish
As you might have guessed by the name, Landon Schoenefeld’s restaurant serves Midwestern food with modern, cheffy flourishes. His upmarket riff on the Midwestern staple “hot dish” casserole includes beef short rib, porcini mushrooms, and of course, tater tots—and has become a Twin Cities icon.

Haute Dish
119 Washington Avenue N
(612) 338-8484

Heyday
Dominated by a freewheeling open kitchen and a few barns’ worth of reclaimed wood, Jim Christiansen’s vegetable-focused restaurant offers cooking with a lightness and purity, shown in dishes like a warm appetizer of a fried egg over chanterelles, quick-pickled blackberries, green garlic, and toasted hazelnuts. The claytonia, morels, and spring onions that Christiansen finds in Theodore Wirth Park make regular appearances on plates here.

Heyday
2700 Lyndale Avenue S
(612) 200-9369

La Belle Vie
The grand dame of Minneapolis fine dining has a new chef de cuisine in Shane Oporto. The jury’s still out on how the menu of French-inflected refinements that won executive chef Tim McKee a James Beard Award for Best Chef Midwest in 2009 will get tweaked, if at all. In the meantime, the bar here—widely credited with igniting the craft cocktail scene in the city—is superb for popping in for an aperitif before a night on the town.

La Belle Vie
510 Groveland Avenue
(612) 874-6440

Kramarczuk’s
Since 1954, this warm, inviting meat market and restaurant has been delivering the old-world flavors of eastern Europe, primarily in the form of sausages and more sausages: Every style of mett, brat, and wurst is available here.

Kramarczuk’s
215 E Hennepin Avenue
(612) 379-3018

The Marvel Bar’s “alkaline trio”

Marvel Bar
This industrial-posh speakeasy underneath Bachelor Farmer has the city’s most extensive selection of spirits from Minnesota distilleries and some of its best cocktails, too. The house style is a restrained refinement—no seaweed tinctures here!—that is nevertheless sly and winning.

Marvel Bar
50 2nd Avenue N
(612) 206-3929

Piccolo
Doug Flicker is the Obi Wan Kenobi of the Minneapolis dining scene and his tiny, 36-seat jewel box spot in South Minneapolis is a must on any food-lover’s tour. His dishes marry craveable comfort with tweezer-prodded artistry, like braised salsify with smoked oysters, hen of the woods mushrooms, horseradish, and cress. And don’t miss his signature scrambled eggs with pickled pigs’ feet and truffle butter.

Piccolo
4300 Bryant Avenue S
(612) 827-8111

Red Table Meat Co.
Heirloom pigs, transformed into traditional Italian-style salumi and whole-muscle cures, are the specialty of this year-old salumeria, run by ace chefs Mike Phillips and Peter Ireland. Their gleaming Willy Wonka-esque facility has a USDA inspector onsite and floor-to-ceiling glass windows that reveal to visitors every step of the process, from butchering, to production, to curing, to aging.

Red Table Meat Co.
1401 Marshall Street NE
(612) 200-8245

Salty Tart
In a city with a brace of top-notch bakeries (Patisserie 46, Rustica), Michelle Gayer’s spot—a kiosk tucked into the Midtown Global Market—focuses on decadent, delicious confections you’d expect from a James Beard-nominated pastry chef, like a chocolate trifle with moist chocolate cake, silky chocolate mousse, and toasty caramel served in a half-pint deli container. Grab a plastic spoon and dig in!

Salty Tart
920 E Lake Street
(612) 874-9206

Spoon and Stable
In a sun-splashed lofty former stable, Minnesota native Gavin Kaysen—whose previous gig was seven years helming New York’s Café Boulud—turns out elegant seasonal cuisine, like wood-grilled duck with black rice, beets, and honey, with the highest-quality Midwestern ingredients.

Spoon and Stable
211 1st Street N
(612) 224-9850

Surdyk’s Liquor and Cheese

Surdyk’s Liquor and Cheese
A sprawling market—really two markets in one—is a one-stop shop for Twin-Cities-made provisions, like Red Table Meat Co. salamis, cocktail bitters by Dashfire, and B.T. McElrath’s award-winning Salty Dog Chocolate Bars.

Surdyk’s Liquor and Cheese
303 E Hennepin Avenue
(612) 379-3232

Tilia
This ur-neighborhood restaurant seems like it’s been there since Betty Crocker’s heyday. It’s a warm taproom (featuring 21 tightly curated draft beers) with creaky hardwood floors, glowing schoolhouse lanterns, and chipped Thonet chairs. Chef Steven Brown isn’t afraid to elevate well-sourced Minneapolis lake fish and vegetables with global flourishes like dukka spices and ras el hanout.

Tilia
2726 W 43rd Street
(612) 354-2806

New and on-the-horizon:

Brut
Erik Anderson returned to Minneapolis from Nashville’s lauded The Catbird Seat, and teamed up with Jamie Malone, former executive chef of Twin Cities seafood temple Sea Change, to create Brut, a classic French restaurant slated for a fall opening. Their pop-ups have been setting Instagram ablaze. Stay up-to-date with developments and opening date on Twitter.

Nighthawks and Birdie
Landon Schoenefeld first made a name for himself with Haute Dish (see above). Nighthawks, named for the Edward Hopper painting, is his postmodern diner; Birdie, opening later this summer, will be a tasting-menu-only restaurant-within-a-restaurant located in Nighthawk’s kitchen.

Nighthawks
3753 Nicollet Avenue S
(612) 248 8111

Patisserie 46
Much-laureled pastry chef John Kraus crafts all the soigné French patisseries—mille-feuilles, eclairs, macarons—at this laid-back neighborhood café and bakery. But Kraus’ kouign-amann twist, his foot-long take on the classic Breton delectable, is a must. There are also killer tartines and crêpes.

Patisserie 46
4552 Grand Ave S
(612) 354-3257

Revival
North Carolina-bred Thomas Boemer won over the Twin Cities with his cooking at Corner Table, a genial neighborhood bistro with deft Italian-ish fare and seasonal Midwestern ethics. His newly-opened spot Revival pays homage to the southern dishes he grew up with, such as fried chicken and pork barbecue with chopped slaw.

Revival
4257 Nicollet Avenue S (612) 345-4516

Cookbook authors Matt Lee and Ted Lee are the hosts of the TV series “Southern Uncovered with The Lee Bros.” which premieres on Ovation June 14, 2015.

The post Matt and Ted Lee on Where to Eat in Minneapolis appeared first on Saveur.

Where to Eat in Minneapolis

Sun streams through the clerestory skylight of Spoon and Stable, a former barn in Minneapolis’ North Loop warehouse district, casting the restaurant’s chef, Gavin Kaysen, in a beatific glow wholly suited to the moment: Kaysen’s preaching the gospel of North Country ingredients. The white marble pass of his open kitchen is an altar upon which sits a whole raw duck from a farm in Brainerd; a large jar of molasses-dark buckwheat honey is from Little Falls; and a saucepan of coal-black rice comes from just across the state line in Wisconsin. Kaysen reaches for the duck, cradling it in his upturned palm, lifts the cavity to his nose, and inhales.

“Smell that…” he insists, proffering the duck, which, true enough, has a distinct aroma, the minerals-and-popcorn whiff of dry-aged beef. “All that funk? In the bone? I want it to be absorbed by the breast meat,” he says. “That’s what we are after.”

By “we” Kaysen means he and Pat Ebnet from Wild Acres Farm, two and a half hours away. They began working together last summer to achieve the tenderness and deep flavor the chef was seeking in Pekin birds. Kaysen had recently returned to the Twin Cities (where he grew up) to open his first restaurant. In the 12 years he’d been gone he cooked in Napa, in London, and in New York City at Café Boulud on the Upper East Side.

To hear Kaysen tell it, the story of his funky duck—and his own homecoming—is as much about the thrill of finding crazily passionate people as it is about discovering alluring ingredients. Over the months that led up to Spoon and Stable’s opening in November, Ebnet sat with him for numerous taste tests of Wild Acres’ birds as the two learned that the chef-vendor relationship could be more of a collaboration than a product-drop at the kitchen door. Kaysen points to a monumental chandelier above the host’s station; it began as a conversation with a glass-artist friend who works across the river. His chef’s table—a bar for six diners overlooking the kitchen—is a thick slice of wood from a black walnut tree made by a pal who culled it from a city park.

We first learned of the culinary genius of Minnesota eight years ago from Andrew Zimmern. At the time, Zimmern was a mostly local phenomenon—an irrepressibly enthusiastic chef-turned-food-journalist—and as much as we Southerners schooled him in the ways of grits and greens, he taught us about the food scene of his adopted hometown: the Eastern European cured-meat traditions of old-school butchers like Kramarczuk’s, the amazing markets where the city’s large Hmong and Ethiopian communities shop, and the legions of food-engaged home cooks who support a dozen food cooperatives—fiercely independent supermarkets with a focus on organic and local produce.

Fast-forward to a recent return visit and we were floored by how Minneapolis was inspiring excitement about Midwestern food the way Nashville was Southern food. Food trucks were partnering with tap houses to create pop-ups. There was Haute Dish, Landon Schoenefeld’s spot serving cheeky, decadent reinventions of midcentury Midwestern cooking—including, as the name implies, haute hot dishes—and the heavily tattooed dudes of Travail Kitchen & Amusements selling tickets to hours-long tasting menus. Red Table Meat Co. was on the scene, meat pros who were curing whole cuts Italian-style and teaming up with Kramarczuk’s to offer some out-of-this-old-world sausages. And presiding over it all, like a benevolent food pope, was Zimmern, who in the intervening years had become a culinary-travel TV superstar and booster-in-chief of the Twin Cities. When the news spread that not only Kaysen, but Erik Anderson, the acclaimed chef of Nashville’s Catbird Seat, was moving back to Minneapolis to be a part of the landscape, we decided to book another trip.

Minneapolis stretches across the banks of a few choice S-curves in the upper Mississippi River, and its proximity to water routes and to the fields of the fertile Grain Belt to the west made it a milling and lumbering center in the 1800s. Like many cities its size, Minneapolis developed a dense downtown grid of gleaming skyscrapers over the course of the 20th century. Here they’re interconnected by the “Skyway”—a network of glassed-in second-story corridors that permit a sun-deprived resident to walk from one building to another in the middle of winter without freezing.

Often compared to Chicago and Seattle—with St. Paul it’s the largest metropolis in the northern United States between the two—Minneapolis feels greener and more pastoral than both. The dense grid of streets quickly gives way to meandering tree-lined parkways that snake around public green spaces and several major lakes, a few minor ones, and the Mississippi. These parks and bodies of water have a loosening effect on the city and are central to the lives of its chefs, like Paul Berglund of The Bachelor Farmer, who proposes a brisk morning walk on one of the city’s hiking trails when we first speak to him, and Steven Brown, whose restaurant, Tilia, is in an enclave of grand Craftsman-style homes just a few blocks to the west side of Lake Harriet.

A tall 50-something with a mop of gray hair, Brown looks like a Replacements roadie who missed the reunion tour bus. “Check this out,” he calls from the pocket kitchen that overlooks his warm dining room with its creaky hardwood floors, glowing schoolhouse lanterns, and chipped Thonet chairs.

He tosses us each a dark-brown sandwich bun, soft and warm to the touch. “I called my buddy John at Patisserie 46 yesterday and said, ‘Man, you’ve gotta hook me up with a pumpernickel roll!’ I just picked them up from his place. Are they beautiful or what?”

He is preparing a mash-up of the Reuben sandwich and a traditional “shore lunch,” a combination that Tilia is famous for. “The shore lunch is for when you’re catching fish,” he says. “You just fry it up in a pan on the shore, and eat it simply prepared.”

Brown interprets the notion of simplicity rather loosely: he’s already brined lake trout fillets in a zingy, aromatic brew made from toasted allspice, mustard seeds, cloves, star anise, and fennel. He’s whipped up a mayo spiked with ancho chile and diced pickles that he calls “10,000 Lakes Sauce”—a Minnesota riff on Thousand Island. He’s quick-pickled kohlrabi overnight in vinegar seasoned with fresh ginger, garlic, and lemongrass for the kohlrabi-radish slaw he’s substituting for the sauerkraut.

To put the sandwich together, Brown gets to frying: “I got a FryDaddy for my confirmation—my friends used to call me ‘The Calamari Cowboy,’” he says, dunking the first brined fish fillet into lemon juice-spiked buttermilk, dredging it in a dry mixture of cornmeal, flour, and whole caraway seeds, and sliding it into a pan of hot oil and butter. He babies the fillets in the fry pan, spooning the buttery oil over them until they are uniformly golden brown.

He piles a tuft of the kohlrabi slaw on the bottom half of a nicely marbleized pumpernickel bun, then reaches for the crispy fish and an aged alpine-style cheese from Roth in Wisconsin, then tops the mile-high “Reuben” with a glug of his 10,000 Lakes Sauce. It’s a punk-rock sandwich with a $25 dry-cleaning bill—impossible to eat without making a willful mess of it, every luscious bite worth the collateral damage.

Though it wasn’t planned, we couldn’t have dreamed up a more appropriate side dish for Brown’s “shore lunch” than the pork belly and potato recipe Paul Berglund cooked for us at The Bachelor Farmer—drawing as it did from a similar campfire culinary tradition. As a Boy Scout, Berglund remembers folding cut-up zucchini, carrots, and potatoes in packets of aluminum foil and cooking these “hobo packs” in the campfire. His 2015 reimagining of this humble childhood staple has become a signature at The Bachelor Farmer, a new-Nordic nest with acres of post-and-beam wood porn where you’re served soup in bowls thrown by the chef himself (while supplies last—the dishwasher is murder on the handmade stuff).

“I feel more inclined to bolder flavors living in Minnesota,” says the Chicago-born chef, who served in the U.S. Navy in Japan and worked for seven years at Oliveto in Oakland before moving here in 2010. “When you’re faced with a bitter cold span of three months, it’s fun to create ways to wake you up! There’s a need for bolder, novel flavors that energize and surprise.”

Berglund’s foil-wrapped spuds and pork belly evoke the Minnesota pine forests: When the packets heat up on the flattop griddle, the cedar paper he stuffs inside them smolders, infusing the food with smoke. He places tiles of fresh pork belly, which have been salted for a day and lightly cooked, on the potatoes and strews shallots—both pickled and caramelized—over the top.

The last stop on our “Minnesota on a Plate” tour of the city was to Christiansen’s Heyday, named—according to the definition painted across the brick wall in the barroom—after 1) an archaic term for high spirits; 2) the period of one’s greatest vigor or popularity; 3) a Replacements song. (Hint: It’s the one that goes: “Goin’ to the party though we weren’t invited!”)

The lofty, open storefront, clad in darkly stained reclaimed wood, was closed for a private event that evening, and Christiansen was solo in the spacious kitchen cooking up a warm appetizer of sautéed chanterelles and quick-pickled blackberries with green garlic, hazelnuts, fava beans, and a fried egg.

Minneapolis born and bred, one of five children, Christiansen characterized his mom’s cooking growing up as “pretty good farm-style cooking,” which sounds like an understatement when he also notes that when she baked bread, she’d toast the whole grain before grinding the wheat. His paternal grandfather was similarly an influence on his food life growing up. He lived in a working-class part of St. Paul on a large plot of land where he had a huge asparagus field, pear trees, and great tomatoes.

Christiansen caramelizes the chanterelles and spring leeks with a knob of butter, a few whole sprigs of thyme, and an unpeeled garlic clove. He squirts a flash of water from a squeeze bottle into the pan as the fried egg is nearing completion. “So it doesn’t brown around the edges,” he says. “That’s exactly the color I’m going for.”

He tops the dish with toasted hazelnuts: “They’re so fruity and roasty, they go great with eggs, and they grow everywhere here,” he says. When we bite into his Minnesota hazelnuts, it’s fair to say that we’d never really appreciated the savory side of a filbert until then. It seems odd, but there you have it: We were astonished by a hazelnut.

Then Christiansen makes a confession: “The Minneapolis Park System is a foraging secret,” he says about one of his favorite suppliers. Tart and earthy claytonia leaves, chanterelles, morels, and nettles are some of his favorite finds. “Actually, most of the chefs know about it, but it’s big enough for all of us. We’re spoiled here,” he says.

Where to Eat in Minneapolis

The Bachelor Farmer
50 Second Ave. N

Red Table Meat Co.
1401 Marshall St. NE

Haute Dish
119 Washington Ave. N

Spoon and Stable
211 First St. N

Heyday
2700 Lyndale Ave. S

Tilia
2726 W. 43rd St.

Kramarczuk’s
215 E. Hennepin Ave.

Travail Kitchen & Amusements
4124 W. Broadway Ave.

Patisserie 46
4552 Grand Ave. S

Fried Egg with Hazelnuts, Chanterelles, Green Garlic, and Blackberries

Bay and Rosemary Custard

Skillet-Cooked Duck Breast with Beets and Watercress

Trout “Reuben”

The post Where to Eat in Minneapolis appeared first on Saveur.