(acoustic guitar music)
(cows mooing)
- Welcome to the farm.
It's gonna be an informative day here today.
Dan Young, a University of Wisconsin professor, [cell phone rings loudly]
is comin' on up to teach me about dung beetles.
[phone still ringing] Now, dung beetles are-- [sighs] hold on.
Let me get this. Hello?
- Hey, it's Brady. - Hey, Brady.
- You promised to help me out sometime. - Yeah.
- I have a cocktail hors d'oeuvre emergency.
We have friends coming for a cocktail party.
- Okay, well what time? - Today, four o'clock.
- No problem. I'll take care of it.
- Really? Great! Thank you!
- See you then.
Okay, a little change of plans there.
That was my friend Brady.
He needs help with a cocktail party this afternoon,
which is a great excuse for me to go out
and learn about the ingredients that are
put into all of the wonderful distilled Wisconsin spirits.
So I have an idea.
Why don't we start out in Blue Mounds,
and learn about growing potatoes?
And then, we'll head up to learn about sorghum
for makin' whiskey.
And on the way back, I'm gonna stop in and get some
lefse for some appetizers.
Gather with us Around the Farm Table .
I'm your host, Inga Witscher.
- [All] Gather with us Around the Farm Table .
- A few years ago, I moved up to Wisconsin.
I started an organic dairy farm at St. Isidore's Mead.
That's when I discovered the abundance
of Midwestern local food and small-scale farmers.
Growing everything from green zebra tomatoes
to pasture pork.
I'm taking a break from the cows, hittin' the road,
and seeing if I can't satisfy my epicurious appetite.
Oh.
(acoustic guitar music)
That's great.
This is amazing.
- Around the Farm Table is funded in part by
Wisconsin Farmers Union.
Heartland Credit Union.
And Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.
- So Dan, I wanted to have you out to the farm.
I'm interested in the beetles.
Specifically the dung beetles.
And find out what they bring to the farm
and why they're important to have in nature.
- Sure.
Dung beetles are within a group of beetles
that are very important recyclers.
A lot of people think of positive things on a farm
with insects related largely to pollination,
and that's certainly true,
but an incredibly important ecological service
that insects provide, and dung beetles is a good example,
is nutrient recycling.
And certainly when you have dung pats like this around,
it's important for this material to get recycled
back into the soil to build the soil,
and also to get it off from the surface
of the soil where you would tend to have
an increase in nuisance flies if it was
sitting out here for a while.
So those are a couple of things that dung beetles
are gonna do to help 'ya.
- What kind of species would I expect to find
here at my farm?
- We have within the family that this group belongs to,
there are probably about 165 species of scarab beetles
that live in Wisconsin.
And a fairly important subset of those would be
ones that are associated with dung.
- So the beetles are really important for me on my farm
just to help with recycling the manure.
How do we encourage them?
Is there something that I can be doing?
Or is there something that I should?
Obviously, I'm not spraying any pesticides
'cause I'm an organic farm,
but should I just, the work's all done?
- I think as long as you have a situation like this
where you have a reasonably undisturbed setting
with the way the fields are managed,
you're basically, the beetles will take care of themselves.
You can certainly see the flies are doing that.
Their sense of smell, as it were,
the chemical receptors in their antennae,
are really, really fine and you can draw things in
from literally miles away if you have a good
foundation for them to receive.
- Well, I appreciate you coming up to the farm
and teaching me about those interesting subjects.
- Oh, you're welcome.
- Well, I tell you what.
I wanted to get some Wisconsin-distilled liquor
for this party this afternoon,
and I wanted to find out about the ingredients
that go into it, so let's head on down to Blue Mounds,
and find out about growing seed potatoes.
(acoustic guitar music)
Well, hello there. How are you guys today?
- [Both] Hi, Inga. - [Barb] Thanks for coming.
- Yeah, I've been wanting to visit here for quite a while.
This farm has been around since when?
- '90, 1994. - [Inga] No kidding?
- We started this farm.
And our first CSA season was '95.
- You guys must've been one of the first CSAs in Wisconsin.
- This is our 22nd season as a CSA.
- Yeah, we started Vermont Valley Community Farm
when there was oh, maybe about a dozen farms
in the whole state goin' on at the very beginning
of the whole CSA movement.
- Was it difficult to educate people about
what a CSA is or to bring people aboard with the idea?
- It took a lot of time and a lot of energy
and a lot of effort
because people didn't know what CSA was.
It wasn't even close to being a household word.
So yeah, we really kind of beat the pavement
educating people.
- Well, wonderful.
And your kids work with you.
That's something that I just love seeing
is the adult children staying on the farm.
- We have three kids.
Jesse works with us. He's our oldest.
Our son Eric works with us.
Our daughter Becky works with us.
And our daughter-in-law Jonnah works with us.
- That's really wonderful.
I love hearing about that.
- They all live nearby and all work on the farm.
- I'm hoping to find out about potatoes.
Is Jesse around-- I'm hoping-- today?
- Oh, we keep him working in the potato field.
That's where you're gonna find him.
- I think he's out in that field.
- Yeah, yeah, he's hilling potatoes today.
- Well, I'll let you guys get back to it.
It was nice to see 'ya.
I'm picking up some potato vodka today to
make cocktails with,
and I realize I don't know enough about
the potato industry here in Wisconsin.
Now here at your farm you're mostly a seed potato producer.
Is that right?
- Yeah, but almost all our potatoes go
for the seed potato business.
We deliver quite a few potatoes to the CSA,
but other than that all the potatoes we sell
are as seed.
- So what's the difference between a regular
potato and a seed potato?
-The only difference, especially for an organic potato,
is that the seed potato goes through extra sets
of testing to make sure it's disease-free.
Otherwise it's the exact same as the potato
you'd buy in the store.
- Now I notice you were hilling your potatoes,
and I do the same thing at my house.
But what's the reasoning behind it?
Is it to grow more potatoes?
- The main reason we hill is for weed control.
When we plant the potatoes,
our planter hills them up and when we knock
that hill down for weed control,
then as they get bigger we continue to hill them up.
So it's for weed control,
but also to be sure that the potatoes themselves
are covered by dirt so there's no greening,
or with animal, no rodent damage or bird damage, so.
- So if I wanted to save some of my potatoes
this year for seed potatoes for next year,
what are some tips and how to make them last?
- We like to, we store our potatoes in cold,
dark and high humidity.
We like to store them at 38 degrees,
and very high humidity, and as dark as you can
possibly make it to make sure that they don't start growing.
They go into dormancy and then they have to
break the dormancy in the spring in order to grow a seed.
We warm them back up in the spring, before you plant them.
- Well, I tell you what.
All this talk about potatoes is making me hungry for lefse
so why don't we take off to Blair
and let Jesse get back to cultivating.
(acoustic guitar music)
I'm at Countryside Lefse here in Blair, Wisconsin.
I wanted to find out how potatoes are used
to make one of my favorite things.
Darlene,you've been making lefse
for quite a few years, right? - Quite a few.
- How long have you been here? - Almost 30 years.
- Oh, my goodness. That's wonderful.
How do you make good lefse?
- Well, by the time I get it,
it's already in these nice... either pucks or the balls.
- Yeah. - And then you just...
- Do you want to--
You don't want to over-flour it though. Right?
- No, you don't. Just a little bit of flour.
It looks like we're using a lot. - Yeah.
- But you'll see as it gets baked,
a lot of this is gonna fall off.
So when it gets onto the clogs over there,
you won't see very much of the flour.
- Yeah, I feel kind of terrible that with a name like Inga,
I don't make lefse more often, but... (laughing)
When there's ladies like you that make great lefse...
- Well, thank you. We try.
And our goal here is to get between
a 17- and a 18-, 19-inch circle.
- That's huge.
- Before we transfer it to a baker.
- Now you all still use the sticks.
Is that, it's so much easier to handle with sticks?
- Well, it's almost impossible to handle it any other way
because it's so thin,
your fingers would go right through it
if you tried to pick it up with your hands.
Now you just swing it out, drop it,
and then roll it off your stick.
- Go, go, go, go, go, go, go!
(laughing)
- You did good for the first time.
- Thank you so much. And keep up what you're doing.
- We will try.
- Let's go say hi to Marshall.
Seeing lefse made like this is really incredible.
It just smells so great in here and I love the atmosphere.
Tell me a little bit about your business.
- This is a business that's been around for 50 years.
We started making lefse in a drive-in in 1965,
and now it slowly has grown,
and now we are here.
- Well, I love that Blair, Wisconsin is almost
kind of known for your guys' lefse here, right?
That's what I always think of when I think of Blair.
- Yup, we get-- in the fall especially,
but even this time of year-- we get people
that will come and drive for three hours to get lefse.
They make it kind of a day.
- Well, I'm Norwegian. It's part of our heritage.
- It's part of our heritage, yup.
Yup, the Norwegians were kind of cheap,
so they didn't want to waste the potatoes, so they--
- Were kinda?
- Yeah, don't waste the potato after you boiled it,
so they made it into something the next day,
and that's where it kind of came from, so.
Yeah, they were kind of cheap.
(laughing)
- Well, it's nice being here to see the process
because I feel like I'm in the kitchen with
my grandmothers and my aunts and my friends making lefse.
And I like that the business is several women
doing their thing and making this incredible product.
What do you think about that?
- Yeah, we do it just like they did in the home.
Just on a bigger scale.
In lefse, there's not a lot of ingredients in it,
but it's very tricky to do the process.
So we have potatoes in the back,
about 60,000 pounds,
and we peel and cook those.
And then they come out here and they mix 'em,
and then they're rolling them,
baking them on open grills, which it gets hot in here,
and then they package them, so it's a...
- It's a handmade product. - Handmade product.
And when you try to change that, it gets dry.
So conveyor oven's not good, machines not good,
instant potatoes not good for lefse.
- Okay. - [Marshall] Yeah.
- Well, listen.
I'm doing a Wisconsin-themed cocktail party
for a friend of mine,
and it wouldn't be Wisconsin-themed unless
I brought some lefse.
So I came to pick up some lefse
for my little hors d'oeuvres.
- Wonderful, yup.
Roll 'em up and then cut 'em into little pieces.
Yeah. - [Inga] Exactly.
Okay, well I'm gonna finish up here and then
gather some extra ingredients and then we'll
get headed to the kitchen.
(acoustic guitar music)
I'm headed out to Sheboygan County to learn
about the sorghum grown here in Wisconsin.
Rich Wittgreve is one of the largest sorghum producers here,
and part of his sorghum goes into making
a craft whiskey, which I'll pick up later for our cocktails.
Let's go say hi to Rich.
(acoustic guitar music)
Boy, it's nice when I'm going through Wisconsin
seeing cornfields after cornfields,
to all of a sudden see a sorghum field.
You don't see that many in Wisconsin.
How many farms are there?
- There are very few farms producing sorghum
in Wisconsin at this time.
There's a few people that are doing it as a hobbyist,
but most of 'em are very small.
- So by small is that like 50 acres?
- We're seeing an acre or less. - [Inga] An acre or less.
- A lot of times they may have 3 fifty-foot rows in their garden.
- That's very small. - [Rich] Yes.
- So how many acres are you doing?
- We actually have 30.
That's somewhere between one and two percent
of the nation's crop.
- That's amazing. Wow.
And you've really kind of helped pioneer sorghum
here in Wisconsin.
Was it always grown in Wisconsin or is this?
- Sorghum has been grown in the United States
since about 1853.
What we see happening is the fact that
they were trying to start a northern sherry industry.
So Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota played
a very important part of that.
In 1879 the state of Wisconsin produced 325,000
gallons of syrup.
- I always think of sorghum as being a southern crop
and Wisconsin being a dairy state,
so it's interesting to know that.
Tennessee and Kentucky are really the heart of it,
with North Carolina having probably the most
producers in the nation.
- How did you come to do sorghum for a crop to sell?
- We started farming full-time in the fall of '84.
And '88 we had a major drought here in Wisconsin.
We virtually lost all of our crops
and all of our custom work.
And we had been playing with sorghum for
about three years then already.
Because of the debt we had from the drought, we just were never
gonna pay the debt off doing what everybody else is doing,
and therefore I elected something alternative.
- That's really exciting.
- So we just kept playing with it.
- What do you harvest off of the plant?
I'm only kind of vaguely familiar with
the sorghum that I would graze my cows on.
So tell me, what does it look like when you're harvesting?
- What we're after is the juice that's in the stalk.
And so what we normally do is we'll go in
and cut the heads off and then we'll harvest
the stalk, squeeze the juice out of it,
and then the juice you cook down like you
would maple syrup sap.
- Is it about the same ratio?
- It's about 10 gallons of juice to make
a gallon of syrup,
where maple syrup takes roughly 40 to 1.
- Oh, wow. Huge difference.
- Yeah.
We cook to a thicker syrup, a heavier syrup.
It will be similar to a honey or molasses in
consistency when we're done.
- And I'm not really familiar with it,
so what does it look like?
Can we just maybe taste some of yours?
- [Rich] Yeah, we have a jar here.
- And this is, you replace this like you would molasses
in your cooking?
- [Rich] Yeah, so for the honey or any other sweetener
that you might want.
- [Inga] So this is that rich, amber color you're looking for?
- [Rich] Yes.
- [Inga] Does it vary from year to year at all?
- It can vary from farm to farm,
also based on the weather and on the soil conditions.
- Okay.
- I've seen sorghum that looked as light as clear honey
and I've seen what we call road tar.
Some people will really mess it up.
- Road tar. This is really good.
It does kind of have, it's a nicer flavor than molasses.
But it reminds me of that molasses flavor.
- It's a very mild molasses flavor
and it won't bite your back.
- Yeah, yeah.
- It's also got just about the same nutritional
value as molasses.
Very high in iron, calcium, potassium,
and the anti-oxidants.
- Okay.
- And because of the sugar makeup,
most diabetics will absorb it much slower
than they would either maple syrup or honey.
- I'm helping do cocktails and hors d'oeuvres
for a cocktail party this afternoon,
and I'm gonna be picking up some whiskey
that's made with your sorghum.
What other products do you do with your sorghum?
What happens with your syrup?
- First of all we sell a lot of it at farm markets.
We do a couple big farm markets year round.
And we also have a lot of store accounts.
But in the last few years we've had
several distillers come to us and they actually
make whiskey from it.
We have people making other products,
some which are going overseas.
We ourselves actually make caramel popcorn with it.
- Oh, I love caramel popcorn.
I might have to grab some of that, too,
to snack on while I'm making cocktails.
Well, I'm gonna head on over to Old Sugar Distillery
to pick up some whiskey made with Rich's sorghum.
And then why don't y'all meet me back
at Brady's house where we'll make up some
craft cocktails and some lefse hors d'oeuvres.
Well, I'm a heck of a lot better at drinking
cocktails than making cocktails,
and that's why I wanted to invite my friend
Chef Nathan Berg.
He's the chef at the Lakely, here in Eau Claire.
Up to Brady's house to help me put on
this little cocktail party.
He loves mid-western cooking,
and he really celebrates it in what he does.
Nathan, what is that mid-west cuisine?
- Yeah, to me it represents everything
that's available here that people can grow locally
and the things that are well-suited to our area.
Here in Wisconsin we're known for our dairy productions,
so lots of cheese and butter and the like.
But it also to me means some of the ingredients
that are native to this region,
the things that the Native Americans in this area
utilized well before the white settlers came here.
So that's a lot of--
- What ingredients are those?
- That would be like a lot of wild rice
and maple syrup and cranberries and venison
and freshwater fish.
Those types of things.
So I think when you kind of combine them as a whole,
that really represents all the different cultures
that have kind of settled here in our area.
- Well, we're gonna make some hors d'oeuvres today
that I always think of as very mid-western,
which is lefse.
And lefse is of course Norwegian,
but I feel like we eat plenty here in Wisconsin.
- Yeah, yeah, that again comes from
the Scandinavian heritage.
I'm Norwegian myself,
so my grandmother taught me how to make lefse
and so many other people around here eat it as well.
I like to do a lot of the traditional.
Scandinavians will just do butter on their lefse,
but I've actually found that I really
enjoy cooking with it as well and mixing
other ingredients and making some fun things out of it.
So I thought that's what we'd do here.
First we're gonna make one that just has
some fresh breakfast radishes and some butter on it.
So I'm gonna chop a few of the radishes here
and then we will get started on constructing it.
- I like using simple ingredients like this.
When you have fresh radishes out of your garden
and wonderful, fresh butter, it's really delicious.
You don't have to go over the top when you're cooking
to have really incredible food and memorable food.
When you're cooking I always say with fresh ingredients
things always turn out so much nicer.
- [Nathan] So then if you want to grab a plate there
and then we can unwrap the piece of lefse.
And we're just gonna spread a nice,
even layer of this farm fresh butter on here.
Okay, and then we're just gonna spread
a little of the fresh radish on there.
And you're right.
This is such a simple thing, but so flavorful.
- I love fresh radishes.
I think they're incredible.
- So then, we're just gonna roll this up.
Did you want to roll that up?
- I can do it for you, yeah. - Okay, great.
- [Inga] Nice and tight, right? - Yup, nice and tight.
And then we'll just cut it up here in a little bit.
We'll build the next one here.
We're gonna use some smoked trout from
our local trout farm.
I'm just gonna roll that up inside of the lefse,
so if you want to grab another plate we'll do that.
And then once that one's cut we're gonna top it
with some horseradish crème fraîche.
- I love that we can use trout instead
of traditional salmon.
You see a lot of salmon with these kinds of
creamier dressings, but we have trout right down the road.
So why not use it, right?
- [Nathan] Yeah, exactly.
A lot of times you see the salmon because
that's something that they use a lot in
Scandinavia because they have so much salmon around them.
But here we have trout.
- Okay.
And again, I think it's nice,
especially when you're throwing a party,
not to have to get stressed out about making
something that's so over the top.
Having a nice, simple recipe like this.
- Yeah, exactly.
These couldn't be any simpler.
And then for this last one we're going to be actually
heating it in the oven.
So yeah, the pan would be helpful there.
Going to just lay out some of the pieces of ham on here.
- [Inga] Okay.
- [Nathan] And then I'm gonna top it with
the Gruyère cheese.
- [Inga] Okay.
- And then this is just gonna get broiled
for about a minute.
Just enough to melt the cheese a little bit
and kind of warm it up,
and then this is a great,
especially because of the potato that's in the lefse,
the potato and the ham and the cheese are just a--
- It's like Easter. - Exactly.
It's like a perfect Easter dinner wrapped up
into one little piece of lefse.
And this is just gonna go under the broiler for a minute
so we can melt the cheese,
and then we'll just roll it up and cut it after that.
- Well, I'm just gonna get these guys finished and
get cleaned up and then we'll start making some cocktails.
(acoustic guitar music)
Well, the gang's all here,
so let's get some drinks started,
and so I can get started serving.
- Okay, sounds good.
- Which is first?
- First I'm gonna make something with the sorghum whiskey here,
and we're gonna combine some sorghum whiskey
and apple brandy.
- Okay.
I love that we can turn sorghum into whiskey
and we have all these wonderful ingredients
here in the Midwest.
And I talk about it all the time,
but I think it's great.
I think it's great to live somewhere
and to eat from that place.
But most importantly, you can also drink from that place.
It's kind of fantastic.
- Oh, it's really great.
It's nice to see there was the craft beer movement
that really started springing up locally
and now it's nice to see that we can
get all of these different liquors made
out of local grains and sugars and all that.
It's kind of the next step, right?
- Okay, so the apple brandy and the Queen Jennie.
- Yup, and now I'm going to add a little bit
of fresh local cream. - Okay.
Now the Queen Jennie, that was named after a lady
that lived in Madison during the Prohibition,
and she was a bootlegger.
- [Nathan] Oh, I did not know this.
- It was Queen Jennie, and she had a speakeasy.
- Excellent. - I know.
- That's very cool. I've never heard that story.
- Quite an entrepreneur, yeah.
Okay, maple syrup.
- Yup, and a little bit of maple syrup to finish it off.
And then what I'm gonna do is dry shake this,
which means to shake it without ice.
Just because it's nice.
That cream is kind of in there to give it
a little bit of levity,
and so to shake it again first is a little helpful.
- I kind of want to take a sip,
but I feel like I should save it for our guests.
- I think you should probably serve it for the guests.
- Well, I'm gonna go serve these.
Why don't we get started on the next cocktail?
- Okay, sounds great.
We're gonna use the potato vodka in here.
And then basically the accents here are gonna
be strawberry and mint with a little balsamic vinegar.
So first thing I'm gonna do is muddle some
three leaves of mint in here with a little bit
of simple syrup.
- And when you muddle,
you're just releasing that essential oil basically?
- Yeah, exactly.
Some people think that muddle means crush,
and they just kind of destroy the leaves in there
and really the idea--
- That's what I do.
- And really the idea is just to press it slightly
to kind of bring out the oils that are
inside whatever herb it is that you're doing.
In this case mint.
- Mint can be very overpowering as you know,
so this is a nice way to incorporate it in a drink.
- Exactly, exactly.
So then we're gonna add some of the vodka.
And then we're gonna finish it off with some
of the strawberry balsamic shrub that I made.
- Now tell me, what is a shrub?
- So a shrub is basically just a kind of
a sweet and sour concoction that a--
- Vinegary? Is that right?
- Yeah, it's usually made with some kind of
fruit puree or juice, and some form of vinegar.
So in this case I did strawberry puree
and then mixed it with some balsamic vinegar.
- I love Nathan. He takes things very seriously.
He just goes up in the garden and makes shrubs
for these craft cocktails.
I love it.
- Yeah, well, you know.
It's a good way to incorporate some local
seasonal flavors into your drinks instead of
just always relying on citrus fruit
that are always in the grocery stores all year round.
- For sure, yeah.
- We're gonna do this in the tall, skinny glass there,
if you want to fill that with some ice.
And I'm just gonna double strain this one
to make sure that we don't have pieces of mint in there.
- [Inga] Well, I got a straw for this one.
- Okay, great.
I'll cut a little strawberry for some garnish
to make it look prettier.
- I think garnish is important for drinks.
- Oh, it totally is.
Just like they say, "You eat with your eyes first."
You also kind of drink with your eyes first.
So if it looks appetizing, it'll taste more appetizing.
- [Inga] Absolutely.
- This is a fun one.
It's kind of a twist on a Manhattan,
except it has almost none of the ingredients
of a Manhattan, but it's made in kind of the same style.
A Manhattan is typically made with rye and vermouth
and brandy, and cherry.
So in this case we're not using really any of
those specific ingredients,
but it still ends up kind of being the same type of thing.
This is a nice local rum made right here in Wisconsin.
And then in place of the vermouth I'm actually
gonna use some mead from a local mead producer.
- And what is mead?
That's just a honey wine?
- Yeah, it's fermented like a wine made out of honey.
There's a place here in Wisconsin.
That's White Winter Winery that's been making it
for 20 years now,
and they make all different styles.
This particular one that I'm using is their black mead
which is made with blackberry.
- [Inga] It's a pretty color.
- Yeah, and it's kind of got the sweet and sour
mix of a vermouth, as well.
So it works very well with that.
And then just for a little bit of extra tart and sweet,
I'm gonna use this wild plum grenadine
and then just a hair of simple syrup as well just to--
- [Inga] Balance out the cocktail.
- Then, for the last part here,
I'm actually gonna use some bitters.
We soak blackberries to kind of top it all off.
-Well, let's get these on a tray and let's get everything served.
(acoustic guitar music)
Lefse hors d'oeuvres.
Not your grandfather's lefse and lutefisk.
Try a tasty tipple of Wisconsin's new
and creative distilleries.
Well, I hope this has inspired you to drink local,
and I hope that you'll gather with us next time
- [All] Around the Farm Table .
- I'm your host Inga Witscher.
(acoustic guitar music)
- Around the Farm Table is funded in part by
Wisconsin Farmers Union.
Heartland Credit Union.
And Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.