Delta Diner – Transcript

– Announcer: This week on Wisconsin Foodie:

– Todd: Well, today is Burger Monday. There is such a cultural thing with burgers that ended up creating an opportunity for us to designate a specific day where all we do is burgers. Partnerships allow us to be what we are, so, for instance, our bread, we work with Ashland Baking Company.

– Honore: We really try to work together as a community. We worked with Todd to come up with a line that is the Delta Diner bread, and it’s actually one of our best sellers.

– Andy: Delta Diner, we do their beef, and then we do some chorizo, and then one of his biggest is Delta Diner Applewood Smoked Bacon that we exclusively smoke here for him.

– This, for me, is the quintessential small-town grocery store. And when we see small businesses working together, we all do better when we all do better.

– Announcer: Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters:

– Introducing Organic Valley Ultra, milk with more protein, half the sugar, and no toxic pesticides. Let’s be honest! None of that healthy stuff really matters unless our kids will drink it.

[dramatic music, mom whispers, “C’mon.”]

[gulping milk]

[cow moos]

– Yeah, I would drink that.

[mom gasps]

– Do you hear that? She would drink that!

[cheering, triumphant music]

– Parents are weird.

– Announcer: More protein, half the sugar. Organic Valley Ultra.

– The dairy farmers of Wisconsin are proud to underwrite Wisconsin Foodie, and remind you that, in Wisconsin, we dream in cheese.

[crowd cheering]

Just look for our badge. It’s on everything we make.

– Employee-owned New Glarus Brewing Company has been brewing and bottling beer for their friends only in Wisconsin since 1993. Just a short drive from Madison, come visit Swissconsin, and see where your beer’s made.

– Wisconsin’s great outdoors has something for everyone. Come for the adventure, stay for the memories. Go wild in Wisconsin. To build your adventure, visit dnr.wi.gov.

– From production to processing, right down to our plates, there are over 15,000 employers in Wisconsin, with career opportunities to fulfill your dreams and feed the world. Hungry for more? Shape your career with these companies and others at fabwisconsin.com.

– Specialty crop craft beverages use fruit grown on Wisconsin orchards and vineyards to create award-winning ciders and wines. Wisconsin’s cold climate creates characteristics and complexities that make this craft beverage unique to our state.

– Society Insurance. Freshwater Family Farms. Also, with the support of the Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

[upbeat music]

– Luke Zahm: We are a collection of the finest farmers, food producers, and chefs on the planet. We are a merging of cultures and ideas shaped by this land.

[sizzling]

We are a gathering of the waters, and together, we shape a new identity to carry us into the future.

[glasses clink]

[knife scrapes]

We are storytellers. We are Wisconsin Foodie.

[tearing paper]

[upbeat guitar music]

– My wife and I moved up here 25 years ago. I was searching for passionate things to do in life, and one thing led to another, and we decided to recreate a diner in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. We actually found a company in Ohio that restores diners. And they did what they call a frame-up restoration, which means they literally start with a frame and rebuild it to spec so that it’s a restoration. And from there, we moved it from Ohio to here, and 16 years ago, we opened, and the plan was to build a destination eatery that is definitely diner genre.

Well, today is Burger Monday, and we talked much about that.

The other days of the week, when we don’t offer burgers, we have a menu of breakfast blue plates and specialty sandwiches. So what we’re trying to do is take traditional diner genre menu items and then push the boundaries a little bit with flavor and with taste and hopefully deliver a new type of experience to our customers.

Well, Burger Monday grew out of the fact that in tight spaces like we have at this diner, burgers don’t co-exist on the griddle extremely well with breakfast items, primarily. So we stopped making burgers sometime about 12 years ago and just went with a lunch and breakfast menu. But there’s such a cultural thing with burgers that ended up creating an opportunity for us to designate a specific day where all we do is burgers, and that became Burger Monday, and it allowed us to put together a process that really creates a high-end product that’s very unique, and it’s very specific to that particular day.

You know, local is a variable term. It can be very much looking to go to local farms, but if you’re patronizing the shops, the stores, even if it’s a local grocery, who are supporting local economic development through employing people, you’re still supporting local.

– You must be Todd!

– Luke, it’s good to meet you.

– It’s good to meet you. Tell me a little bit about the Delta Diner.

– We try and keep things simple, you know, and try and have a really good understanding of who we are and who we’re not. Monday’s are always burgers. We don’t do a burger on the other days. It’s a great product, and people travel quite a distance to come and have it.

– Do you think they’d mind if we peeked in on it?

– No, Steven’s back there right now. Why don’t we go take a look?

– Sure.

– Hey, Steven.

– Steven: Hi, Todd.

– I want you to meet Luke.

– Luke: Hey, how’s it going, man? Good to meet you.

– Likewise.

– What are we doing back here?

– Right now, what I’m doing is just portioning out the burger that we ground this morning to 4.1 on the scale and just a little under seven ounces.

– So we have a local partner, Sixth Street Market, that provides us with the beef and we like to combine a couple of different cuts.

So we’ve got really good chuck, but we’re also using essentially the same muscle as the flat iron. And it’s a 50/50 mix. So we start with that, and then, the process the night before is we wanna marinate that and get some flavor into the beef, but it’s a dry marinade. So, it’s garlic and pepper and some salt, and then it’s gonna sit and marinate overnight, and then Steven comes in in the morning, grinds it the day that we’re gonna serve it.

So you’ll see these are very kind of loose balls. We don’t wanna compress it because the beef gets tough. So, when you bite into that burger, the experience is the bun is crafted so you’re not biting through a whole bunch of bread. We make that in house. And you’re getting to this light, fluffy, just delicious burger.

– It is my personal belief that the hallmark of a restaurant is its burger because so many restaurants do a burger, right? This sounds like the most thought-out burger I’ve ever heard of. I mean, this is really incredible.

– It’s the reason we have a Burger Monday, ’cause this would probably be a little bit difficult process to follow every day, but also having that burger on the grill changes how you do breakfast, too. So it really works well for us to be able to concentrate that burger crowd on a day where we’re doing a really special burger.

– Suzanne: What are you hungry for?

– Why don’t you go ahead though.

– I kinda want to stick to the classic, the diner burger. Would you recommend that?

– It’s cheddar cheese and hard fried onions with a little Chipotle mayo. It has a nice smokey charred flavor to it, so yeah.

– I love smokey charred flavor. This is like heaven.

– It is.

– I have to ask, where’s the cheese come from?

– Wisconsin!

– Luke: Great!

[all laugh]

– I’m biased; I’m going with the Nina. It’s my wife. She makes the garlic that’s on it, so this one’s for my wife.

– Luke: Oh, that’s sweet. So why the Northwoods?

– Todd: We actually were here for eight years before we built the diner. We ran away from corporate, looking for I guess a richer, more passionate life. Once we were here, then you have to figure out what that passionate living is gonna be. I’m a fan of diners since I was a kid. When I was 12 years old, family vacation, I went to see the beginnings of our country with Gettysburg, with Washington D.C., and you go through Pennsylvania, and you go through diner-land. And the first stainless steel diner that we went to, I was just blown away as a kid, and then later in life, I traveled a lot, and if I was on the East coast, I’d go 40 miles out of the way to sit at a counter. I mean, diners are just different, and you got people who are driving trucks sitting next to suits, sitting next to tree-huggers, sitting next to conservatives. It doesn’t matter. There’s great passion out there for the diner, which is really cool.

– How did you create this network of partnerships? I mean, you’ve been doing this now 16 years.

– Well, we’re a small business. We’re bootstrappers to this day. Philosophy is if we can find somebody to partner who’s local that does something as well or better than we can do it, why would we take that time to do that when we can then focus that time on something else that we’re doing from scratch? So for instance, our bread, we work with Ashland Baking Company. They actually make a bread for us, Delta Diner bread, that’s a whole wheat sourdough bread. On the label, directions how to get here, so when they’re retailing it at co-ops throughout the area, it’s great promotion for us, and we talk about them every day through our verbal menu.

– Kealy: One thing that I think really makes our bread special is the slow fermentation. So, it’s just allowing more time for the flavor development to happen. All these pan loaves are the Delta Diner sourdough. So those will come out tomorrow and slice and ship to the Delta Diner. He also orders cranberry-walnut. They order the Italian country, as well. Often the white pan loaves. The sourdough that we have now, we use an organic wheat flour, it’s not a whole wheat flour for our starter, and as well as an organic whole rye. And it’s used in all of our sourdough products as well as just as a flavor enhancement in our bagels and our croissants. So what she’s working on right now is, this is a sheet of our croissant dough. The dough itself is mixed one day, and then it proofs and ferments overnight, and then it’s laminated with a series of folds with a really high butterfat butter in the center of it. I don’t know if it’s something that you can see, but there are multiple layers of dough and butter in that. So in our high times in the summer, we sometimes make nine of these sheets per day, and then those are mostly sold here and at the coffee house across the street, the Black Cat.

– My name is Honore Kaszuba and I own the Black Cat Coffee House and Ashland Baking Company in Ashland, Wisconsin. I moved here because my brother had started an organic farm called Hermit Creek Farm and I really fell in love with Lake Superior, and it seemed like there really weren’t any coffee houses here at the time. We opened up as a strictly vegetarian restaurant, which was a little off the chart for this area, but it did very well. After running the coffee house for six years, we felt that an artisan bakery could do very well in this area. When we first opened, I felt like we were the first place that really had that local foods movement vibe, and a lot more restaurants have opened that are really focusing on the local foods’ movement, as well. We really try to work together as a community. Delta Diner is a really good example of that. We worked with Todd to come up with a line that is the Delta Diner bread, and it’s a variation of our sourdough that we offer here daily. It’s actually one of our best sellers.

– Todd: Partnerships allow us to be what we are. I mean, our story wouldn’t be as deep, and wouldn’t be as rich, if we weren’t able to talk about these other companies that we work with because they’re passionate people who are creating just an amazing product.

– Luke: It’s like the original social networking. You talk about me, I’m gonna talk about you. You promote me, I’m gonna promote you.

– Todd: Right, so partnerships allow us to leverage other businesses’ brand where they’re doing good things in a community. We’re very, very fortunate in this area to have artisan producers of many products that allow us to form those partnerships.

– Diner burger.

– Thank you.

– Nina burger.

– Todd: Thank you, Suzanne.

– You’re welcome.

– Luke: Where do we start?

– If you’re up for sharing, why don’t we cut these in half and exchange? So, it’s gonna be a little bit pink in there. It’s gonna be super juicy. The Rockstar here should be the patty, and the bun should complement it so it has a little crisp on the outside, and it’s gonna compress, and it just kinda hugs that burger. That should be what we’re getting here.

– Luke: You can see that this wasn’t rushed, and I’ll tell you why. It literally with very little provocation, tiny squeeze, you see all that coming out, all that juice, that’s delicious. That tells me that this thing has not been pressed. Indeed they are true to their word back there that this is the first time that it gets any pressure whatsoever. I am salivating, and I gotta taste it.

– Todd: Yeah, jump in.

– Hands down, that’s one of the best burgers I’ve ever had. The best bites, like seriously

– Awesome.

– And that beef, it’s so good.

– Well, it couldn’t be any more fresh. Which is the whole idea of the process.

– I mean, the consistency is what catches me first because it is soft. Traditionally there’s a little bit more chew to a burger, but this is actually a delight to eat. I mean, it’s put together in such a way that it lets the natural juices kinda work in there, you get the richness.

– Todd: Well, if we ground that same patty, last night, and left it in a ball, it would still be a tougher burger today. Gravity alone will make that patty denser. We cook this like you would a steak au poivre, where you’re searing it, and it goes a lower temperature so that we can do the saut, whatever the topping is, while the burger’s on the grill, so it’s going fresh out the pan right to your burger. It’s gonna spend a third of its time on the hot part of the grill. Moves over, gets covered like you’re putting it in the oven, so the cheese can melt while you’re doing the saut. And then it goes on top so that when it’s coming off, it’s not sitting there on that hot grill drying out.

– Luke: So, au poivre, that literally translates to “of pepper.” So when you sear that, what you want is you want that nice caramelization bit, and I can see that right there, where you start to get a little bit more of the sugar, the natural sugar, coming out, and it is an amazing bite.

– Hey, Steven.

– Steven: Yes, Todd?

– As always, excellent job, man.

– Tried not to screw anything up too bad.

– Luke: The Nina burger: spinach, red pepper, onion, and then garlic. That spicy, pickled garlic. It’s mild. It really is. And it takes a lot of that really sharp sulfurous taste out of the garlic itself.

– Yup. It’s a pretty unique garlic in that sense.

– It’s delicious. Good job. I think one of things that is wonderfully refreshing about the Delta Diner experience thus far, these are traditional American classics, but they’re done in a way that’s well thought of. It’s well-executed, and it really raises the bar.

– And everything we do here is pretty simple. But simplicity is good. It’s about the execution. We wanna try and take people somewhere where they may not have been before. But then if you deliver on it, then you have a passionate customer because you’ve shared something with them that they’re not gonna share somewhere else. You know, do things in a way either through execution or through some creativity on the normal stuff that takes people a little bit different spot.

– Luke: Sure.

– It’s pretty simple.

– I mean, it’s working.

– Cool.

– You’ve got it.

[moderate rock music]

– We made it to the Sixth Street Market in downtown Ashland. We’re gonna go inside and see what makes this meat so great that the Delta Diner looks for it specifically.

[Door squeaks]

Hey, Andy.

– Hey, how’s it going?

– Good, how are you today?

– Good.

– Tell me a little bit about the Sixth Street Market.

– We do a wide variety. We do fresh cuts, steaks, roasts. We do all our own grinding, and then we do a full assortment of fresh and smoked sausages.

– What else do you provide for the Delta Diner specifically?

– Well, Delta Diner, like you mentioned, we do their beef, and then we do some chorizo and then one of his biggest is the Delta Diner Applewood Smoked Bacon that we exclusively smoke here for him. Today, we have some in the smokehouse right now smoking and if you want to come back and take a peek at it.

– You’d let me?

– Andy: Absolutely.

– Awesome, let’s do it!

– All right.

– Show me this bacon.

– Andy: We’ll walk over here to the smokehouse. So I got this in early this morning. Smoke producer, you can hear it running. It’s pumping the smoke up and through, so we got applewood going right into here. And we’ll crack it; we’re gonna get some smoke out. And it should clear a little bit; we get a peek at it.

– Luke: Man… that’s literally one of my favorite aromas is that nice smoke.

– Andy: Yes, you can’t beat it.

– It’s rich, it’s full.

– Yep.

– So the bacon comes from here in the slabs, and then where does it go?

– Bacon from here, what we do is we bring it right from the smokehouse into the freezer to put a little bit of a freeze on it, so we can slice it in the bacon slicer.

– And I think that that’s an important note to kind of address quickly. When we want those really uniform cuts of meat and we want it to be perfect in the package, nine times out of 10 you take and chill that meat down so the cell structure gets more rigid and you’re able to put in on something that slices it really quickly and evenly.

– Andy: So, the bacon slicer is just over on this side here.

– So this is like the world’s largest deli slicer, is that what I’m looking at here?

– Right, fully automated. What we’ll end up doing is we’ll put the slab down here and then we’ll work it. This will push the slab through and then on the inside here we have a blade that’ll slice it.

– Okay, sweet, can we see this thing in action?

– Absolutely. So here’s a slab of the Applewood Bacon.

– Sure. Sweet.

– Turn everything on. So from here, we’re gonna inch the slab forward, get it closer to the blade, and then we just hit start.

– That’s no joke!

– It’ll feed that bacon slab through and we have the full slab right here sliced and ready to go.

– Look at that!

– Luke: This is great. So, what else do we do here?

– Yesterday, I did some snack sticks, so I got some hanging here if you’d like to see them.

– I love a good snack stick, I mean like, really. And it’s kind of the hallmark of a good Wisconsin butcher, their snack sticks, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen them whole. Are these whole in here?

– These are whole, hanging on the cart yet.

– Yeah, I can’t wait, the big reveal.

– So, in here we got– These here are actually our cheesy pepper sticks.

– Yeah!

– Those came out of the smokehouse late yesterday afternoon and brought them down to temperature overnight in the cooler here.

– Sure, I can’t wait to taste it. Do you have any that are being processed?

– We do, we have some jalapeno cheddar sticks that are being cut, out on the table right now.

– Luke: That sounds like my jam; let’s check it out.

– Over on this the room here, we got Jada. She’s been cutting jalapeno cheddar snacks sticks this morning.

– Hey, Jada.

– Hi.

– Aw man, this is great.

– So, that one is smoked in hickory smoke.

– Yeah. Subtle, it’s nice. It’s hard to smell anything over the applewood smoke in here. I feel like I’m hanging out by a campfire, but that’s a good thing. Mmm. My favorite thing about the snack sticks… They got a little bit of pop to ’em. You get a little bit of burn, but it’s not bad. Even those who are predisposed to not liking spicy things are probably gonna like this snack stick. This is delicious.

– Thank you.

– Do you get a lot of hunters that’ll come in here looking for something they can take in the woods with them, like a snack?

– So in this room here, we have just a drying room. No refrigeration, no heat. This is Poppa Jerry’s and Ella’s Summer Sausage that are drying.

– Luke: So this all shelf stable right now?

– This is shelf-stable. This is something that’s really nice. You can throw on the front seat of the truck, and you don’t have to worry about a cooler. Shave it off the buck knife and hit it with a chunk of cheese.

[both laughing]

– I like it! That’s about as Northwoods as it gets.

– Yeah, absolutely. Well, another thing that I’m just getting into is I’m experimenting a little bit with fermentation. So, I built a fermentation chamber over here in the corner, and if you wanna take a peek at that, we can jump into that.

– You know I love that stuff, getting all science-y on me here.

– So, this is nothing more than a normal fridge that I’ve converted into a fermentation chamber. I have a humidifier up on top. I have temperature control so I can heat and cool. Humidity gets too high, humidifier can kick in or out, as needed.

– Nice.

– So inside today, I do have some Soppressata hanging. On the outside is nice white mold.

– That is a good mold.

– Yes, that is a good mold. Once you get that coated with that nice white mold, you’re gonna keep away any bad bacteria, bad molds from starting.

– Luke: This is the true innovative part of it, right?

– Yeah, I do have some of this product sliced up if you wanna give it a try?

– You know I do, man.

– All right, sounds good.

– Here we go.

– So I love the Soppressata. First and foremost, like the gauge, those big chunks of fat in there, that’s great. I mean, that’s what I love about this.

– Andy: The flavor.

– That’s delicious.

– Thank you.

– Nice blend of spices.

– Yep.

– That rich port flavor.

– This one here is a little bit more spice-forward than you would normally see a Soppressata. It’s got a little bit more of a red pepper to it.

– Sure, it’s delicious. So, this is summer sausage. This is quite a bit smaller. This is dry-aged or dry-cured?

– Yes, it’s dried. After it’s smoked, I hang it in a drying room for 28 days. So I usually lose about a third of the body weight. This one here is Poppa Jerry’s. I named that after my father. And on this side here is Ella’s Italian style.

– Luke: Okay, who’s Ella?

– Andy: Ella’s my daughter.

– Oh nice, look at you. Mmm. That’s delicious, too. You get a little more of the snap and twang in that almost.

– Yep. Yep.

– That’s good, though. So as I walk around, I see a lot of local products here. Tell me what that local community aspect is for you and why it’s so important here.

– We are a small business ourselves, so we pride ourselves lending a helping hand to those smaller businesses. Like you said, we got the kimchi’s made up in Cornucopia. We got some local honeys, local maple syrups, and that’s where we started and we like to lend our helping hand to those local, smaller businesses.

– This, for me, is the quintessential small-town grocery store. I grew up with these and the reason that I love them is because in the grocery store, you’re trying to provide food for the entire community, but there are some things that we just naturally do really well. And when we see small businesses working together, basically empowering each other with the idea that we all do better, when we all do better.

[uplifting music]

• Chef Buck Naked?

– Yes, he’s originally from northern Wisconsin here. He’s actually got a cabin out here in Delta. And he makes that down in Key Largo.

– I can’t believe that someone already beat me to the marketing punch with Check Buck Naked’s fiery rub.

– These gentlemen are some of our most passionate seasonal Deltoids. They travel all the way from Georgia to come up here and grouse hunt every year and just great guys. In fact, they’re immortalized on the wall there with the Vidalia Onion bag given the generous gift that year. We had to get creative real fast ’cause we had 200 pounds of onions. And we didn’t waste one.

– Yeah.

[all laugh]

– Onion pie, Vidalia everything, it was great.

– Announcer: Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters:

– Introducing Organic Valley Ultra, milk with more protein, half the sugar, and no toxic pesticides. Let’s be honest! None of that healthy stuff really matters unless our kids will drink it.

[dramatic music]

[mom whispers, “C’mon.”]

[gulping milk]

[cow moos]

– Yeah, I would drink that.

[mom gasps]

– Do you hear that? She would drink that!

[cheering, triumphant music]

– Parents are weird.

– Announcer: More protein, half the sugar. Organic Valley Ultra.

– The dairy farmers of Wisconsin are proud to underwrite Wisconsin Foodie, and remind you that, in Wisconsin, we dream in cheese.

[crowd cheering]

Just look for our badge. It’s on everything we make.

– Employee-owned New Glarus Brewing Company has been brewing and bottling beer for their friends only in Wisconsin since 1993. Just a short drive from Madison. Come visit Swissconsin, and see where your beer’s made.

– Wisconsin’s great outdoors has something for everyone. Come for the adventure, stay for the memories. Go wild in Wisconsin. To build your adventure visit dnr.wi.gov.

– From production to processing, right down to our plates, there are over 15,000 employers in Wisconsin with career opportunities to fulfill your dreams and feed the world. Hungry for more? Shape your career with these companies and others at fabwisconsin.com.

– Specialty crop craft beverages use fruit grown on Wisconsin orchards and vineyards to create award-winning ciders and wines. Wisconsin’s cold climate creates characteristics and complexities that make this craft beverage unique to our state.

– Society Insurance. Freshwater Family Farms. J. Henry and Sons Bourbon. Something Special from Wisconsin. Marcus Hotels and Resorts. Central Wisconsin Craft Collective. 91.7 W-M-S-E. Edible Milwaukee magazine. Also, with the support of the Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

For more information about upcoming Wisconsin Foodie special events and dinners, please go to WisconsinFoodie.com.

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