Wisconsin Foodie

Honestly Cranberry

– Narrator: This week on Wisconsin Foodie:

– Cranberries were native to Wisconsin. It’s the Wisconsin state fruit. Wisconsin is the largest grower in the world, producing 60% of the world’s cranberries, and they…
(crunches)
pop. I realized that I grow a great fruit that is tart, and most of the cranberry products out there were added sugar, and I said something, “We need to get the true tart taste out there,” so this is the real deal.
– Ryan: We’re cuttin’ up some pork belly, going to make some duck sausage today, and to put a Wisconsin spin on it, we’re going to add the cranberries.

– You know what I’m going to do? Let’s go for broke here.

– Okay. We love to do this little dish that we call gnudi, and the beautiful part about this particular pasta is you get a lot of the tartness with the Montrachet goat cheese and the subtleness of the salt and black pepper. What I think that that is amazing. Look at that.

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– Narrator: The Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin are proud to underwrite Wisconsin Foodie and remind you that in Wisconsin we dream in cheese.

(crowd cheering)

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Milwaukee’s landmark art deco hotel offers luxury accommodations, legendary hospitality, and world-class dining. Paired with the hotels roaring ’20s vibe makes The Ambassador a must-experience destination.

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– Narrator: Society Insurance. Small details. Big difference.

– Narrator: Edible Milwaukee magazine.

– Narrator: Also, with support of the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

[light jazz music]

[car passes]

[chickens cackling]

[drink filling]

[chopping vegetables]

[fruit popping]

[meat sizzling]

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– My grandfather was definitely a bigger picture guy.

First of all, he saw the opportunity of this huge piece of land. It was 5,000 acres plus at the time which he saw value in.

(engine rumbles)

Now, it’s not what you all have, it’s what you do with it, and that’s what I’ve always been raised with. I did feel as though I learned that from my grandfather. I think that he would be very proud to know what we’re doing here. We’re maintaining that vision, and I can only hope that the next generation will see that bigger picture.

The marsh was started back in 1873. The Arpin family purchased this property for their lumbering business, but they found cranberries growing wild out here, so they built dikes and ditches around the native stands of vines, and that’s how they started cultivating the fruit.

Cranberries are native to Wisconsin, so it is truly a native North American fruit.

It’s the Wisconsin state fruit. It’s the largest fruit crop in Wisconsin. Wisconsin is the largest grower in the world, producing 60% of the world’s cranberries.

In Wisconsin we have larger areas. We generally refer to them as marshes. On the coasts, they refer to them as bogs. This is more commercial, larger expanses of area.

(engine rumbles)

We grow 12 varieties. Some make better sweet and dried, some make better unsweetened, some are just experimental for us. We like the variety.

Look at this. Look at this.

Look at this. See, this is white turning red.

It’s probably a little tarter. It’s all about degrees of tartness… but these are nice. This is a– Look at that. That’s a lucky fruit. It looks like four-leaf clover in there. Those are little air pockets, and that’s why they float, that’s why they bounce. And they…
(crunches)
pop.

We’re on the last week of harvest. We’ve been going for about three weeks now. Yes, it’s busy, yes, we all burn the candle at both ends, but it’s what you work for all year long!

I’m so blessed because we have two children, and both of them on their own volition have come back to join us and to help me with both businesses, both the farm and Honestly Cranberry. Stephen is the manager. He’s a better cranberry grower than I am, and that’s a good thing.

– Well, my morning started with you just get everything lined up and rolling, and then I had to check water, check the reservoirs, and then check the water on the beds we’re about to pick. It’s a common misconception that they’re grown in water. They’re actually grown dry, ’cause we want to be in control of the moisture levels of the soil, so the plants are the happiest. But make no mistake, if there was a flood during bloom time that would ruin the crop, so it’s all about proper timing of the flooding.

– So, we’re just bringing the water up. We call this a raking flood, so you just want the tips of the vines showing, so that the berries are just coming up to the surface ’cause the berries are on a short stems. It’s about half an inch long or so, and because they have air pockets in them, they’ll float up, so it’s easier to see them at this point too, so for the person on the harvesting machine, they can see where they’re going.

– So, we’re knocking the berries off the vine. This is the picking process. We call it raking, raking or harrowing, so we’re just gradually plucking the berries off the vine. It’s a very gentle process on the vine. Cranberries are perennial, so the nice thing is we don’t have to plant ’em every year. So the oldest vines we have out here are planted in 1939 actually, and if you mess ’em up during harvest, you’ll see it next year, so you got to be very gentle during harvest. But, this land is so much more than just the cranberries.

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– We can grow about 330 acres of cranberries, but we have about 6,000 acres of land, and we have a forestry management plan on 2,600 acres, and it’s a very complimentary relationship with the commercial cranberry production.

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I know I’m doing something right when I’m doing something right for the wildlife. You watch, and you feel very responsible for that. And, we’re all in it together, so we have to be mindful of, of what else is going on around here, so.

Right now, it’s a beautiful fall day, and all of these cranberries have all been knocked off the vines.

What we’re doing is we’re blowing the berries that get caught in the edge of the dike. We’re blowing them out of the grass and then taking a cran-boom is what we call it, and we’re surrounding and corralling the cranberries and bringing them down to one end, so that we can elevate ’em into a truck and then take them into the receiving station.

(gentle music)

So, a truck’s getting loaded on there. They get dumped in here, we call this the de-grassing area, so this is a blower here. The blower blows the leaves off, and they go over to that truck. The good berries come here… and then it goes through an air cleaner, and a grater, and a soft berry remover, an ambient air dryer, a conveyor, an optical sorter, and then they get elevated into a hopper, and then get put into these totes. And then it goes on the truck and to the freezer.

(lighthearted music)

(truck engine accelerates)

– Yah, when we’re rockin’ and rollin’, we can do 10, 15 semis a day out of here. We do about 1,200 pounds every minute, which is pretty impressive. Specifically during harvest, I’m in this receiving station where we clean and bin all of the fruit. I’m Allison. Been here my whole life pretty much, fourth generation cranberry grower, and I did sneak away for a little bit. I went to school at the University of Montana in Missoula, and then I decided to come back. And just working and living near my family. Can’t beat it.

– Hi!

– Hi!

– How’s it going?

– Good.

– What are we on?

– Truck three.

– Nice.

– So far, so good?

(smack of hands)

That’s my girl. Love you.

– Allison: My mom is one of the hardest working people I know. She’s been here her whole life. When we’re not harvesting, I’m mostly involved with Honestly Cranberry which is my mom’s newer company, so her having two businesses, two full-time jobs, keeps me busy as well.

(gentle music)

– This building was built as a mess hall. They used to feed 40 to 60 people lunch and dinner in here. Now we just feed hungry minds.

I love this picture. It was actually almost a little postcard. So, this was my grandfather right here, second from the right, 12 years old, wearing a tie and everything, get all dressed up to come to work. But, hand picking wasn’t the most efficient way to go, so here are the modern machines of the time. These are all hand rakes, all made out of wood. But when they got wet, they were twice as heavy, and it was this kind of action all day long from August, September, October, November, or until freeze up in December, all day, every day. So, that’s another reality check. Anybody starts to complain about harvest, could be worse, could be still doing it that way.

To sustain a farm, is successful, but I realize that I grow a great fruit that is tart, and most of the cranberry products out there were added sugar, and I said something, we need to get the true tart taste out there, and realized that if I could just dry them and people could use them as a snack or add them to whatever they wanted to, that would be a good way to go. So, this is the real deal. Ingredients, cranberries. One ingredient. We call this clean, so in a one-ounce bag, let me show you, it only takes 15 pieces, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, we’ll do like that. That’s a daily dose of cranberry. That’s what you get for your health benefit. So, in a one-ounce bag, there’s 10 daily doses. So…

True tart taste and natural goodness of cranberries.

And when I started this company, I knew that I wasn’t trying to be everything to everybody, but I knew that there were people, including me, out there, who love tart.

Success in Honestly Cranberry would be to just make sure that people understand that you can actually enjoy cranberries and its true tart taste without anything added to it, and you can do whatever you want with it. Here I am, always something that I wanted to do. I think that we are all here because we love it here.

I think the family and everybody who works here knows that we are blessed.

We’re a family working here, employed here, but we’re blessed because we’re in a great community, we’re in a great state, and to understand your blessings and to feel gratitude every day, it leads to goodness.

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(jazzy music)

– Hey Wags, what you got going on?

– Hey, bud.

– What are you makin’? We’re cuttin’ up some pork belly. Going to make some duck sausage today. We have some local duck and local pork belly here.

– Nice. Now, why a combination of duck and pork?

– The duck by itself, it could make the sausage. -Okay.

– You’re going to end up with a little bit more of a dry sausage. So, we add the pork belly in this case simply to add fat.

– Sure.

– This is four pounds of duck to one pound of pork sauces or pork belly, and to put a Wisconsin spin on it, we’re going to add the cranberries.

– Where are the cranberries from?

– Honestly Cranberry. They’re going to exhibit the tartness of the cranberry without any sweetener.

– Wow.

– You have the tartness, the salt, the pepper, the garlic, but no sweetener.

– Okay, cool. What do we got to do now? We got to grind it?- We’re going to grind it, and then we’ll mix up the spices, so we have some salt, some pepper, chopped garlic.

– It’s all ground up, you got the spices, you got the garlic, you got a little bit of nutmeg. Are we going to mix it?

– Now we get dirty.

– Yeah, go.

– Ryan: So, now, let’s add some cranberries.

– Sweet. You know what I’m going to do? Let’s go for broke here. All right, there it is.

– So, we’re going to take the duck, and pork, and sausage mixture. We’re going to put it in the chamber to stuff it here.

– Okay, cool, awesome.

– What you want to do here is drop it in.

– Okay, why drop it?

– Drop it because you’re going to want to pound any air that’s in there out.

– Sweet.

– You’ll see when we’re stuffing it out of the tube, if air’s in the pockets, if air is in here, it’ll get into the sausage casing which could end up exploding your casing.

– Okay, yeah.

– An explosion meaning just popping it open.

– Luke: So, we have that stuffed.

– Ryan: Yep, stuffed, locked and loaded. We’ve got our casing.

– Luke: This is natural casing?

– This is natural casing. Crank this down.

– Oh, I see it, I see it.

– So, once all the air’s pushed out, I’m going to stop it off. We’re going to get to a brat size.

– Now, when you say a Brat size in Wisconsin, I think most of us know how big that is approximately.

– So, that’s about eight inches long. Right there. I’m going to pinch it off, pinch it off here, do some twists. Now, we’re twisted off, and we have our first sausage link.

– Cool!

– Now, you’re going to keep goin’. And, you definitely don’t have to twist every time. You could make a coil sausage. We’ve definitely done that here, but personally I like the art of twisting my sausage. Here we go, we have one, two, three, about 15 links. At this point, we could hang these up and dry them a little bit, and what that does is it sets the casing around the meat a little bit. Or, we could cut ’em apart and eat ’em right away.

– Okay, cool. What I want to do with these is I would like to poach ’em if I can.

– [Ryan] Yep.

– I want to capture as much of this flavor as possible. Cool. Look at that. Nice work, Wags.

All right, we’re back in the kitchen, and we have with us these amazing sausages that Ryan put together downstairs, but what I want to start with first is something that’s a little bit more simplified. There’s a tradition of making gnocchi in the Italian culture, and gnocchi can be actually really fussy and temperamental. So at the cafe, we love to do this little dish that we call gnudi, and it’s a deviation of gnocchi. So, we’re going to start by taking our goat cheese and adding it to our mixer, so this is Montrachet goat cheese. It comes from Belmont, Wisconsin. Fun fact is that Belmont, and this is how I get my servers to remember it, is the first state capital of Wisconsin.

We’re going to do six eggs.

(light jazz music)

Next we have some flour from Middle Earth Organics. We’re going to lightly knock this in. I’m going to add just a dash of salt and a little pepper, and I’m going to turn this thing on and start to mix at a low speed.

(light jazz music)

We can see that start to come together a little bit. What’s really nice about this is the farm fresh eggs really give that a sunshine-y yellow color which I think is beautiful, and it’s always symbolic of a really good pasta dough. What I see though in this bowl right now is we have a really nice consistency for that dough. I’m going to take and work this dough right onto this flour. Now, this feels amazing. It’s soft, it’s supple. I’m going to take and roll this out just a little bit.

Like any good pasta or gnudi or gnocchi, it has that consistency of almost a pasta marshmallow.

So, the next step in this process is going to be blanching them in salted boiling water.

When they start to float, we’re going to give it about a minute or two, so we can let that mixture of the goat cheese and the eggs set, and then we’re going to scoop ’em in to the ice-cold water. The cool part about this, the floating is really essential because when we drop ’em into the ice shock, initially they are going to sit on top. As they cool down, though, we’ll start to see them fall and sink, and that’s that air leaving and those cells setting which makes a little bit more firm gnudi. They’re starting to go to the bottom of the shock. We can pull it out. There’s a really firm texture to this. That really light fluffy cloud has got this nice encapsulation there. We can feel that it’s firm and squish it. I like to taste it, too.

And the beautiful part about this particular pasta is you get a lot of the tartness with the Montrachet goat cheese and the subtleness of the salt and black pepper, and the richness of the egg, and I think that is amazing. Next, we want to reduce the heat just a touch on that boiling liquid. I want to season this, though, and poach these sausages, so I’m going to take an onion, a few sprigs of parsley, just a little bit of chili flake to the water, and our garlic. At this juncture, we want this to be just around a boil, so about 205 to 210 degrees. We’re going to grab the sausages that Wags made down in the basement, and we’re going to take and put four of ’em in that poaching liquid.

We have our sausages poaching in the back. We’ve got our gnudi chillin’ in the bottom of the shock, and I’m going to turn on a burner to about a medium high heat. What I want to do at this point is take the gnudi out of the bottom of the shock.

We’re going to add just a little bit of high temperature cooking oil, and then I’m going to come back with one of my favorite ingredients, the Westby Co-op Creamery butter.

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We’re going to take and add our gnudi.

I want to make sure that I get these Shiitake mushrooms in ’cause they’re going to need just a little bit of time to cook with it, and they’re really going to soak up that brown butter flavor. We’re going to add our onion.

And, next we’re going to take the pride of Cranmoor, Wisconsin… cranberries.

One of the last steps that I want to do at this stage is add just a little bit of bulk and green to it, and I think for me, there’s nothing that adds that flavor in bulk like a little bit of kale. We’ve been poaching these sausages for about five minutes. I want to put a little bit of color on ’em. So I’m going to lay those carefully in this saut pan. It’s time for one of my favorite parts in the process, and that’s hitting this with just a little bit of wine. In this case we’re going to use a little bit of a rose, a sparkling rose, to offset that cranberry flavor and give it a little bit of love. This is really going to even out and mellow all those flavors together… and create a really nice base. You can see that wine and that butter work together to create its own sauce. All the flavors have come together.

All right. The smell of this dish, it’s really different. You obviously get a little bit of the acidity that you can smell in the cranberry which I think is awesome, but then the big uniter, and the thing that smooths out all the rough edges in a dish like this is the butter. We’re ready for the sausages.

We want to take and cut ’em on a hard bias. You can see, look at the moisture in there, and those fat pieces are still whole and solid. And we have the cranberry sitting right in the top. Next we’re going to hit this with a little Marieke Gouda. I’m a big fan of fresh herbs at the very end of pasta dishes just to give it a little bit of fresh kick. And some fresh parsley really helps round it all out. One of my favorite parts, I have a little bit of honey from Peaceful Valley. I’m going to do just a couple drizzles around. A little bit of honey in this dish is going to really bolster all of that acidity and give it a really awesome counter balance. It’ll blend well with the pork, duck, cranberries, kale, onion, garlic, chili flake, and of course, butter.

(light jazz music)

– Well, at this time of year with fresh cranberries.

Gosh I mean, everybody loves a caramel apple. And the thing about fresh cranberries this time of year, my favorite way to do it is, forget like one cranberry and caramel, just dump a bunch of cranberries in a bowl, drizzle caramel on top and eat it like a sundae. It’s a — It’s some stiff competition for a caramel apple crisp.

The more civilized way to do it is, I guess, use toothpicks and then dunk ’em in caramel, but I prefer the more industrial way of the sundae.

(jazzy music)

– Narrator: Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters for their support.

– Narrator: 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.

– Narrator: 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 is made.

Milwaukee’s landmark art deco hotel offers luxury accommodations, legendary hospitality, and world-class dining. Paired with the hotel’s roaring ’20s vibe makes The Ambassador a must-experience destination.

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.

– Narrator: Society Insurance. Small details. Big difference.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

– Narrator: The Central Wisconsin Craft Collective.

Something Special from Wisconsin. Illing Company.

Edible Milwaukee magazine.

– Narrator: Also, with support of the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

– Narrator: For more information about upcoming Wisconsin Foodie special events, dinners and tours, please go to WisconsinFoodie.com. There you can sign up for our mailing list to be the first to know about our events and offerings. Also, get connected with us through Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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