Wisconsin Foodie

– Narrator: This week on Wisconsin Foodie... - Michael, how long have you been farming?

- Since 1872.

So seven generations with me and my wife, Chloe.

We do heritage breed, pasture-raised pork, as well as grass-fed organic beef.

So we're moving every single day to fresh pasture for optimal growth and pasture development.

– Chloe: It really makes a big difference, them being raised outside and getting a lot of exercise.

And it really does change the flavor and the taste a lot.

- I thought we'd do a really simple preparation, Steak au Poivre, the full nature of peppercorns, the little bit of heat, and then the sweetness that accompanies them really access, this piece of beef.

This is beautiful.

– Announcer: Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters: [energetic music, cash register rings] [gift card rustling] [pouring a beverage] [mystical swirling] [wind whooshing] [heart beats "lub-dub"] [bell chimes as door opens] - 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.

- At Organic Valley, our cows make milk [cheery whistling] with just a few simple ingredients.

Sun, soil, rain, and grass.

[bubbles popping] And grass, and grass.

– Cow: Yee-haw!

[angelic choir music] - Organic Valley Grassmilk, organic milk from 100% grass-fed cows.

[banjo music] - 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.

[upbeat music] - 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 d-n-r dot w-i dot g-o-v. - 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.

- With additional support coming from The Conscious Carnivore.

From local animal sourcing to on-site high-quality butchering and packaging.

The Conscious Carnivore can ensure organically raised, grass-fed, and healthy meats through its small group of local farmers.

The Conscious Carnivore, know your farmer, love your butcher.

- Additional support coming from the Viroqua Food Co-op, Central Wisconsin Craft Collective, Something Special from Wisconsin, Crossroads Collective, La Crosse Distilling Company, as well as the Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

[clapping along to energetic music] - Luke Zahm: We are a collection of the finest farmers, food producers, and chefs on the planet.

We're a merging of cultures and ideas shaped by this land.

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

[clinking glasses] [scraping knife] We are storytellers.

We are Wisconsin Foodie .

[paper rustling] [dramatic electronic music] [birds chirping] [upbeat music] - Michael Dolan: This morning, we're headed out first to go feed the chicks and check them, and we've got cows to move, yearlings and steers to move, pigs to feed.

Just a normal day on the farm.

– Chloe Dolan: Michael and I, we do most of the management of the farm.

We do the chores, daily chores, but Michael's parents help, his brother helps.

So, we said we're three generations living and work on the farm.

And so everybody kind of has their role here.

This year, we're doing three batches of a pasture-raised organic chicken that we have in our mobile greenhouse.

So, those get moved every day.

As they get a little bit bigger, it'll be twice a day on to fresh pasture.

And then, we also do some egg layers.

So we have some eggs, as well.

[upbeat country music] - We do heritage breed, pasture-raised pork that we direct market.

And as well as we have grass-fed organic beef.

So we're managed rotational grazing.

We're moving every single day to fresh pasture for optimal growth and pasture development.

On our farm, we let a pig be a pig, you know, out on pasture.

They get to play in the mud, and they get to eat fresh grass and obviously get some grain.

We grind on farm.

We grow all of our own corn and buy local organic soybeans and raise our own oats as well.

The quality of the meat is exceptional.

I mean, we've been so trained to think of pork as the other white meat.

And it's, it's contrary.

We've also been trained to think that pork should be really lean, but that's not the case.

I mean, with raising pigs out on pasture and heritage breed pigs, they should have a nice set of fat on them.

And when you give them pasture and access to outdoors like this, they tend to have a nice deep red color of meat that's really full of flavor.

- It really makes a big difference, them being raised outside and getting a lot of exercise, and it really does change the flavor and the taste a lot.

[upbeat country music] - We wannna leave something for our kids to farm.

We want something, we wanna leave it better than what we found, what we started with.

And also, I believe a lot of our farming practices, you know, can be used as a model to raise food like our grazing practices and our cattle.

There's a statistic out there if everybody adapted or if all the beef in the United States was raised with rotational grazing grass-fed practices, we could sequester the amount of carbon that's been emitted in just 10 years.

That's been emitted since the industrial era.

So it's all about getting the carbon in the soil and feeding the soil, and raising good meat.

– Chloe: Basically, I'm trying to be good stewards of the land.

[upbeat country music] We kind of expanded on what his parents started with, which was they really were into the organic grass-fed aspect of it.

And so, we've just sort of built it from there.

[upbeat country music] - My biggest thing is know your farmer.

I mean, how do you want your food to be raised?

How do you, you know, that's something that we should have a connection with.

[ Wisconsin Foodie van passes quietly] - One of the beautiful pieces about having the ability to interview farmers are stories of generations.

And I think that that's what makes the Midwest farming culture so strong and prevalent.

Michael, I, this land has been in your family for a long time.

How long have you been farming here?

Since 1872?

So it's seven generations with me and my wife, Chloe.

It was a dairy farm predominantly up until the 2000s until we converted it to grass-fed, all pasture-based diverse livestock farm.

– Luke: Can you give me an overview of everything that's happening here?

I mean, there's a lot to take in and, obviously, it's so picturesque and beautiful that, you know, you can get caught on any one facet.

– Chloe: Mm-hmm.

What do I see?

What am I looking at?

– Chloe: We have grass-fed organic beef that we rotate every day onto new pasture.

We have a heritage breed pigs that are organic and pasture-raised, and then we have chicken that's also pasture-raised that we rotation graze.

[upbeat music] - We're really focused on quality all the way through life from birth to finish.

And we have farrow to finish, as well, on the hogs.

- How much of this is about, like, the ethos of eating well and wanting to understand where your food comes from?

And how much is it like about flavor?

Do you get feedback from your customers that this food tastes different?

- I think a lot of people come because they just liked the story.

They see us on social media.

They like the cute pictures.

And then, they taste our stuff, and they're like, "I can't, "I can't go back to stuff in the grocery store, that stuff tastes like nothing."

It's definitely a big difference, and we get that a lot from customers.

– Luke: Sure.

[upbeat music] [tractor engine hums] - This is pig palace.

– Luke: Pig palace, I like it.

- We're weaning and fence training the piglets right now and starting them on way from uplands.

– Luke: Sure.

[tractor engine chugging] [upbeat music] - [Michael hollers, whistles] Moos!

MOOs!

- How long did it take you to perfect your cow call?

- [laughs] About five years.

- About five years?

- Still in training.

- Nice.

- [Michael cattle calls] MOOs!

- Are these cows ready to be moved?

- They are.

- How much of your job in your day is actually just spent with the animals, and you know, making sure fencing's done, or do you find yourself because you do have a farm store spending a lot of time inside with customer interactions?

- Thankfully, my parents take care of most of the customer interactions, so it frees me up to manage all this stuff.

And it's quite-- takes up quite a bit of my time to, yeah, manage all the cattle, rotate them in every day.

– Luke: Sure.

- If you wanna grab that post.

- Yeah.

- And we'll pull it all the way up.

[summoning bovines] Moosies!

[upbeat music] - Luke: This way, friends.

No crowding.

There's room enough for all of us.

- So, on our farm, it's really using nature as a model.

We're doing a lot of biomimicry.

We're treating the animals as how they would-- intended to be treated in nature.

We started with 14 Murray Grey cows and just started as something like we'll just grow beef for ourselves and for our friends.

And the same thing with the pigs.

Started with two to three, and now we're processing up to a 100, 150 pigs a year.

And we have 175 head of Murray Grey beef cattle where we calf to finish everything.

- Do you ever get questions from your customers or when they come and buy, like, say they buy a quarter of a, of an animal, 'how do I actually prepare this?'

I mean, is that how far the disconnect has gone where people don't know what to do?

- In grass-fed beef is, there's such a fine line there.

It takes, really, attention to detail to cook.

– Luke: Sure.

- You can overcook it [snaps fingers] like that.

– Chloe: So, we sell everything in our store, retail, we sell some to restaurants wholesale.

- This is what food sovereignty looks like, doesn't it?

- [chuckling] Yeah.

Yeah, So this is our meat freezer.

This is where we retail all of our cuts.

We have beef, pork, and chicken.

Pretty much any cut you can think of.

If we don't have it, we can order it next time we process something so... - And this is more diverse than most farm stores get.

I want, I wanna do some steaks because I wanna show people how to not overcook grass-fed beef.

- [laughing] Okay.

- And I want some of that fat on there.

Can you hook me up?

- Yeah, definitely.

Got some New York strips here.

- Sure.

- There's a little bit of marbling, maybe a little bit less than you would see in the grocery store because we don't feed any corn to fatten them.

- I think one of the ways that I really appreciate a New York strip specifically with those grass-fed notes is Au Poivre which means "in crushed peppercorns."

And the reason for that is some of the notes of grass that come through the beef and the beef fat really combined with some of the floral elements that you'll find in peppercorns.

Chloe, it's been amazing.

Thank you for walking us through the farm store.

Thank you for allowing us on the farm.

I can't wait to get this outta here because I've got some ideas what to do with this, and thank you.

– Chloe: Thanks for coming up.

This was great.

– Luke: Awesome, our pleasure.

Thanks.

– Chloe: Thank you.

[upbeat country music] [serious instrumental music] - So now, I'm gonna bring you into actually the fold of my home kitchen, and the reason that I wanna do this inside my house is because I really wanna be able to showcase this amazing piece of beef.

This beef from Seven Seeds.

This is a pretty remarkable piece of grass-fed beef.

So, one of the things that I noticed about this beef is that it's nicely studded with fat, and that's kind of unusual for a grass-fed product.

Most of the time grass-fed gets a bad rap for being really, really lean.

And if you have a tendency to overcook it, it becomes dry and unpalatable.

But in this piece, you can see the fat striations through this whole New York strip.

You can also see this colored fat on the outside.

Now, normally when you would pick up a steak that's been finished in a conventional fashion, you might see more white through here.

But this presence of orange shows that there's a lot of beta carotene in this.

That means that this animal was eating grass for its entire life.

This is really, really fantastic stuff and the health benefits for grass-fed beef are unparalleled.

But today, I thought we'd do a really simple preparation: Steak au Poivre.

Basically, what au poivre in French stands for is a peppercorn of pepper.

So we have a combination of pink peppercorn, white peppercorn, and Tellicherry peppercorn that we're going to put in a spice grinder and pulverize the different textures.

And the idea is that we're gonna really crust the outside of that steak.

We're going to heat up a cast iron skillet and with that cast iron, we can have uniform heat that will sear the outside of the steak beautifully, but it will also hold heat.

The idea is that we wanna sear this thing cook it to a rare, maybe medium-rare at most, remove it and let it rest.

And then accent it with the rest of the dish.

Today, because I'm feeling festive, I wanna use some local lacinato kale, a little bit of onion grown by my neighbor in her garden.

Some lemon, some shiitake mushrooms that are locally grown.

And then, I wanna compliment that with Uplands Rush Creek and a little bit of Bard bread.

Some of the stuff that you can find in a local supermarkets, and the idea is to make this more accessible to you.

One of the first things that I wanna do for a piece of meat like this, this New York strip, is I wanna make sure that I get that salt crust just right.

So I'm going to take my sea salt and apply it to the outside.

I do this before I do the pepper, so that way I can ensure that that salt actually sticks and binds to that protein, which in the end will help that pepper also adhere to the protein.

Here we go.

So this may look like a lot of salt to folks but I promise this is a pretty chunky piece of beef.

And we wanna make sure that that crust on the outside has enough salt to flavor the entire piece.

So I liberally season it.

Next, I have my peppercorns.

Now, for those of you who don't have one of these at home, I picked this bad boy up at a St. Vinny's or a Salvation Army or any place you can find used housewares.

Literally, it's a coffee grinder.

I keep one for coffee in our house and one for spices.

In this instance because I want a variation of pepper.

I'm gonna put my first batch in, and this will be the fine ground.

[blender motor whirring] At this juncture, I'm gonna take this fine ground pepper and I'm gonna put it back on the plate because, again, we wanna create a crust.

Now we can see in here that there's some peppercorns that haven't broken down and that's just fine.

Because quite frankly, we want consistency on the outside of this piece of beef.

In this grinder, I have Tellicherry peppercorn which is actually just a fancy name for black peppercorn.

The floral nature of peppercorn, with a little bit of heat, and then the sweetness that accompanies them really accent this piece of beef.

And so, I wanna create a nice spot to be able to take this piece of beef that I've seasoned and drop it in there.

Now, we can see this is pepper crusted through and through.

One of the reasons we do this is to give this piece of beef a really nice shell on the outside while keeping it really, really, really delicious and soft and luscious and sweet on the inside.

Next, I'm going to heat my skillet.

So, to start the process, we're letting the pan heat up and we want this thing to be pretty hot.

The reason being, we wanna get that moisture seared on the inside.

I put a liberal amount of oil in there.

And the reason being, is I wanna make sure that there's enough liaison to transfer that heat from the pan to the actual piece of beef.

With a pan like this, I wanna give it a little bit of time to heat up before I put the oil in.

Right away, I can smell these peppercorn seared.

It smells floral.

It smells beautiful actually.

So we gave that beef a flip, and what we have to do now is literally just be patient.

Boo-yah.

So now that I can see that this bottom side is seared and we have a really lovely crust, I'm gonna take this piece of beef and put it in the oven.

I have the oven set for about 350 degrees, which is kind of like the universal temperature for getting things controlled.

What we wanna do is we want that beef just to have the ability to continue to cook a little bit on the inside.

That seared crust will be nice and delicious on the outside.

We just wanna bring that temperature evenly through the piece of beef.

So we're going to give it about five minutes in the oven.

In the meantime, I can start to prepare some of the pieces that I'm going to need to accompany the dish.

All right, what we wanna do now, is we wanna prepare the base for our kale and the mushrooms.

And this is really, really dead simple.

I'm gonna take just a little bit of onion here.

This was grown by a neighbor and in true Wisconsin fashion, at the end of her garden season, she provided me with a giant bag to hopefully last me through part of the winter.

[gentle music] I think it's always best when you can use garden-fresh ingredients.

And anything you know the story of makes it that much better when you serve it at the table.

So, to Joe, thank you so much.

I really appreciate these.

I'm gonna cut the ends off.

And I really just wanna come down through the onion and get relatively uniform pieces.

As far as the shiitake mushrooms are concerned, I literally just wanna pick these bad boys up, take the stem off, and keep 'em torn.

I really enjoy the woody, kind of earthy flavor that mushrooms bring to a dish like this.

[skillet hissing] I'm gonna let this rest on my cutting board for about five minutes in order to really, really get those juices to resettle into the piece of beef.

But before we do that, I'm gonna put a really healthy pat of the Nordic Creamery butter, right on top.

Just let it kind of rest in there.

So that really gets a lot of richness but it's also gonna act as a really, really delicious and delicate sauce.

Put the same pan over medium heat.

I'm gonna actually take these mushrooms and onions and I'm gonna place some right in the skillet.

At this point, while I still have a lot of really good heat intensity in this pan, I'm gonna simply take a lemon and slice it in half.

The idea with the lemon is that if we put it in a pan like this face down these sides will caramelize and that'll allow that juice and all that citrus in there to really, really concentrate and become more sugary.

And last, but certainly not least are the vegetables.

You can never have too many vegetables on a plate like this.

And I love lacinato kale.

Lacinato is also known as "dinosaur kale" because of the scaly texture of the leaves.

But I love it.

This is so rich in iron and all sorts of minerals that you pull from this vegetable that it can't be underestimated.

The other thing that I like about it for all the people who cook at home, it's kind of bulletproof.

You can put this on a hot, hot skillet, you can throw it on the grill, you can do all sorts of stuff and with enough salt and lemon, I promise, you won't even know it's kale.

We're going to allow this to just chill out in the pan.

One of the reasons I like to really slice the steak before I serve it is because I wanna see it.

I wanna see how close to that perfect temperature I got when I cooked it.

[upbeat music] That looks pretty good, doesn't it?

[gentle music] And last but not least, let's lay this beautiful grass-fed beef, lovingly and humanely raised by Seven Seeds Organics, right on top of this.

We can see the butter kind of melted on there, really works into the beef.

And I think the real crowning moment of this is squeezing a little bit of that caramelized lemon juice right over the top.

This is ready to go.

For anyone who might have apprehension about searing a piece of beef at home, don't.

It's a really simple, delicious way to use the bounty of what's around you and put it on a plate.

And honestly, I can't wait any longer.

I've got to try a little bit of this for myself because this is almost too good to be true.

[gentle music] That's really good.

You add a little bit of pepper, right?

You get the peppery bite, you get the acidity of the lemon which accentuates the pepper, but then you get that sweet richness of that beef that's really balanced by the mushrooms and the umami in the kale.

And it's just this medley of flavors that's in one little bite.

Michael and Chloe and everyone in the seven generations of farmers that comprise Seven Seeds Organics, thank you.

This is beautiful.

Bon apptit!

Luke: You ever run out of gas out here?

– Michael: [laughing] Yeah.

– Luke: How does that feel?

– Michael: Chloe, can you come pick me up?

I feel like that's half the time is me bugging her to do more work.

[Luke laughs] - Luke: Do a figure eight, come back, take my shirt off in this next scene.

Conan, the Barbarian good for you, Arthur?

[speaking like Conan] This is the time when we pull the water through the pasture.

Arthur's head would be-- Oh!

[laughs] - Announcer: Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters: [energetic music, cash register rings] [gift card rustling] [pouring a beverage] [mystical swirling] [wind whooshing] [heart beats "lub-dub"] [bell chimes as door opens] - 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.

- At Organic Valley, our cows make milk [cheery whistling] with just a few simple ingredients.

Sun, soil, rain, and grass.

[bubble popping] And grass, and grass.

– Cow: Yee-haw!

[angelic choir music] - Organic Valley Grassmilk, organic milk from 100% grass-fed cows.

[banjo music] - 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.

[upbeat music] - 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 d-n-r dot w-i dot g-o-v. - 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.

- With additional support coming from The Conscious Carnivore.

From local animal sourcing to on-site high-quality butchering and packaging.

The Conscious Carnivore can ensure organically raised, grass-fed and healthy meats through its small group of local farmers.

The Conscious Carnivore, know your farmer, love your butcher.

- Additional support coming from the Viroqua Food Co-op, Central Wisconsin Craft Collective, Something Special from Wisconsin, Crossroads Collective, La Crosse Distilling Company, as well as the Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

- Are you hungry for more?

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