Wisconsin Foodie

– Announcer: This week on Wisconsin Foodie .

[guitar music] - Hi, I'm Caitlin Cullen.

I'm the chef and owner of the Tandem restaurant.

And we are starting our first full week of community free meals.

We like to serve people good food, yeah.

We like to be a cool place to kick it, sure, but we've always focused primarily on helping people.

– Charles: This is a trying time for the peoples right now.

We just gotta stay positive and keep living.

– Kevin Jahnke: When I was a little kid, we had beef cows.

And when I moved back here to the farm and kinda took over, I was able to convert our beef farm to a dairy farm.

In recent times now, the milk prices have been taking a dip.

So we just decided to help make ends meet that we'd do something else.

And so this hemp craze kinda was pretty appealing.

And I guess we're taking a risk and seeing what we can do.

– Luke: It's truly an incredible plant.

– Kevin: Doesn't that smell good?

Yeah, sticky, ooey gooey heaven.

[soft guitar music] - Announcer: Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters.

[energetic music] - Announcer: 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.

– Announcer: At Organic Valley, our cows make milk with just a few simple ingredients: sun, soil, rain, and grass.

And grass and grass.

- Yee-haw!

– Organic Valley Grassmilk: organic milk from 100% grassfed cows.

- 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.

- With additional support coming from the Conscious Carnivore.

From local animal sourcing to onsite, high-quality butchering and packaging, the Conscious Carnivore can ensure organically-raised, grassfed, 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, The La Crosse Distilling Company, as well as the Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

[upbeat music] - Luke: 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.

[upbeat music] We are storytellers.

We are Wisconsin Foodie .

[paper tearing] - Caitlin: Just put the napkins and stuff right by the door.

– Lydia: Okay.

Thank you for calling Tandem, please hold.

- So today, Liv, you're looking at one, two, three, four, five, six.

You're gonna have two pages, all right?

Is that too annoying?

- No.

- Hi, I'm Caitlin Cullen.

I'm the chef and owner of the Tandem restaurant, and we are starting our first full week of community free meals.

There you go, honey.

Good luck.

[groovy music] The Tandem has been in business a little over three years.

We opened in November 2016.

Anyone who knows anything about our restaurant knows that we're always skating on the edge of like, insolvency.

Check my unemployment letters.

'Cause we're a social enterprise more than anything.

And we probably should have started off being a 501c3, but I was stubborn and was like, "No, the hood doesn't need another nonprofit."

Like, we need to show people that commerce can happen in their communities.

By virtue of the neighborhood that we're in, which is Lindsay Heights, I decided when opening that we would train folks potentially for their first job or their first job upon reentry or their first job in a restaurant on the job and compensate them fairly for their time, hoping that we could kind of bridge the connection between the massively unemployed North side of Milwaukee with the massively underemployed restaurants of the downtown area.

Like, that's always been our goal.

And then, Arlissya, just for your knowledge, anytime you add something to a pot, add salt.

We like to serve people good food, yeah.

We like to be a cool place to kick it, sure.

But we've always focused primarily on helping people.

When we knew that we were gonna have to change to like a delivery and curbside format, we had to cut the menu down significantly.

And I just thought like, "Oh we have so much food "in the walk-in that's gonna go to waste."

So I thought, "Well, let's just cook off what we have."

And we stopped doing our carryout and delivery and really just focused on community meals.

And so Thursday afternoon around 2 o'clock, I looked at my staff and I explained what I thought was gonna happen.

And how I thought it was important that we focus on doing the most good and looking back at this time and feeling like proud of what we did.

And so this allows us to kind of change what our approach is, but keep our mission the same.

It might help keep people in just a little bit of money for a little longer and also give them something to do.

Like if I had to sit around all day, I'd go insane.

And for right now, me, Charles, and Will are gonna slap together 300 meals.

The beef ones are mashed potatoes, carrots, Brussels, and the beef itself.

How you doing, Willy Will?

– Will: Good.

– Caitlin: What's today, 3/23?

– Will: I've got the worst handwriting, Cait.

– Caitlin: How bad?

Oh, it's cute.

The original plan was to freeze meals.

I was like, "Oh my God, "we're just gonna make a bunch of meals, "throw 'em in the freezer, "and people can grab 'em when they want."

And so we made like 85 meals and we froze them all, and they didn't stay in the freezer for more than three hours before they were all picked up.

So then on Thursday, we kind of re-upped and doubled down and we did 150 meals.

And within two hours, 150 meals were gone.

Halfway through the day, it was really clear that the need was a lot greater than we thought.

It seemed like it was something that we should focus on and continue to burn through everything in the walk-in.

Oh good, we have plenty of seafood, okay.

– Charles: Right now, labeling seafood jambalaya for the peoples today.

I was homeless and I was looking for a job.

My girl wanted to be a dishwasher.

But Caitlin said she wanted me to do the dishes.

So ever since then, I've just been working here, making sure the restaurant is okay.

This is a trying time for the peoples right now.

We just gotta stay positive and keep living.

– Caitlin: We're taking every precaution.

Everybody washes their hands when they get in the door.

And nothing that goes out in boxes gets touched by a human hand that's not clean and freshly into a glove.

One of our employees is even bringing some masks today.

We don't let anyone in the building.

So we keep two bodies as runners.

And then Lydia just stays on the phones.

That way, the runners can be more diligent, like gloves on, gloves off, sanitizing in between passes.

– Lydia: So you want one falafel, one corned beef hash, and two beef plates?

– Woman on phone: Yes, please.

– Lydia: Okay, sounds good.

Just let us know when you're outside and someone will bring it to you.

- This is a lot of people who don't have means to eat, you know, got kids and...

I have a elderly friend that can't get up.

So I'm basically coming for him.

So it's good that they doing this.

- A friend of mine, knowing that I have problems getting food, told me about Tandem and the free meals.

It means a lot to me because otherwise I'd be struggling.

And I had some smothered chicken and rice that tastes very close to my mom's.

[chuckles] I haven't had her cooking in a long time.

This is like home, it's like comfort.

The food is really, really good.

[chuckles] - We're cooking whatever the hell we got.

So we had a bunch of chicken 'cause our delivery and carryout had been so busy that we brought in three cases of chicken Thursday morning for like frying to sell to people.

I don't know, I wanna make this feel more fun than horrifying.

Like to kinda normalize this moment in time.

Like it is okay to go get a free meal if you haven't prepared.

You get a lot of folks that you would typically expect to see at like a food pantry or a shelter.

And I hope they're happy that we're making really cool meals.

I think over the next couple weeks, we're really gonna see a lot of folks, a lot of wage workers, a lot of service industry people who didn't prepare for this, who don't have food at home, who don't have a savings, who are used to eating at work all the time.

So they haven't really prepared for this.

- This is great for people that need help because as you've seen on the news, all food pantries are closed because of the virus.

And I guess it's not getting much better, and grateful for this place that they're giving out food for free.

- Can you grab that?

- Thank you.

- Thank you; two beef, one falafel?

– Caitlin: It feels terrible to push someone aside.

You know what I mean?

And be like, "Sorry, I don't have anything for you," or "You'll have to come back tomorrow."

But people have been donating an extraordinary amount.

I mean like, some guy came and donated a bunch of stuff from like a food supplier's freezer.

Here's 50 pounds of frozen chicken breasts and 20 pounds of frozen crawfish and all kinds of stuff that we can turn into meals for the entirety of this week.

We're making our vegetarian option for the day.

So one of the donations we got was like an extraordinary amount of lettuce.

And meanwhile, we had just bought a case of tomatoes for our BLTs that were on our delivery menu.

So just really trying to not let anything go to waste.

So these are just like a good falafel wrap with a yogurt sauce.

We're trying to keep items that we're making, I don't know, nutritious.

I'm suspecting a lot of people, this might be the one meal they get today.

Our next focus, because we did decide to do something different and that people have been supporting, is to support other small businesses now 'cause we're all in this together.

Restaurants in Milwaukee have always looked out for each other.

- So we are from the restaurant Lucky Liu's.

I'm the worker there.

So we are closing down due to the coronavirus.

Since we were closing down, so we decided to donate our fresh produce to someone in need, like Tandem Milwaukee.

– Caitlin: And we've got chopped onions, Julienne onions, mushrooms.

And then we gotta figure out what to do with all these peppers.

– Lydia: Stuffed bell peppers.

– Caitlin: Ooh, I like that!

Vegan or veg?

– Lydia: Both.

– Caitlin: All right.

We're all working on something a little different.

Anomalous is getting, she put some pulled pork in the oven and she's got some baked mac and cheese getting moving.

Will is slapping together some marinated chicken that we're gonna grill off, and we'll serve that with a twice-baked potato.

And what the hell else did I say was going with the chicken?

Veggies, a variety of veggies.

So we've got a little bit of carrots left over from what we did today and some frozen peas that Anomalous has in a pot, and she's gonna cook off and add some of the chopped veggies Lucky Liu's is donating today.

I've offered to pay people for whatever they got, but I think they just wanna help out.

You know, some folks are just literally stopping by and handing Lydia a check.

And then we also had some supplementary meals from Emerald City Catering.

This is a guy I've never met in my life, and he's just been dropping off boxes of food he can't use.

And so they have been dropping off anywhere between 30 and 50 meals every day.

So we can at least give people something.

I think it's pork and beans.

Cool, yep, all right.

Today, we did nearly 300 meals with their help.

So they did 40 and we did the balance.

I think we came up at 286.

So the goal is gonna be 300 a day and scaling that as need requires.

But it keeps me doing something to help folks, which is what we've always done here.

Maria, there you go.

Thank you, stay safe.

– Kevin: Come on girls, let's go.

[whistling] Get 'em in, Finn, let's go.

[upbeat guitar music] Typically, we come out about 6 o'clock and I'll send the dogs off to get the cows.

Once we got the cows in the parlor, the crew usually takes over the milking and then I'll go out to move fences in the pasture.

Come on, let's go.

[whistling] When I was a little kid, we had beef cows.

And when I moved back here to the farm and kinda took over, I was able to convert our beef farm to a dairy farm and milk 60 cows and feed those 60 cows every single day with nothing but pasture.

And 15 years ago, when I had the idea of trying to milk cows feeding no grain on nothing but pasture, most dairy farmers that I knew kinda laughed at me and thought, "Well, that's not gonna work."

And I said, "Well, we'll see."

So 15 years later, I've got my herd of crossbred dairy cows up there that are making it work.

In order to ship quality milk, you've gotta pay attention to details.

One of the most important things is making sure the health of the cows is good.

And so one of the things that we've made it a goal on our farm is because we drink the milk out of our tank is that every drop of milk that goes into the tank has to be the highest quality milk for me and my family, which is an accomplishment.

And it's pretty hard to do because there's so many factors every day that can contribute to milk not being the highest quality.

Generally, once the cows are milked and they're off onto their pasture, most days I'm done for the day.

And I know that's hard for most farmers to comprehend that.

You know, I come out, work two hours in the morning and I'm done for the day.

And come back out 12 hours later and do it all over.

So in the middle of those 12 hours, it could be anything from cutting firewood to, you know, fixing other fences.

Over the past 30 years, I've developed what's called a grazing eye.

Generally, you stand out here and look around and try to estimate, you know, how tall the grass is; it's intuition.

But you know, really my goal is to lay out the right size of an area that's gonna provide my cows with all the dry matter feed intake that they're gonna need for the next 12 hours.

You know, it's funny that the grass and pastures is the cow's favorite food, and she can eat it 24 hours a day her whole life and never get sick of eating it.

I think early on as an organic pioneer, one of the first things that I struggled with was the amount of weeds that you just have in a pasture like this.

So, you know, as you look across here, you see a lot of tall weeds that the cows didn't eat, that some farmers would think is either ugly or a waste.

But to me, it's just diversification.

So even if that weed grew and the cows didn't eat it, that weed still fulfilled some type of a benefit to my farm, whether it was its roots growing down deep into the subsoil to bring nutrients up that are more available for the plants that the cows do eat.

[uplifting music] In recent times now, the milk prices have been taking a dip.

Our expenses are going up faster than anything.

So we just decided to help make ends meet that we do something else.

And so this hemp craze kinda was pretty appealing.

And I guess we're taking a risk and seeing what we can do.

So here's the field of hemp.

So there's 2,000 plants out there on one acre.

There's two different varieties.

So the variety on the lower half is called the Abacus Cherry.

The reason that we chose this one was because it would be a more hardier plant that would probably have a better chance of surviving outside.

[uplifting music] So again, just like the unknowns of everything else about growing this, there's a little bit of unknown about when is the correct time to harvest it.

I guess what we're gonna do is we're gonna be going by the color of the trichomes.

So the trichomes are what secrete the oil that we're gonna be collecting.

They basically look like little spines with a dewdrop on the end of each one.

And so after we pulled off all of the fan leaves and harvested nothing but the flower, we had half a pound of dried product off of it.

Which was pretty impressive, I thought.

So I got a thousand of those here.

If we can average half a pound on those, that's 500 pounds.

And then this variety down here is probably easily gonna average well over a pound.

So I've got 1,500 pounds is what we're estimating at this point.

The market that we're going for is a CBD extraction.

And so the dried flower market for that is ranging anywhere from $40 a pound to $150 a pound.

So we're hoping that our organic certification is gonna give us an edge on that to keep us up on the higher side of that.

– Luke: It smells great in here.

I gotta say, it smells like college for me.

This is pretty incredible.

Thanks for having us out here.

- You're welcome.

- Good to be here.

What are we doing today?

- So we're harvesting hemp out of our field today.

We're setting up one of our greenhouses to hang plants.

We've got another setup in our shed that consists of a drying system.

The drying system has reached capacity.

So we're just hanging plants to just buy a couple days until we can get the dryer emptied out and put some fresh green stuff in it.

- What's the end result of this product?

- All right, so the product that we're growing is CBD hemp.

So the leaves contain a small amount of CBD oil and the flowers contain a significantly higher amount.

- And this is all part of like a strategy to diversify the family farm, right?

- Right.

– Luke: Would you mind you showing us the operation today?

– Kevin: Yeah, we'll take the tour of the whole thing.

[tractor engine roars] [uplifting music] Well, I know that back in the mid-1900s, hemp was a pretty big crop in Wisconsin.

Talking with my dad, he can remember that there was a few farmers around that had been growing hemp for the fiber, but as a CBD crop, there's been no history.

So this place where we're growing the hemp this year, it was one of my pastures.

– Luke: That concept of regenerative agriculture, do you feel like that's kind of the newest horizon, you know?

- Yeah, because from a perspective of being an organic farmer, one of the philosophies within organics is to always try to do better.

You know, the big thing is just to stick with kinda my belief system.

And so my belief system with the dairy was low input and organically.

– Luke: Sure.

- But you know, they're amazing plant, they're hardy.

You know, a weed's job is to grow and make a seed.

And so if they can get in the ground and grow, they will.

– Luke: That's incredible.

– Kevin: And they're doing it, yeah.

[gentle music] - Luke: For those of you at home who don't know, or maybe aren't as familiar with what this smells like and feels like, you know, to put it in a way that's translatable, I always think that there's definitely like a pineyness that's associated with really, you know, wet cannabis.

I think that that also is like accented in hops, you know, when you get a really hoppy beer and it's that taste and that sensation that kind of like, "Buh!"

knocks you back a little bit.

That's so much what these smell like.

And they're actually so laden with oil that they literally are juicing off on my fingers.

And it's sticky, it's a resin.

It's truly an incredible plant.

– Kevin: Doesn't it smell good?

Yeah, sticky, ooey, ooey gooey heaven.

Hey, Steve.

This is my friend, Steve.

– Luke: Hey, Steve.

- He's one of the members of our co-op.

– Luke: Why a Co-op?

- Why not a co-op?

- Aha, that's the answer.

That's the sandbagged answer I'm looking for.

- And the reason for me is protection and the ability for us not to have to compete against each other for that same market share.

So we started doing group buys together and purchasing seed together, purchasing equipment together.

And then we decided to continue on, and now we're gonna be forming our own brand, our own South Central Hemp CBD oils and other products together.

So I'm also a veteran.

So I formed an organization with a number of other veterans in the state called Wisconsin Veterans for Compassionate Care.

And that just one thing led to another.

And I got a call, hey, the governor wants to announce this in his budget.

And you know, we'd like to invite you to speak after him and tell the story.

[uplifting guitar music] I had my third back surgery in 2016.

And I had been running a 20-acre certified organic CSA operation at that time.

And so then I had to stop farming.

Well, CBD is just one of over a hundred different cannabinoids that's found in the cannabis plant.

THC would be another one.

I find it very helpful for me personally when I'm dealing with pain, without the psychotropic high that you get with THC.

I don't like to paint rosy pictures.

I mean, it's gonna take a lot more than hemp to save the dairy industry.

Can it help a few farms pull through and make it through until hopefully conditions change?

Yeah, I think it can, but it's hard work.

So it might not be for every farm out there.

[gentle guitar music] - Kevin, I mean, what am I looking at here though?

I mean, this is, this is some farmer ingenuity.

- Yeah, so this is a homemade dryer system that I built.

We've got blowers on the end of it, blowing air.

These trays have mesh bottoms in them.

So each tray stacks on top of each other to allow the air to blow up through it.

And then we've got dehumidifiers in the back of the room to pull out the humidity.

What is in here is flowers and leaves off of the hemp plant.

So the, you know, the aroma is coming directly from the flowers.

- Where does it go?

- So right now, we're working with a processor who's organic to process this into oil for us to give us a product that then we can go out into the retail world with and hopefully, you know, have markets to sell it.

- Yeah, well, this is pretty eye-opening and I mean, it's amazing.

I'm actually... a strange word, but I'm really proud of you guys for being able to put this together and take on this endeavor as a way to sustain the multiple generations of farming that have happened right here.

[uplifting guitar music] - I've had beagles ever since I was eight years old.

My dad got me my first beagle.

I've been a diehard rabbit hunter ever since.

I should use the term rabbit hunter loosely because I very rarely ever get any.

Beagles are quite the dog.

Everything that happens to a beagle, through its brain, goes through their nose.

They're relentlessly happy.

They have no manners.

They don't listen very good at all.

They're not very smart, but they can smell a track and follow it for miles.

[whistling] Hey, boy!

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

[energetic music] - 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 with just a few simple ingredients: sun, soil, rain, and grass.

And grass, and grass.

- Yee-haw!

– Organic Valley Grassmilk: organic milk from 100% grassfed cows.

- 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.

- With additional support coming from the Conscious Carnivore.

From local animal sourcing to onsite, high-quality butchering and packaging, the Conscious Carnivore can ensure organically raised, grassfed, 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, the La Crosse Distilling Company, as well as the Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

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[groovy music]