Wisconsin Foodie

>> This week on Wisconsin Foodie... >> Hi there, I'm Sigrid, from Wienke's Market. Our parents have been here since late 1966. Now that we have our cucumbers washed and speared, we are going to make pickles. >> Fermentation Fest is about abundance and transformation. There's still a lot of experimentation going on here, but I think the spirit is very generous. Arts engagement is a very important part of this, because we're bringing people out of galleries and out of museums into the world to sort of interact with the landscape. This is kind of a great example of how to do that. The Farm/Art DTour is our main attraction, and that is available from dusk to dawn for the entire ten days. There were 39 official stops on the map, but there are plenty of what we call rogue installations, unofficial things that people just put out on their own. I better see what stop number this is. >> Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters for their support. Outpost Natural Foods Co-Op, and Superior Equipment and Supply. The Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board and the dairy farm families of Wisconsin are proud to support Wisconsin Foodie, helping viewers celebrate our state's vibrant food culture. With nearly 11,000 family dairy farms, the Wisconsin dairy industry generates more than $26 billion annually for the Wisconsin economy, and brings recognition to the state for producing award-winning cheeses. >> Hi there, I'm Sigrid, from Wienke's Market. Why don't you come with me, and meet the family. Here we have Don and Jane Wienke, mom and dad. >> Hi. >> My husband Dave, and my sister Marit. Why don't you guys all come on inside and we'll show you our market. >> This is our retail store. Our store is in a renovated barn. We have a selection of pie fillings, which of course, we have Door County cherry pie filling. And our large selection of homemade pickles. Let's go see where those are made. Here's our canning-processing kitchen. We're going to make some pickles. We do need a few more things, though. Let's go get some fresh cucumbers. Our parents have been here since late 1966. So, it's been what, 47 years almost? Then in the early '90s is when the processing kitchen was state and federally approved to be able to make and sell the pickles. So, another 22 years or so, of making the pickles and selling them. Here's one of our pickle patches. Mom's already picking some cucumbers. What have you got for us? We'll make the pickles. Thank you! >> Thanks! >> We do grow a lot of our own produce for our pickles. Not all of it, because we're far beyond that. but we grow our cucumbers, some of our own cucumbers. We grow our own beets. We grow a lot of beans for our Dilly Beans. All of our own dill, we do grow all of our own dill. I can take you in and show you how we grade the cucumbers on our cucumber grader. We're going to put the cucumbers on our cucumber grader. It starts with the smaller cucumbers in the beginning, and as they go down the machine, the larger ones fall into their slots. This size here is what we're going to be canning this afternoon in our canning kitchen. It's the perfect size for our dill spears that we're going to be doing today. Okay, now that we have our cucumbers washed and speared, we are going to make pickles. Some of the jars are prepped here. We have onion, and garlic, and fresh dill. You just saw us go by it out in the field, and now we have it picked and ready to go. We start with a little bit of onion, a few cloves of garlic, and fresh dill. Everything here at Wienke's is hand packed, so they were hand cut and now we're hand packing them. All of our recipes that we use are actually our mom's mom's recipes, Grandma Nelson's recipes. We've modified them to some degree. She probably doesn't like the fact, I shouldn't say "doesn't," but the fact that we use hot-- A lot of people like hot pickles, so we put hot peppers in some of our varieties of pickles. I don't think she ever would've thought about that. But you know, you've got to do what the customers want. Then we add a little bit more onion, another clove of garlic, a little bit more dill. To top it off, we need another pickle for on the top. You want your pickles to be nice and tight. Otherwise, they'll all rise up. All right, now that we have our pickles packed nice and tight in the jars, we're going to add our brine. We do around seven or eight different brines here. The brine is what makes the pickles. We do some with sugar, some without sugar. Very simple ingredients. The simpler the better. We don't use any kind of preservatives in any of our pickles. Now that we've added the brine, we will take it over and we will wipe the top of the lid, add a lid to it and a ring. These will be ready to go into our hot water bath. They will process for approximately 15 minutes. This is an average day of pickle making at Wienke's market. Our ladies have hand packed all these in our canning kitchen. We do over 15 different varieties of pickles right here in our canning operation. We distribute our products throughout the state of Wisconsin, northern Illinois, and Upper Michigan. You can always find Wienke's Market pickles in your local grocery store. Okay, it's been about 15 minutes. Let's get our pickles out of the canner. Here's our done product. All right, I'm Sigrid, and thanks for coming to Wienke's Market, and let me show you how to make pickles. >> We are at St. Paul's Church, which is Food Chain 1, which is stop number 12 on the map, of the Farm/Art DTour, which is the signature event of the Fermentation Fest. My name is Donna Neuwirth. I'm the co-founder and executive director of Worm Farm Institute. We are the producing organization of Fermentation Fest. Fermentation Fest is about abundance and transformation. It's a live culture convergence, whether it's from grain to beer, or from milk to cheese, or from cabbage to kimchi, or from one sort of community to another. The Farm/Art DTour is our main attraction. That is available from dusk to dawn for the entire ten days. There are 39 official stops on the map, but there are plenty of what we call rogue installations, unofficial things that people just put up on their own. We had a pilot year in 2011, where we weren't really sure how it was going to work. After the first year, 100% of the people polled who participated wanted to participate again. "Well, if Larry's gonna do it, sure, why not?" There's still a lot of experimentation going on here, but I think the spirit is very generous. Because so many people appreciate the drive out here, and spend money locally, and boost the local economy, it's making converts out of the people who were quite skeptical to begin with. Technically, we're in LaValle, but I'm not actually sure. We're out in the country between LaValle and Reedsburg. >> Hi! >> Come on over here! I'd like you to talk about your beer jelly. It's the only beer jelly in the world, as far as we know.

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>> Well, let's hope so, so far. So, we were gearing up for Fermentation Fest last year, and I did a beer tasting with a local brewer, Dave Dietz, who's now brewing at the Corner Pub in Reedsburg. At the end of our beer tasting that day, I went home and went to sleep and woke up in the middle of the night thinking, why shouldn't I make jelly out of beer. So, we gave it a shot, a little trial and error, and here we are today, selling locally brewed beer. It's excellent with your sausage and cheese trays. It's good to glaze a pork chop or a portobello mushroom, or maybe some tempeh on the grill. It really seals in the juices. I've been a chef for about 27 years, and have always done preserving. I started making my first pickles and jams when I was about 8 or 9. So, I retired and tried to decide what I was going to do with the rest of my grown-up years and got involved with the Fermentation Fest. I think the most important aspect is the stories that I hear from people. It really just opens up conversations. It opens up people telling stories about their history, and then connecting it to the modern interest in food preservation. So each jar is a story, not just for me, but for the people who come and visit us, wherever we happen to be. You can just stick your paddle right in there.

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>> Surprising. I mean, surprising. >> Well, chocolate is actually a fermented food. A lot of people do not know that. But it's fermented at the country of origin. My signature chocolate right now is my sea salt sugar baby. It's made mostly from honey from my farm bee hives. I'm running one for Fermentation Fest. It's not fermented, but it's made from squash from my farm garden. It's finished with Wisconsin maple syrup, honey from my bee hives, and ginger. It's been a phenomenal seller. In fact, all of my chocolates are coming from my farm bee hives, but I also try to support other local farmers, to use their products in my chocolates, as well. >> The biggest complaint we have at this fest is not enough stuff to eat. So we really needed to ramp up the prepared, ready-to-eat food. Jams and jellies are fine, but we need pizza and sandwiches and things. So we invited La Fortuna in this year, and we're very happy to have them. >> I'm Scott Lynch. I'm one of the co-proprietors of La Fortuna Pizza, based in Madison. We specialize in a Neapolitan style brick oven pizza, cooked with wood, using Wisconsin-grown ingredients. It started out of a love of eating pizza. And we built a stationary wood-burning oven at our house to kind of support a habit. As is often the case, a hobby turned into a profession. That's Pizza Bianca. It's a dough that we make ourselves, our own homegrown rosemary, a little bit of olive oil. Garlic salt from Penzey's Spices, and two kinds of cheese from Farmer John's Cheese in Dodgeville. There's no food that's more approachable than pizza, so it's an ideal vehicle for us to try to connect people with their farmers. >> Mmm! Wow, it's incredible. >> I'm Molly Balcom Raleigh. >> And I'm Emily Stover. We're artists from St. Paul, Minnesota. >> We're here at the Dumpling House, our installation for Fermentation Fest. People come in and they say, "Oh, is this a class?" or, "How do we pay?" And we say no, it's an art installation. Then right away, they're like, "Oh, okay, well, what do I do?" >> I have been blown away by the reception we've received for Dumpling House. >> Yeah, and when you do something like this, there's always that point where you wonder if what you're doing makes any sense. >> Yeah. >> And I think there was this moment the very first day, if I'm not mistaken, when an older woman says, "We are the filling." Yes! It was just, we knew that we kind of hit on something that really made sense, not just to us, but to people who live in this community. >> It's a beautiful success. It is a live culture convergence, and we're very happy to be a part of it. >> Arts engagement is a very important part of this, because we're bringing people out of galleries and out of museums into the world to sort of interact with the landscape. So this is kind of a great example of how to do that. I better see what stop this is! Here it is, okay, 26. This is stop number 26 on the Farm/Art DTour. The artist of this truck sculpture is named John Himmelfarb. He's from both Chicago and Spring Green, just down the road a piece. He actually drove this here. This is Kyle Martin, local plein air painter, who is capturing this sculpture in oil. >> It's interesting, I actually saw another one of his pieces in the Wyoming Valley off of Highway 23 in the spring. >> Really? Huh. >> And I painted that. I didn't know it was a piece of art. I mean, it was the same kind of thing, just all these fuel tanks stacked up on a truck. I saw it and I just thought it was an interesting way to recycle. >> I want to see that painting. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's beautiful. I mean, the thing that I do as a landscape painter, is I kind of have to look at the lines of the landscape in a different way. What this does, is it allows even the residents of the area to take a second look in that same way. It's a different look, but it's just connecting us with the land, and connecting us with the farmers. I grew up farming, and you know, it's just really important to support local farmers. Because without them, we're not going to have any food, so it just makes people connect with their farmers. Art is food for the soul, so we need to nourish our soul, especially in today's culture, in the same way that we need to nourish our bodies with wholesome foods. >> Hi, I'm Pat Skogen, from Reeson Family Farm in Loganville, Wisconsin. I'm here representing the Ridge and Valley Growers, which is a whole group of wonderful local farmers from the communities of LaValle, Hillpoint, Lime Ridge, North Freedom, Reedsburg, and the Dells. So, we put together all of our produce this year. We have this culture stand in Lime Ridge. We did meet a lot of new people. Let's see, probably our biggest sellers were the garlic and the mushrooms. We had a lot of interest in Deb Doob's aronia berry jam. We also had some interest in Cedar Grove Cheese Curds and the other pottery that was here at the stand. >> The aronia jelly is really good. >> Tell me about that. What is it? >> Aronia is higher in antioxidants than any of the other jellies. They're native to this area. The berries are black, and they grow on bushes about the size of highbush blueberries. They taste really awful if you just eat them raw. But as soon as you cook them, you can use them in baking, just the way you do blueberries, and it makes a dynamite jelly, especially if there's some sugar involved. Well, I don't know if you can see here, there's quite a distance between here and the yarn, because they love to roll in all kinds of stuff. Of course, their fiber picks all of that up, so there's a lot of prep work that goes into making the yarn. So, spinning the yarn is the least of the work, actually. It's the picking that takes the most time, that's the most tedious. I also have solar panels. He's standing in front of the solar panels, with straw hanging out of his mouth. They don't seem to notice when there's straw, or whatnot hanging out of their mouths. It doesn't bother them a bit. >> It's a pretty good life, right? >> Yes. People think that oh, llamas, they spit. They really only spit at each other, or if they're really angry about something. They are aggressive feeders, so they have a lot of food fights with each other. Then for people, it's just a matter of not being in the middle of that. It's really funny, because after they've spat at each other, they kind of go with their mouths open, and they can't eat. So, they have this food fight, fighting over the food, but then they can't eat it. They're just too upset. >> This is Castle Reedsburg, and this is what we call a farm forum, which are creative expressions by folks who don't necessarily consider themselves artists. In this case, it was a collaboration between a construction company and an engineering firm in town. So this is Castle Reedsburg, which is made from local straw and recycled pop bottles. Serpentine. Frankly, I don't know what the title signifies, but I know that he wanted to have an object that you could see the land through, and that it evokes some organic shapes, and reflected the landscape across the street. >> What do you want people to take away from this experience? Somebody that comes from the city, to just come out here, what do you want them to leave with? >> Well, fermentation is transformation. So, I think it's really important for people to see how places and food, and lives, and futures can be transformed. So, I think I want people to see possibilities, and revitalize people's imaginations. >> Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters for their support. Outpost Natural Foods Co-op; Superior Equipment and Supply; the restaurants of Potawatomi Bingo Casino; Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources; Something Special from Wisconsin; and Colectivo Coffee Roasters. The Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board and the dairy farm families of Wisconsin are proud to support Wisconsin Foodie, helping viewers celebrate our state's vibrant food culture. With nearly 11,000 family dairy farms, the Wisconsin dairy industry generates more than $26 billion annually for the Wisconsin economy, and brings recognition to the state for producing award-winning cheeses. >> This episode of Wisconsin Foodie is now available on DVD at WisconsinFoodie.com. You can also like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and watch past episodes through YouTube and Vimeo.