Home Grown and Bizarre

I get a lot of odd looks these days whenever I’m asked about my day job. I can spin a good yarn about the hakarl merchants of Bjarnhofn—the guys who “make” the putrified twenty-foot-long Greenlandic shark (the national dish of Iceland). I have sped alongside killer whales in the glacial North Atlantic in search of puffin, divined my way through gritty night markets from Taipei to Thailand, attended ritualized tuna auctions in Japan’s Tsukiji Market, eaten the freshest caviar by the fistful with the Iranian merchants at Rungis outside Paris and with Russian mobsters at the Caviar Bar at St. Petersburg’s Grand Hotel Europe (they take theirs on blini). Sheep’s heads? Which continent? And I can tell you that the Napo River Pilchi Indians in the Ecuadorian Amazon know how to cook coconut grubs with more flair than their Filipino counterparts.

When it comes to dining on unusual foods, however, there’s no place like home.

Sharing food and experiencing culture is what I do on the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods, and the longer I spend working on the show the more I believe that all provincialism is universal. Care to charcoal grill some camel parts next weekend? Not in my backyard? Well, try explaining lutefisk to a melon hawker in the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakesh. Or American cheese singles to a herdsman in the Sahara. He’d laugh at you. What is cuisine on one side of the world sounds vulgar on the other. Frankly, what is a weirder food practice than taking boneless, skinless chicken breasts from a factory farm and shrink-wrapping them in plastic?

So it was with great pleasure that we pitched the Travel Channel on doing a local episode of our show—in fact, “Bizarre Minnesota” was part of the first set of proposals we ever submitted to the network suits way back when.

We got the green light for a homegrown episode in season two, so beginning with the wild rice harvest last August and through late September’s ruffed grouse hunt, we shot a Minnesota episode. We could have shot an entire show in one day in the Twin Cities if we cared to. Tongue tacos on Lake Street, fish maw and spicy pig intestines at my favorite Chinese restaurant, head cheese on East Hennepin . . . but what would be the challenge? Here’s my diary of weeks of Minnesota eating, which, no doubt, would make a Kalahari bushman blanch.

Wild Rice Harvest—Mahnomen
8/23/07: Shoot 1
My father-in-law has insisted for years that I check out the White Earth ReDiscovery Center and do some wild rice harvesting, so it seemed a good place to start my journey. The center is where tribal elders pass on important ways of life to a generation removed from traditional pathways.

It took me all night to drive to Mahnomen, and after a short sleep, I drove to the center. The White Earth people believe that the Great Spirit brought them from the Northeastern United States to the place where the elders told them the “food grows on the waters.” Wild rice is a plant native to the Upper Midwest lakes region. Zizania Palustris is actually not rice, but a water-grass seed prized around the world for its singular nutty flavor.

I spent the morning on the water, gliding in a canoe (many a Minnesota lake has been stripped of its value by ignorant motorboaters) through the delicate shoots, knocking the seeds onto the floor of the canoe while my partner poled us along. The shoots may be accidentaly ripped out if they are tugged on, so the practice of knocking the seeds with long wooden sticks is purposely sloppy, allowing some of the harvest to fall back into the lake to reseed the rice bed. After an hour, we had a large pile of rice in the middle of the canoe, and we headed for shore.

We cured the rice by letting it air-dry, then we parched it by stirring it with a wooden paddle in a cast-iron kettle over an open fire, letting the stray grasses and the seed’s outermost skin harmlessly burn away. What remains is jigged, or threshed, by dancing on the seeds until the skin separates completely. Tossing the rice in the air allows the chaff to simply blow away.

We ate a wonderful meal, cooked at the water’s edge, among the birds and stunning scenery of the northern lake country. Griddled yearling deer, baked bannock bread, and the rice were a real treat, and, yes, we ate all of the deer—heart, liver, all of it. The strangest thing we ate was sucker-head soup—a bland potage made with a repulsive lake fish renowned for its fatty and cartilaginous body. The heads are the prize of each diner’s bowl—you chew, you suck, you spit out bones. No one said this job was easy.

Minnesota State Fair, St. Paul
8/30–31/07: Shoot 2
The fair offers up an environment rich with some of the world’s strangest foods, and some delicious irony. The foods I long for the most on trips overseas are judged in the 4-H animal buildings or born in the Miracle of Birth Center.

Madrid’s Casa Botin has built a 300-year-old reputation on baby pigs. If I were running the fair, there would be baby pigs, lambs, and chicks coming out of wood-burning ovens instead of sitting under heat lamps waiting for the unwashed hordes to snap a picture. Sounds tastier than a candy bar on a stick, don’t you think?

I settled for sharing corn dogs with my pal Marjorie Johnson and sampling the good (wild game brats at Giggles, deep-fried smelt), the bad (cola cheesecake, ostrich on a stick, spaghetti and meatballs on a stick), and the ugly (deep-fried Spam). There’s been a sad trend over the last decade of incorporating new fair foods simply because someone can put them on a stick. Sloppy Joe on a stick was one of the worst things I have ever eaten. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.

Ingebretsen’s and Olsen Fish Co., Minneapolis; Cozy Café, Cyrus
9/14–15/07: Shoots 3–5
I have lived in Minnesota for sixteen years but never tried lutefisk, and I thought it was high time I saw how the iconic food in these parts was made. I stopped by Ingebretsen’s on East Lake Street to find out where the Scandinavian icon gets its lutefisk and sampled some lamb jerky, blood sausage, and creamed cod roe.

Armed with insight, I ventured to Ingrebretsen’s source, Olsen Fish Co., to see how perfectly good dried cod is ruined by well-intentioned Norwegians the world over. Well, not really the world over, since more lutefisk is consumed here than in Norway. Olsen processes more of the stuff than possibly any other merchant on the planet and does the lion’s share of its business at Christmas. I have followed cod through the salting and drying process in about a half-dozen countries, and it was odd to see trucks unloading that same product at Olsen’s back door, but there it was.

The fish is hydrated in water, then rehydrated in a water and lye solution, then finally with water again to rid the fish of the caustic soda. As the cod is exposed to the lye, its protein makeup changes, and the fish not only swells and plumps to resemble its waterborne form, but changes consistency, taking on a jellylike texture. Hungry yet?

I wanted to try lutefisk in its terroir, which meant traveling to Cyrus, to the Cozy Café, a neighborhood diner that doubles as a senior center and puts on phenomenal suppers on fall Fridays—with lutefisk as the star of the show. There are only 303 residents in Cyrus (halfway between St. Cloud and the South Dakota border), but about 400 turned out for the meal, and we stuffed ourselves on “klubs” (potato dumplings), Swedish meatballs, and all those amazing Norwegian sweets handmade by dozens of country grandmas.

The lutefisk is poached, then served with butter or cream sauce, and paired with plenty of klubs and potatoes—nary a fresh herb in sight. The food has changed little in the 160 years since Norwegians and Swedes set sail on the North Sea headed for these prairies. I can tell you that at Cozy’s lutefisk is way more palatable than its reputation suggests, but the slimy texture is frightful in your mouth. Nevertheless, anyone who wants to enjoy great home-cooked fare and take in a real slice of small-town life should head to the Cozy and visit with proprietor Jean Anderson.

Lake Superior’s North Shore
9/17–18/07: Shoot 6
Next on my journey, I ventured north for the weekend to Grand Marais, stopping at Russ Kendall’s Smoke House for a snack of the best smoked herring and whitefish in Minnesota. I locked myself out of my car and had to be rescued, got a ticket for speeding after wrestling with a sauerkraut pie at Betty’s, and finally crawled into Grand Marais just before the kitchen closed at My Sister’s Place. While the pizza at Sven & Ole’s is overrated, I can assure you that My Sister’s Goober Burger is a singular experience—if you like peanut butter and mayo on your burger.

I crashed pretty hard and woke up before dawn for a fresh “skizzle” at World’s Best Donuts (definitely not overrated), one of the best doughnut shops I have visited. A skizzle is a large, flat, yeasty Frisbee of sugar-dusted dough hot from the fryer (they use lard); it stands out as one of the better sweet starts to a day I can recall.

Within an hour, I was on a herring boat in the middle of Lake Superior, hauling in fish by the bucketful. Sitting in a dead calm fog on a cold September morning was a surreal experience, but in Harley Toftey’s boat I was in good hands. After securing our catch, we filleted herring and squeezed roe for an hour, then retired to Dockside Fish Market for a shore lunch of fried herring, whitefish, herring roe, and strong coffee.

That afternoon, I headed down the shore to meet up with Shawn Perich, outdoorsman, author, and avid grouse hunter. Shawn and I spent the presunset hours in the woods, then stuffed ourselves silly on fresh moose, grouse, and blueberry slump. I have eaten dozens of game birds I can name, and many in Asian markets that I can’t, but if I had to eat just one, it would be freshly shot ruffed grouse—the most delicate, white-fleshed, clean-tasting bird I have dined on. Pan-searing a grouse breast takes only minutes. Minnesota is the ruffed grouse capitol of North America, and fall is the season to get out there and taste it yourself.

Heartland Restaurant, St. Paul
9/20/07: Shoot 7
American food philosophers are espousing sustainable tail-to-snout eating, wasting nothing, and respecting the homegrown aspects of food. Elsewhere in the world, people have been eating that way for millennia and never stopped, as we did in the last century. The irony is wicked, but in a few places in our state there are pockets of more-than-passing enthusiasm for this old philosophy.

Many chefs preach the life, but few really practice it. Lenny Russo is the real deal, and one day at his restaurant in St. Paul I saw just how much he walks the walk. Whole lambs and a wild boar were on their way into the kitchen the afternoon I arrived, and Lenny and his staff had them butchered and processed in less than an hour. All the glamorous cuts (loin, chops, shoulders, ribs) would star on most menus in town, but anyone can cook those. It takes real talent to pickle lamb’s tongue, braise pork belly, and sauté brains with lemon and brown butter. Poached sweetbreads, smoked and braised pig trotters, grilled kidneys, and sautéed liver (or all of the above ground into a forcemeat for a wickedly sturdy terrine) are everyday events at Heartland. Anyone hoping to sample something that departs from the same-old same-old would be well advised to check it out.

So what did I learn from Bizarre Minnnesota? Eating food that has a story makes it taste better. Eating food with a story that comes from where you live is personal. Food is something we can share every day, and the more we share our food stories with the rest of the world, the more we can focus on what we have in common, instead of what divides us.

Bizarre Foods—Minnesota will air on the Travel Channel in March.