How to Eat Like a Minnesotan (Don't Cha Know!)

There was a moment in the most recent season finale of the television version of Fargo that struck me. While a group gathers around a holiday table in modern Eden Prairie, someone remarks that they’ve forgotten the salad in the fridge. Ewan McGregor goes to get it, and when he opens the fridge door, for just a second, we are treated to a backlit shot of a ruby-red Jell-O dome. I guffawed and pondered: How many people understood that that was the salad he was sent to get? How many who were laughing with me across the country had ties to Minnesota?

We are the land of Betty Crocker and SPAM, and while some people think we all believe ketchup is a spice, plenty of others have eaten fresh fish from our lakes and artisan bread from our millers and know that food matters to us. Perhaps some of our food traditions in the Northland are weird, what with holiday fish cooked in lye and burgers with cheese on the inside, but they are ours. And cripes and criminy, we defend them. I sometimes wonder what the staff at the letters desk of The New York Times muttered under their breath when they fully realized the tenor and strength of our response to the paper’s 2014 assignation of grape salad as the iconic Minnesota Thanksgiving dish. What became known around here as #Grapegate elicited some 10,000 e-mails and comments to the Times, calling it out for its shoddy reporting and spurring multiple national news stories on the backlash. We may eat weird food, but gosh, at least get that weird food right. Though we did find out one thing: When you take the state that produces the most turkeys in the nation and operated the largest grain mill in the world for 60 years, and you smugly, blithely give it a wreck of a dish that no one will be eating at any Thanksgiving ever, that’s the actual end of Minnesota Nice.

As I think about this coming January, when a million or so people will descend on our fair state for the Super Bowl, I know some of them will be wondering what to eat in Minnesota. New York comedian Mo Rocca recently landed in Bemidji and tweeted out that exact query, and the responses from locals here and expatriated were what you’d think: hotdish, walleye, wild rice, Heggies pizza, and so on. And that’s when it hit me. While we see Minnesota food lists regularly pop up from Food Network, USA Today, and other national outlets, who better than we, the eaters, to really drill down on those Minnesota foods? It’s one thing to mention Lutheran binder as a regional colloquialism, it’s entirely another to have cranked open a can of cream of mushroom soup for the first hotdish you brought to the Homecoming potluck when you were 16 (guilty).

Food culture is, of course, a fluid thing that ebbs and flows with the influx of new humans who bring their own flavors and edible traditions to our tables. When this story is rewritten in 20 years, there will likely be the addition of pho and banh mi to the list, so woven have they become in our current eating landscape. This makes us happy, just as it does to see our current chefs looking back to the traditions of our past and finding a way to bring them into the future. To best set the path on where we’re going, it’s helpful to know where we’ve been, even if that means ketchup as a spice. See you around the booya.

Hotdish

First of all, it’s not hot dish—it’s hotdish, one word. That’s an important distinction, as there are plenty of hot dishes in town, but only hotdish can really call up the culinary warm blanket of the soul. In other towns it might be known as casserole, but let’s be clear: “Casserole” really just refers to the shallow baking dish, while hotdish is a meal and a means of comfort and survival. What we’re talking about here is a pan, preferably 9-by-13, bubbling with a hodgepodge of starch (noodles or potatoes), veggies (maybe green beans or peas), a bit of protein, and a binder. That binder, which holds it all together, is commonly cream of mushroom soup (also known as Lutheran binder), though the cream is more important than the mushroom in that equation. It’s all baked together, preferably topped with a crisp tater tot lid floating on the molten love, and usually served to you by nice ladies in a church basement, at a neighborhood potluck, or right into your hot little hands at the screen door because your hubby slipped on the icy driveway, throwing out his back, and well, jeez, you gotta eat. Hotdish is how we show love.

It’s so tied to our food identity that Senator Al Franken does a bang-up job of repping it at our nation’s capital, hosting an annual Hotdish Off in Washington, D.C., that is a coveted invite for political elites. In town, you’ll find plenty of hotdish gatherings, such as the Holland neighborhood’s annual Hotdish Revolution, which is going on 13 years strong and proudly displays a sea of accomplished pans and Pyrex. We even had a critically acclaimed restaurant known as HauteDish, which redefined the meal for a new generation, deconstructing it with gorgeous braised short ribs, snappy green beans, and potato croquettes in the shape of huge tots. Though that restaurant recently closed, it opened our hearts to the possibilities of the food from our past and spurred plenty of local cooks to take a look at what hotdish could be. Whatever you do, just don’t call it casserole.

Go Get:

A soul-satisfying classic version is being served in personal cast-iron skillets down in Eagan at Mason Jar. It’s so good and hearty that you’ll forgive them for calling it hot dish. themasonjar.us

Local Maker:

While you’re getting your hotdish protein hand-butchered for you at France 44 Cheese and Meat Shop, make sure you check the case for its housemade tots. Those beauties crisp up real nice under a broiler. france44.com

Next Gen:

Hmong chef Yia Vang grew up in the North and pulls from both sides of his culinary heritage by making a cross-cultural hotdish for his Union Kitchen pop-up dinners. Comfort AND spice, what a concept. unionkitchenmn.com

Jell-O Salad

In her 2008 book Perfection Salad, food historian Laura Shapiro traces the history of the more-perfect-than-Jell-O dish, Jell-O salad. Gelatin was once a labor-intensive product only rich people could afford, the food of kings, lords, and robber barons. But in the very early 1900s, the popular versions we know today, including Jell-O, were invented. Commoners could suddenly have the food of kings for a pittance! Yet somehow that was not enough—homemakers wanted something more, something fancier, you know, with Mandarin oranges and whipped topping. By the 1960s, Jell-O salads were such a fad there were multiple sections featuring them in the 1964 Joy of Cooking. Somewhere along the way, the rest of the country stopped caring about Jell-O salads, seduced as they were by green leaves and vinaigrette. Not us! Church basements and family tables remained a-jiggle and a-wiggle with festive towers and multi-hued bowls.

Local chefs have yet to bring Jell-O salad back into star position on dessert menus here, though we have seen it on at least one fancy menu in Chicago, at a place called Split-Rail. To our local chefs we say, grab your molds and bring it back! Perfection’s favorite salad has so many homegrown super-fans, you could take it to new modern levels with the drop of a marshmallow!

Go Get:

Izzy’s Jello Salad ice cream was first created for the Hamline Church Dining Hall at the Minnesota State Fair. This unforgettable concoction of lime Jell-O–flavored ice cream studded with bright red cranberry sauce bits and bright white mini-marshmallows is often available at both Izzy’s shops. izzysicecream.com

Local Maker:

Jell-O is made by Kraft Heinz, and there’s no getting around that, but why not add local marshmallows? North Mallow makes mallows with no high-fructose corn syrup, and its vanilla bean flavor dandies up any domed mold. northmallow.com

Next Gen:

What if a classic Jell-O salad was a cocktail? That’s the premise behind the festive and fluffy Salad Days cocktail at Can Can Wonderland, which lights it up with lemon, lime, cherry bark vanilla bitters, pineapple berry vodka, and sour cream liqueur. Trust us, it works. cancanwonderland.com

Ju(i)cy Lucy

We are not a danger-seeking lot as a rule, but one of our favorite and most iconic local foods is known to come with a very specific warning: “Hold on a sec, will ya?” It is she who is impatient, who bites too soon into a Ju(i)cy Lucy, who releases the molten core to dire effects. Usually scalding the face, often staining the shirt, but most definitely missing the beautiful and magical point of a cheese-stuffed cheeseburger: slow down and savor.

No one really knows who was the first to decide that cheese on a burger should go inside the meat instead of on, but the Lucy is basically two patties crimped around a stack of cheese, which is then griddled to become a meaty-cheesy Hot Pocket. The debate in town is our version of the Hatfields and McCoys, with Matt’s Bar and the 5-8 Club, both on Cedar Avenue, vying for local cred as the originator of the dish. At Matt’s, the Jucy Lucy has a thinner cheese flow, along with a loose commitment to spelling, while 5-8’s burger emits a more robust cheese lava. Both have their champions and detractors, but if you’re a loyalist to one, you likely won’t touch the other.

Originator status notwithstanding, the local Lucy fascination isn’t limited to Cedar Avenue. If you head across the river, you’ll find that The Nook’s version, known as The Juicy Nookie, doesn’t care about being first, it just cares about being best. St. Paulites tend to believe that this cheese-stuffed burger is a divine miracle (touched perchance by its proximity to the famous Cretin-Derham Hall Catholic school across the way?) that achieves the perfect balance of cheese-to-meat ratio while keeping the burger actually juicy and moist, a feat that takes skill when you have to cook it long enough to melt an inner dairy core. For many, the Nookie completes the triumvirate.

It seems crazy that it was only in 2008 that we were gifted with Blue Door Pub, which took the notion of a Juicy Lucy and turned it to 11. The small Merriam Park eatery offered a whole slew of cheese-stuffed burgers, planting a flag with its signature Blucy that shifted the inner cheese from orange to bleu with great success. What followed were lines, hour-long waits, more locations, and the permission to stuff your burger with all the goodness you could imagine. Just remember, whether you go classic or cutting-edge, give it a sec, hon.

Go Get:

We’re staking our claim: Matt’s Bar is where you should start your Jucy Lucy education. Get it with onions and order fries to snack on while you wait for your first bite (then dip those skinny taters in the cheesy gash once you do). mattsbar.com

Local Maker:

Chef-run local butchery Lowry Hill Meats makes custom Juicy Lucy patties for your cookouts, complete with farm-direct beef and melt-it-right housemade American cheese. lowryhillmeats.com

Next Gen:

Chef Vincent Francoual created what is surely the most decadent version with his Vincent Burger, stuffed with braised short ribs and smoked gouda cheese. Find that burger at one of the Cara Irish Pubs, where Francoual is now culinary director. carairishpubs.com

Booya

When people all over the country started exclaiming “booya” in a celebratory way, how many Minnesotans started looking around for soup? For us, booya denotes a special kind of “stone soup,” one that is usually made in a giant kettle at the local fire station for a community fundraiser. (Case in point: The booya at North St. Paul Fire Department has been running since the 1930s.) You see, it’s all about the gathering.

A booya is not only the soup itself, but the event: Come to our booya! The rich and hearty soup/stew is made to feed a mass of people, so it’s usually an easy-eating 40-gallon pot of slowly simmered on-bone meats, cabbage, carrots, celery, potatoes, rutabagas, corn, green beans, whole tomatoes, and tons of herbs and spices subjective to the lead cook. It’s usually cooked overnight, preferably over a wood fire, and the good smells coming off that kettle are enough to draw anyone in, especially on a crisp, flannel-decked Minnesota autumn day when booyas can be found at VFWs and American Legions. Get in line, for despite the vast quantities, some booyas sell out in an hour. The meaning of the name, meanwhile, is up for debate. Some think it is a derivation of the French word bouillir, meaning to boil or bouillon for broth, but most believe the soup/stew is somewhat Belgian in origin. Over in Green Bay, Wisconsin, they spell it booyah, but we wouldn’t kick them out of the VFW parking lot for that.

Go Get:

The Booya World Championship will be held this year on October 7 in South St. Paul at the On the Road Again Fall Festival. 

Local Maker:

You can buy over-fire kettles at Frattallone’s Ace Hardware around the metro, or you can rent one of the 12 kettles, ranging from 40 to 80 gallons, available at the dedicated booya building in Casey Lake Park. frattallones.com

Next Gen:

Obb’s Bar is not exactly next-generation, but it happily carries on the booya tradition every October with a new recipe. This year the booya starts at noon on October 1 and runs until the soup is gone (which might be sooner than you think). obbsbar.com

Bars

Here’s an apology: Most of us grew up eating bars at every picnic and holiday party, and we didn’t realize everyone else in the country wasn’t. We would have shared— that’s kind of the beauty of bars. There’s always an extra pan somewhere, lurking on a sideboard, and as good Minnesotans, we always leave the last bite for someone else.

A bar isn’t a cookie, but it’s also not cake. Bars are made in a rectangular pan and then cut into squares. We all feel like a brownie could be part of a bar, but in our hearts we know it’s just cake keeping a low profile. There are Scotcheroos, Goody Bars, and Dream Bars, all of which might have varied recipes depending on which mom reigned supreme at your school bake sale. They can be fruity—lemon bars and rhubarb bars are like tablecloth anchors—or they can be peanut butter-and cereal-based as long as there’s a thick layer of melted chocolate over the top. Some bars are baked, but most are mixed and assembled, as one does when you remember you need to bring a dish to share and you’re already running behind. Oh, you bet. Bars make up for anything you might lack.

Go Get:

The Scotcheroos/Snoopy Bars at Sarah Jane’s Bakery in Northeast are the classic layered cereal/peanut butter/chocolate bars you’ll remember from that lock-in with the Lutheran youth group. sarahjanesbakery.com

Local Maker:

For a grab ’n’ go tray of seven-layer bars that will kick the pants off of any supermarket cookie tray, call ahead to Keys Café & Bakery; they’ll set you up. keyscafe.com

Next Gen:

Yum! Kitchen and Bakery makes a Special Yum! Bar that pulls all the nostalgia notes of a classic bar, but it’s HUGE and uses the best chocolate and highest-quality ingredients to lift that first bite past memory and into revelation. yumkitchen.com

Sweet Corn

Brad Ribar is one of the Minnesota sweet corn kings. He founded the iconic State Fair corn roast booth in 1985 and now sells nearly a quarter of a million ears of roasted corn every year. There’s no better witness to the obsession with sweet corn, as his goal is to provide bushels and bushels of hot ears to hungry fair-goers at the tail end of their summer fun. Is there anything more Minnesotan than standing at the corner where Dan Patch Avenue curves into Nelson Street with thousands of other locals as they all pause to inhale hot buttery kernels, too enthralled to care about the charred husks heating their grips?

We wait all season, eyeballing the fields to make sure the corn is knee high by the 4th of July. It’s like our last golden hurrah before we relegate our diets to pot roast and potatoes. Plus, it’s like dessert in vegetable form. “About 15 years ago, we started getting a lot more of what’s called super-sweet,” says Ribar. Back in the day, sweet corn contained about 15 percent sugar, but today’s super-sweets will typically measure in at 25 to 35 percent sugar. These new super-sweet varieties lend themselves better to roasting, because the sugar can caramelize, and to cooking more complicated dishes like sweet corn ice cream, because now we get corn’s sweetness without the duller starch. All of this is to say that local chefs have found a new versatility with sweet corn that maybe our grandparents wouldn’t have. Which is why, come August and September, you’ll see sweet corn gremolata, sweet corn fritters, and sweet corn chowder on menus all around town, as if someone is handing out gold coins.

Guess which state is the number-one producer of sweet corn in the country? Go ahead and raise your butter-streaked hand and maybe suck a kernel or two from your teeth before answering: us. We’re all sweet corn kings here.

Go Get:

Sweet Science Ice Cream infuses organic sweet-cream with sweet corn, then adds a fresh blueberry compote—it’s high summer, captured and frozen. sweetscienceicecream.com

Local Maker:

Untiedt’s supplies Ribar’s State Fair booth, and in season it’ll supply you too—the roaster, the corn, the whole shebang. untiedtswegrowforyou.com/rent-a-corn-roaster

Next Gen:

Steven Brown’s Tilia and St. Genevieve have had sweet corn pickles, sweet corn ravioli, sweet corn hash, and sweet corn coconut chipotle soup—among others. “If I could die in August, I’d have my last meal be chanterelles and sweet corn,” says Brown. tiliampls.com, stgmpls.com

Lefse

If you’re not from here, the dish that might be most foreign to you could be the simplest. Thomas Kim, chef and owner of TheRabbit Hole, grew up in a Korean family in California and Hawaii and knew nothing of lefse—until he followed his bride, Kat Melgaard, to her Norwegian family home on a farm in North Dakota.  

“The first time I heard the word ‘lefse,’ it was: ‘Is Aunt So-and-So making the lefse?’ ‘No, Aunt So-and-So is making it.’ And it was all very urgent, like the first thing you do for any holiday is figure out who’s making the lefse,” recalls Kim. “I had to ask Kat: ‘What’s lefse?’ She said, ‘Think of it like a tortilla made of potatoes. It’s really good.’ Then I tried it. The flavor profile is really amazing. That earthy, roasted baked potato flavor, I just love it. If you look into the recipes, you find how wildly different all the recipes are. Some people swear you have to use russet potatoes, some people say buttermilk, some say heavy cream, with butter.” Kim soon found that the best lefse was in fact the family recipe, using sour cream and buttermilk in the Melgaard way.

Whether you roll with just butter or mix butter and sugar in your lefse, you know that it’s a well-earned treat. “It is legitimately backbreaking!” says Kim, who is taking on the tradition so that the older generation gets a break. “I don’t know if I could handle it more than once or twice a year, but I want my daughter, who is 3, to know what it is and how it rolls. The tradition and history of lefse, the importance to the family. Lefse forever,” laughs Kim. He says he wants to experiment with scallion lefse in his global street food eatery. What would traditional Norwegian lefse makers think about that? He’ll no doubt hear the unvarnished truth back on the farm, this and every Christmas hereafter.

Go Get:

Since 1921, Ingebretsen’s has been the core of the Scandinavian food scene in the Twin Cities, and thus lefse central. The main market offers the cities’ largest selection of both, as well as lefse classes for those who want to make their own. Go to the Ingebretsen’s Kaffe Bar in Norway House to get lefse served to you with lingonberries. ingebretsens.com

Local Maker:

Jacobs Lefse Bakeri in Osakis will FedEx you lefse anywhere in the country—or just send the mix and instructions if you’ve got the skills. gotlefse.com

Next Gen:

When Tullibee changed chefs, they had to keep the lefse on the menu, such a draw it became for diners. Paired smartly with chicken liver and pearl onions, it’s a worthy 2.0 treat. hewinghotel.com

Iron Range Porketta

Italian porchetta is credited to Emperor Nero, who fed Roman troops in his opulent style with young pigs roasted with wild fennel and garlic. Iron Range porketta is different, and it’s not just the regional phonetic spelling. It’s what iron miners in northern Minnesota developed in towns like Hibbing and Virginia during the particular cultural cross-pollination of immigration before World War II, when Finns, Italians, Czechs, and the Cornish all traded recipes and came up with a Crock-Pot–perfect version of a pork shoulder rolled with fennel seeds and garlic, cooked till it’s fall-apart perfect—no warm Italian countryside required. 

Terzo in south Minneapolis perfectly splits the difference between the two traditions. The restaurant owned by the Broder family has a daytime porchetta take-out window, inspired half by the Iron Range and half by Italy. “Growing up, our family had dear friends who lived in Virginia,” explains Charlie Broder. “It was a rustic lake cabin, like cabins used to be. With an outhouse. We’d spend all day on the lake fishing, just doing lake stuff. And we’d get porketta from Fraboni’s. Such great memories. Such great sandwiches.” Later, Thomas Broder, Terzo’s chef, trained in Italy, where he grew fascinated with different Italian versions. Terzo debuted their own hybrid in 2014, wrapped in pork belly for crisp goodness, like they do in Italy, but pulled together long before service so that the flavors blend pulled-pork style, as they do up north. The resulting porky goodness forms the basis for several of the best sandwiches in the Twin Cities. The one with grilled rapini and housemade giardiniera is more Italian, twining bitter charred green flavors through the porky depths, while the Calabrian feels more Iron Range, with a fancy mayo and crunchy slaw taking it in a more traditional tailgate direction. Terzo’s porchetta is available by the pound, in case you want to skip the turkey and turn Thanksgiving into your own kind of legend fit for a Roman emperor. terzompls.com/porchetteria

Go Get:

It’s been 104 years since Guilio Forti opened Sunrise Bakery on the Iron Range, but only two years since its sister spot opened on Grand Avenue. Stay in town and get a porketta sandwich just like Hibbing’s. sunrisemarketcafe.com

Local Maker:  

Fraboni’s, the Hibbing butcher shop, will mail-order real Iron Range porketta right to your door; throw one in your Crock-Pot for the best-smelling house in town. frabonis.com

Next Gen:

Herbivorous Butcher, our favorite plant-based non-meat shop, makes a porchetta now and then. How? It’s a secret vegan recipe! theherbivorousbutcher.com

Spam

Whether you’re a fan of the canned ham or not, you can’t deny that SPAM saved the world. During World War II, that humble little bit of tinned meat was one of the things our soldiers could count on, with 100 million pounds of SPAM being shipped to American and allied fighters all over the globe. Not bad for six ingredients mashed together in Austin, Minnesota.

SPAM is the ultimate high-low experience, dancing the fine line between being a kitschy joke and a delicious snack. Come on, even the name can’t take itself too seriously—the brother of a Hormel exec blurted it out during a New Year’s Eve party, and it stuck. During economic hardship, SPAM was a central part in many a hotdish, providing protein at a value. In better times, SPAM is a nostalgic plaything, courting an ironic place on cheffy menus with SPAM tots and SPAM ’n’ eggs breakfast sandwiches for the brunch set. Truth is, locals don’t revere it as much as the rest of the world—the biggest SPAM Festival takes place in Hawaii and the Japanese SPAM mascot is a YouTube sensation. But we’re still hometown-proud and not above sneaking a 2 am griddled SPAMwich when we think no one is looking.

Go Get:

The secret off-menu SPAM sandwich at Culver’s in Austin. For $2.99 you get a perfectly griddled SPAM hunk on a bun with cheese, lettuce, tomato, and mayo. culvers.com

Local Maker:

Get thee a tour of the SPAM museum and learn all about its place in history. BONUS: The gift shop has global flavors that aren’t available anywhere else in the U.S. spam.com

Next Gen:

There’s a special treat at United Noodles’ Unideli called SPAM musubi, which is as close to SPAM sushi as you’ll get. The snack, seared SPAM with rice topped with Worcestershire-eel sauce and kimchi furikake, is not only a revered dish in Hawaii, but it’s darn good in Longfellow. unitednoodles.com/unideli

Wild Rice

Spiritually and economically, wild rice has always been a keystone of local Native life. The traditions of the Anishinaabe hold that more than a thousand years ago, prophets were told they would find their promised land by journeying to the place where “food grows on water.” It’s been a Minnesotan staple, if not the Minnesotan staple, ever since. Everyone once seemed to know the rules about harvesting what is essentially a grass seed: You do it by hand and make sure enough falls back into the water to reseed for next year. Everyone once seemed to know the rules for cooking it, too: Pay extra for the good stuff from local lakes, preferably from a driveway stand by a cabin up north, and then show it off in hearty soup. But is this staple fading with the older generations?

Maybe not, with the help of people like Sean Sherman. “I’ve carried it all over the world with me,” says the Native American chef, whose cookbook, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, is out this month. “I’ve taken it to India, I’ve given it to René Redzepi at Noma, I gave some to Alex Atala from Brazil. It’s so unique, but people in Minnesota are really the only people who understand. There’s so much diversity in wild rice; each lake produces slightly different wild rice when you compare the hand-harvested varieties. Spirit Lake versus Red Lake, Leech Lake versus Bad River in Wisconsin, you’ll see light yellows, oranges, browns, and even some red. There are some people who know their wild rice so well they can identify what region rice is from just from looking at a bag of it.” Sherman is launching a nonprofit this year, NATIFS, which stands for North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, as one part of many initiatives he’s involved with so that a new generation of Minnesotans will be able to tell their Leech Lake wild rice from their White Earth Lake wild rice—and make the soup that has defined this region for more than a thousand years.

Go Get:  

Lunds & Byerlys makes classic wild rice soup with ham, the one you’d see in the encyclopedia if it had a picture illustrating the essence of wild rice soup. In fact, Lunds & Byerlys currently sells more than 350,000 pounds a year. lundsandbyerlys.com

Local Maker:

White Earth Wild Rice sells hand-harvested wild rice from the White Earth Nation in northern Minnesota. Open a bag and you’ll find it’s the caviar of wild rice: light, clean, mineral, with a scent of morning wind over the clean lake. realwildrice.com

Next Gen:

The Minneapolis American Indian Center is the hub of the country’s biggest urban Native community. At its core is Gatherings Café, offering healthy food and providing culinary training to Native Americans who want to cook using Native ideals and products. At lunch it offers two great takes on wild rice, a cold salad with sweet notes of maple and cranberry or a savory hot bowl with kale and a crunchy seed brittle. maicnet.org/gatherings-cafe

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Minnesota Food by the Numbers

1 Rank nationally in sugar beet, sweet corn, and green pea production.

45 million turkeys raised annually by MN family farms, making them the top growers in the nation.

157 Years the Schell’s family has been brewing beer in New Ulm, making them the second oldest family brewery in the U.S.

1949 marked the first year of the Pillsbury Bake-Off, whose grand prize of $50,000 was handed to Theodora Smafield by Eleanor Roosevelt.

2,250 Average cookies made per minute by Sweet Martha’s during the MN State Fair.

10,000+ The number of the souls who came to drink beer outside in January at the 2016 Beer Dabbler Winter Carnival.

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From Minnesota Kitchens to the World

National food icons that are Minnesota proud. 

• Jennie-O Turkey
• Malt-O-Meal
• Nut Goodie
• Cheerios
• Bundt Cake
• Totino's Pizza Rolls
• Land O'Lakes
• Caribou Coffee

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Love Thy Neighbor 

Why Wisconsin is the best border buddy.

• Cheese Curds
• Cranberries
• Beer Brats
• Broasted Chicken
• Brandy Old Fashioneds
• Friday Fish Fry and Fish Boils
• Cream Puffs
• Door County Cherries