SANDWICH LAB: The Lake Trout Situation

IN THE DELICATESSEN SCENE, NEVER SHAKING UP YOUR SANDWICH MENU IS CONSIDERED ESPECIALLY HEINOUS. AT NORTHERN WATERS SMOKEHAUS, THE DEDICATED DELI EMPLOYEES WHO INNOVATE ON THE SANDWICH MENU ARE MEMBERS OF AN ELITE SQUAD KNOWN AS THE SANDWICH LAB. THESE ARE THEIR STORIES:

Jacob’s Lake Trout Situation

Like a flavor flash-mob, this sandwich is incoming to shake up your everyday life. 

A minute ago the Smoked Lake Superior Lake Trout was hanging around some lemons and scallions, having an impassioned conversation; but the crispy Smoked Pancetta, wasabi mayo, cucumbers, cilantro and thin-sliced cabbage were just scrolling on their phones, minding their business. Next thing you know, the buttered, toasted, white bread shows up, and suddenly the courtyard (where I imagine this is all happening) comes alive, and onlookers are astounded as these seemingly separate entities come together in a meticulously choreographed song-and-dance.

Meticulously choreographed.

Yes, it has been choreographed, and meticulously. Abs are out and fists are pumping. This Situation of a sandwich required extensive development, but has turned into something quite special. Inspired by the Jersey Shore and classic New England Lobster rolls, with that particular NWS flair, this just might be the smoked lake trout sandwich we’ve been waiting our whole lives for.

Try it during the month of August, and receive not only a scintillating gustatory experience, but two stamps on your sandwich card. This is the cutting-edge of Smokehaus sandwiches. The Lake Trout Situation costs $10 + tax.

WHAT IS SANDWICH LAB?

AT NORTHERN WATERS SMOKEHAUS, OUR WORK IS PLAYING WITH FOOD. THAT MEANS SOMETIMES, IN THE LINE OF DUTY, WE STUMBLE UPON AN AMAZING COMBINATION OF INGREDIENTS THAT EVOLVES OVER SEVERAL SHIFT-MEALS INTO A NOTEWORTHY NEW SANDWICH. OTHER TIMES WE UNCOVER A MORE EFFICIENT WAY TO BUILD A SANDWICH, OR WE SWAP AN INGREDIENT ON A CURRENT MENU ITEM. SANDWICH LAB IS AN ANNUAL GATHERING OF OUR STAFF TO REFINE OUR SANDWICH-LINE SKILLS, TO COME TO AGREEMENT ON ANY CONTROVERSIES, AND—THE BEST PART—TO INTRODUCE OUR PET SANDWICHES TO THE GREATER SMOKEHAUS COMMUNITY.

NOTABLE SANDWICH LAB FINDINGS FROM PREVIOUS YEARS INCLUDE THE CEDARS’S SECRET, THE PURPLE RANGE, THE PHOEBE, AND THE PORK LION. LAST YEAR’S SANDWICH LAB HAD SO MANY GOOD SANDWICHES THAT WE COULDN’T DECIDE ON JUST ONE OR TWO TO ADD TO THE MENU, SO WE DECIDED TO GIVE THEM ALL A CHANCE TO SHINE, AS MONTH-LONG SPECIALS.

5 Things: August 2nd, 2019

Welcome back to 5 Things™. It's been a lovely week in town, with a handful of conferences at the DECC keeping our lunch rushes busy. If you find yourself with a bit of a wait for your lunch today (Friday), Jacob will be out on the patio selling beer. What better way to enjoy your pre-sandwich time than an ice-cold regional beer?

Now, to the Things™—

First of all, I am sorry that the first week of the Summer Scavenger Hunt ended so quickly. The first round lasted about four hours. I really thought the hiding spot—tucked behind foliage on a fence-post at the Observation Dog Park—was more difficult. This coming Monday (August 5th), I will do better.

This was a practice round.

We have a new wine in the deli. The late-Spring flavor of vinho verde is leaving our shelves to make room for Trollinger, a wine by Andi Knauss, a German winemaker associated with a collective of natural winemakers known as La Boutanche. Trollinger is a versatile table wine named after the grapes it's made of, which have moderate acidity and tend to produce light-bodied wines with strawberry, cherry, nutmeg, and smoky notes. It's available by the glass for $7 and by the (1 liter!) bottle for $42.

If you're into wine, you're definitely going to want to see the wine profile project our media team has been working on. Here are a few of the images they created:

As part of our ongoing cookbook project, we tested a few recipes at Wisconsin Point on Tuesday.

While the day began with some prep and packing of gear, things really got started once we hit the beach, when we dug a trench, found a couple of large-but-portable logs to mount our grates, and set driftwood ablaze en masse, until we had enough coals to shovel into the trench.

The first recipe was a grilled summer vegetable salad with a light soy sauce and mirin dressing. I'm talking about beautifully charred and caramelized kale, broccoli, zucchini, portobello mushrooms, summer squash, fennel, and sweet corn, tossed with a simple, high-impact dressing.

Coarse-chopped gremolata gave an herbaceous, citrus-infused flavor to the tender river trout meat.

Once the veggies were finished, we grilled a grip of Cedar Island Hatchery brown and rainbow trout, stuffed with a zesty coarse-chopped gremolata, and later topped with puréed gremolata, for aesthetic as well as flavor reasons.

Our hausmade sausages look fantastic cooked over a beach fire too.

Italian-style sausage, Classic German sausage, smoked Andouille sausage, and smoked Polish sausage—in concentrated powder form.

All of this cooking was done with a couple of simple grill grates, over coals from a fire made entirely of driftwood found at the beach. A few lessons solidified during this field trip—you don't need a ton of fancy equipment to make a high-caliber meal, and cooking is always better with good company.

The Fish Schtick enters its final weekend. Maybe it's just the time of the year, but the Fish Schtick has been selling like crazy. Combining the salty, smoky goodness of our Traditional Atlantic Salmon with sweet & tangy Cornichon pickles, tomato, lemon pepper, lettuce, and a swipe of mayo on a hausmade ciabatta, this sandwich is a flavor palette to reckon with, and people are loving it.

We've got a situation incoming. A Lake Trout Situation. Jacob's Lake Trout Situation, to be specific. Inspired by a New England Lobster Roll, this is the Sandwich Lab creation for the month of August.

Smoked Lake Superior Lake Trout salad, crispy Smoked Pancetta, cucumber, wasabi mayo, cilantro, and thin-sliced cabbage will come together and make a scene atop buttered and toasted hausmade white bread.

Like the Fish Schtick, and the other Sandwich Lab creations, this flavor bomb will also earn you two stamps on your sandwich card.

Me waking up from cookbook stress dreams.

That's the way the news goes this week. There's a whole bunch of events in-town this weekend, including the City on the Hill Music Festival, a biking festival, Spirit Valley Days, and the opening celebration for Casket Quarry Park in Spirit Valley. The forecast is looking great, with sunny days above 70-degrees all weekend. If you want your NWS fix, but feel like surpassing the line, place a pickup order (online, or over the phone at (218)724-7307 (ext. 1)) or catch us via delivery through Food Dudes or Bite Squad.

Next time you're in the area, please enjoy Flo's steady takeover of the wall space around and within our deli.

5 Things: July 26th, 2019

We had a big weekend (7/19-7/21), and we didn't run out of anything we planned on having in-stock.

That's all. We have evidently found our stride. As always, if you'd like to ensure we have what you're looking for, give us a call before you stop in @ (218)724-7307. You can even place a pick-up order, then skip the line when you arrive.

The D&D Summer Season.

While our epic, levels one-through-twenty—for the uninitiated, that is all the levels—campaign is on hold through the summer, it doesn't mean we haven't been rolling dice and speaking in funny voices. With new characters and varying levels of seriousness, we have taken to a ghostly sea as a cohort of debt collectors-become-zombie-hunters, taken up arms as an elite unit of kobolds to punish another group of kobolds for their crimes against the Dragon Queen, Tiamat—namely stealing magical artifacts from the Queen's hoard—by stealing powerful magical artifacts from the Queen's hoard, and a handful of other brief adventures to come, before we return to our dubious heroes' adventures in Waterdeep.

Good cheese weekend.

Taylor, our resident cheese connoisseur, announced at our morning meeting that this is a great weekend for cheese lovers at the Smokehaus. Primarily, it's the Comté (or Gruyère de Comté) that just arrived at our deli. The flavor of this semi-soft, unpasteurized cow's milk cheese from the Franche-Comté region of France is heavily influenced by the natural pastures and strenuous guidelines for a cheese to carry the name.

My personal favorite cheese that we've ever carried, Shepherd's Way's Sogn Tomme, will also be a regular fixture in our grab and go case until at least the end of summer. It's a buttery and crumbly sheep's milk cheese, with a slightly higher fat content, and it is too good for mere words when drizzled with local honey and decorated with a blueberry, if that sounds good, but slightly lacking, put that combo on top of a cracker and add a bite of smoked salmon to the mix.

A number of other great cheeses are in-stock as well, including Marieke Young Gouda and Carr Valley Apple Smoked Cheddar.

Our current cheese selection has even me, a lactose intolerant individual, drooling.

All Pints North this weekend.

More than 120 MN breweries gather at this enormous Bayfront Festival Park gathering each year, and attendees make their way through the offerings two ounces at a time. Lovers of beer travel hundreds of miles to attend this event (which is listed on the website as "Sold Out"), so expect a busy weekend in Canal Park and downtown, with ancillary events at local breweries and restaurants all weekend.

For more information about All Pints North, follow that hyperlink.

We'll be serving beer on our patio.

In honor of All Pints North, and our newly minted selection of adult beverages, Eric Goerdt himself will be slinging beers on our patio today (Friday) from noon until sometime after noon—weather permitting—to try to cater to the influx of beer enthusiasts and test out the viability of "refilling" beverages on the deck. Hopefully no one has to wait in a summer Smokehaus line just to grab another beer.

Next week on 5 Things™: It's August! Whoa! Where did the summer go?

5 Things: July 19th, 2019

We're in the dog days of summer—or we might not be—and life at NWS is heating up. Our first Thing™ offers an option for cooling down:

We've got White Claw!

I still haven't tried it*, but this low-calorie, gluten-free, slightly boozy seltzer water has become iconic of Summer 2019. One-hundred percent of planned beach expeditions I have attended this year have featured a cooler half full of White Claw cans. It's reported to be refreshing and taste quite good. I may or may not have "liked" a meme featuring a can of Hidden Valley Ranch White Claw this morning on the 'Gram.

We received our first shipment of Grapefruit White Claw this week. Lightly-flavored effervescent beverages (affectionately known as "day beers") are a longtime staple of life at NWS—a former deli manager once challenged herself to drink twelve cans of LaCroix in a shift, and the grapefruit and lime varieties of Topo Chico sparkling water have become a fast favorite for staff and patrons alike—so it follows quite naturally that our early forays into hard beverages would include what I am now exclusively calling "nighttime day beers" in my head.

*By the time this blog is posted, I may have consumed at least one can of White Claw.**

**Leif and I drank our first nighttime day beers together on the patio after work.

Heirloom tomato season is in full effect!

Every July, we purchase a beautiful bounty of locally-grown heirloom tomatoes from Hammarlund Nursery in Esko, MN. Ken Hammarlund himself brings us dozens of pounds of these delectable tomatoes in weekly increments when the season is in full-swing.

These 'matos are not only exceptional on the palate, but also come in beautiful colors—bright greens, yellows, and purples, and swirls of all three—so they are remarkably pleasant to prep for the day.

If you've ever been on-the-fence about sandwiches with tomatoes, July into the first few weeks of August is a great time to try them.

Waiting for your order on the patio is easier than ever!

We love our small storefront and our home in DeWitt-Seitz Marketplace, but it's not without its shortcomings. The hallway we share with Lake Avenue Café can become crowded whenever the sandwich queue is even a little backed up.

"Stick around. We'll call your name when your food is ready," was essentially the script. Those who wanted to establish themselves at a table on the patio were also given the annoying task of periodically sending an emissary inside to check on the status of their food.

But this has all changed now that we have added a public address system to our patio. We'll default to calling out names un-amplified in the deli, but if no one comes running, we'll double-down on the PA.

Grab that spot outside, catch some extra rays of sunshine, experience a bit of leisure while we make your order.

A little bit of Smokehaus lore.

Research and development for our first cookbook has provided a wellspring of insights into the growth of the Smokehaus. A bunch of these tidbits will make their way into the pages of the book, and some of them are going to pop into the 5 Things™ blog now and again.

During a rapid-fire meeting Tuesday morning on our patio, the topic of our salmon seasonings came up. Dill is a no-brainer when it comes to salmon, and a blend of black pepper and coriander bears a strong resemblance to another popular preparation of meat, but what of cajun seasoning?

Our cajun-seasoned smoked Atlantic salmon is a fairly popular item of its own, but unless you arrived at this web address accidentally and have no idea how you got here or how to navigate away from this page, you have probably heard of the Cajun Finn. The sandwich that outsells half of the rest of our menu. 40% of the sentence "I'll have a Cajun Finn," which is sometimes 40% of all words said by an individual ordering as part of a group.

Cajun-seasoned smoked salmon, it turns out, was an experiment with a current trend that ended up wildly successful.

Paraphrasing Eric: "People were putting cajun seasoning on everything, so we tried the same thing with smoked salmon, and people loved it."

That's a pretty wild innovation to just stumble into, and serendipitous. Who knows where the Smokehaus would be without the cult success of the Cajun Finn? I like to imagine the excellent quality of our food would have carried us to similar heights, but it's impossible to say.

Two new product features on our blog!

They put me to work this week—alongside work on the cookbook, a handful of press releases, and some updates of our online swag descriptions, I also whipped up a couple of posts about our selection of natural wines with suggested food pairings, and an often overlooked menu item, the fish basket. Since you're already here, think about checking them out.