Welcome to our collection of recipes, lore, and favorite stories from all of us at the Smokehaus. We hope you find something interesting and useful to add to your food journey.
One of our simplest offerings is also our most impressive. The Northern Bagel is a showcase of our "traditional" smoked Atlantic salmon. Our Haus-made scallion cream cheese is the perfect counterpoint for the sweet and slightly salty salmon, and the toasted bagel is a perfect delivery device. Our second best seller after the untouchable Cajun Finn. This is possibly the best way to experience our smoked salmon.
Traditional smoked salmon from the deli.
Beginning Monday, January 30th 2023, we’re adding three brand new sandwiches to our menu, moving a couple of sandwiches to the Secret Menu, and making a small improvement to a Smokehaus classic! By the conclusion of this blog post, we hope you’ll be thoroughly informed of these updates. The Secret Menu sandwiches aren’t going away entirely, they’re just going to be hidden, and at the end of this blog post, we’ll provide instructions for how to find them.
Blog post too long? Don’t feel like reading? Here’s a quick breakdown of key sections:
New Sandwich Introductions: The Club-Mariner, mmMmm, and The Sunday Sushi
Sandwich Update: The Gorilla
Menu reconfigurations/Secret Menu: Big Dipper/Squealy Dan, The ‘06/The Phoebe
Onward to new sandwiches!
Back in November, we held our occasional Sandwich Lab training and menu development session. Six members of our staff each submitted a sandwich for peer review, and of those six contenders, the three highest rated sandwiches—based on Taste, Use of Ingredients, how the sandwich Highlights NWS, and the sandwich’s Feasibility—earned a spot on our menu: The Club-Mariner, mmMmm, and The Sunday Sushi.
A club sandwich like you’ve never seen before! An homage to the Golden Age of comic books in what may be the Golden Age of sandwiches!
The Club-Mariner combines the flavor of land and sea, featuring the opulent pairing of Traditional Smoked Atlantic Salmon and crispy Smoked Pancetta, dressed with sweet hausmade quick pickles, lettuce, and a kiss of wasabi mayo on two slices of toasted white bread.
The Club-Mariner was the highest-rated sandwich at Sandwich Lab, and was developed by our in-haus graphic designer, newsletter writer, social media coordinator, and all-around cool dude, Zac.
(stylized as “mmMmm”)
If you’re wondering how to pronounce the name of this sandwich, just imagine yourself taking the first bite: Maple-sage Smoked Turkey, massaged with Sriracha & Hoisin, then toasted, sits atop a mayo-spackled hero roll, and is further dressed with thinly-sliced cabbage, red onion, pickled ginger, and cilantro. The sweet and spicy flavors dance on your taste buds, as the wave of umami pulses to a rhythm only you can feel. You can’t help but to proclaim, almost in song*, “mmMmm!” You might’ve wanted to say more, but your mouth is full and you do not want to rush this bite.
Deli manager and chief goofball Leif developed and pitched mmMmm to the Lab.
*That’s a glissando’d octave up and down of B, for any readers with perfect pitch, or any sort of musical background. Trust us, we tested it.
Another umami-bomb joins our menu, especially tailored to the “not too spicy” crowd! The Sunday Sushi doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s the first time a sandwich of its sort has appeared on our menu. The Sunday Sushi takes a classic Midwestern hors d'oeuvre, oftentimes nicknamed “Lutheran Sushi”, as its influence—savory sliced Smoked Berkshire Ham, brushed with scallion cream cheese, and wrapped around a dill pickle spear—deconstructs it, adds sliced cabbage, and puts it on a hero roll. This combination has graced many a Smokehaus sample tray and employee snack session, and now it’s available for your everyday nutritional needs!
Michael, our Mail Order Director and in-haus music festival aficionado, finally codified The Sunday Sushi into sandwich law before the council.
When Eric Goerdt speaks, we listen. And not just because he’s our boss, but also because he’s a rare intellect, a wellspring of knowledge and insight about food and life. So, when Eric said “The Gorilla should have pickles,” we listened.
Henceforth, dear reader, The Gorilla will include sliced dill pickles as a base ingredient!
In order to make room on our paper menus for The Club-Mariner, mmMmm, and The Sunday Sushi, we’ve folded two of our sandwiches into similar offerings. Say (sort of) goodbye to The Squealy Dan and The Phoebe! Before we explain the changes, please know that over the phone and at our ordering window, you’ll still be able to order both of these sandwiches by their original names! The changes will mostly affect your online ordering experience, or a newcomer’s navigation of our paper menus. We understand that this may cause some minor headaches, but rest assured, our staff is prepared to help you navigate the reconfigured menu.
The Squealy Dan aka The Ol’ Standby aka The Smokehaus Staff’s Favorite Morale Sandwich bears such a strong resemblance to The Big Dipper that it’s only natural to combine them.
•The (new) Big Dipper has meat options: choose from Porketta, Smoked Pork Loin, or dry-cured Salami Mix.
•The (new) Big Dipper still comes with zesty three-pepper dipping sauce. This is an improvement over The (old) Squealy Dan, which notably did not include dipping sauce.
How to make your Big Dipper a classic Squealy Dan: choose Smoked Pork Loin or dry-cured Salami Mix as your meat, hold the green olives, and add black pepper.
The Phoebe is a Smokehaus spin on the classic deli sandwich known as a Rachel, which is itself a variant of the classic deli sandwich known as a Rueben. The Smokehaus spin on a Rueben is called The ’06.
The official changes to The ’06 are as follows:
•Meat options: Smoked Bison Pastrami, Corned Bison, or Maple-sage Smoked Turkey Breast.
•Cabbage medley options: hausmade Sauerkraut or hausmade Kimchi.
•Cheese options: Swiss cheese becomes the default. Cheddar cheese or provolone cheese are available as substitutions.
How to make your ’06 a classic Phoebe: choose Maple-sage Smoked Turkey Breast as your meat, select Kimchi, and substitute cheddar cheese.
We appreciate your patience and adaptability as we enact these changes to our menu, and we’re excited to get these new sandwiches out of your thoughts and into your hands, mouths, stomachs, and hearts!
For all the years leading up to my time at the Smokehaus, I ate the Cajun Finn. Exclusively. My only deviation was if I was lucky enough to show up on Taco Tuesday. Once I started working here, I knew I needed to explore the very expansive menu for no other reason than product knowledge. While doing research under the cloak of product testing, I learned what I've always known: we make some ridiculously good food. If you’ve ever come to the deli and asked the person working what their favorite sandwich is and saw them hesitate, hmm and haw... it’s for good reason. There’s much to choose from and rarely is it a bad choice. While I still love The Finn, I have yet to go wrong deviating from my old standby.
I took an informal poll of some staff (okay, I drug them aside and demanded an answer), veteran and new-ish and everything in-between. Here are the results:
Nic P: "Italiensk. I love it because it features our salamundos (large diameter salamis) and the mortadella which are some of my favorite products we make here."
Cho: “Probably The ‘06 because I really like our bison pastrami. Our meats are so quality and you can really taste it in the pastrami. And who doesn’t love a toasty sandwich?"
Tyler: “The ‘06 or a Phoebe for a good food coma. If I need to go light: Sitka Sushi for the win. Or, a pizza on a naan”. Author’s notes: I had to inform Tyler that pizza, indeed, is not on our menu. No, really, we can't make you a pizza.
Emma: “Spring Roll on a Square (vegan mode!). I love the pickled veg, it has such a unique flavor profile. The almonds? DEVINE. So good! They give it the crunch. God bless Patricia.” Author's Note: Our Spring Roll used to be served on a Naan (thus, the "roll") but moving forward it will be served on a square ciabatta which makes this solid vegetarian option a vegan sandwich too!
Cal: "D-Luxxx with Turkey. Always the turkey. Or, a Cold Turkey or, a Cedar's Secret. The turkey is so good." Author's note: Cal's been working here since he's been in the womb. So if he says the turkey's good, it's good.
Nicholas Matthew Ruszat Klee: “For years I’ve ordered the Cold Turkey, now I make the Cold Turkey, thus the circle of life continues.” When asked what he would do if we were out of Crayo, a critical ingredient in this second best selling sandwich, Nick responded, mournfully, that he “would simply weep”.
Taylor P: "Big Dipper. The porketta here is so good and it feels like the regional favorite that I grew up eating is less common. Plus, people generally wouldn't think of making a sandwich with this as the key ingredient."
Brian: "Hedonist or Bahn Faux Mi. Both feature the country pâté which has such a great, complex flavor. I see people who have worked here for a very long time regularly eat the country pâté which is an indicator that a product is good and has lasting power."
Justin: "Bahn Faux Mi." Author's notes: Justin is a man of few words.
Ben: "I worked in the pizza industry for a long time. When I go to a place that specializes in pizza, I get the most basic thing they have, a cheese pizza. If their crust and their sauce aren't great, their pizza won't be great. So here, I would recommend some of our most basic sandwiches like the The Northern Bagel with Smoked Salmon or Gravlax. You'll get to taste what we do best and guaranteed, it will be delicious."
These days, it’s not uncommon for any of us to reflect on the past year and be wide-eyed and possibly fatigued at how much has changed in our worlds. The past year at Northern Waters certainly wasn’t anything we could have anticipated nor did we have a map to navigate what would come to be a new way of doing business for the foreseeable future. On March 11, we shut our doors to in-deli customers but remained open for pickup and delivery orders. “It was the slow season”, we said. “We’ll be okay”, we said. “We’ll make it work.” While our internal affirming statements came true, we really had no idea what was in store and the challenges we would collectively overcome.
“The business coming in, it’s not going to last,” we said, as people stayed home and we watched our favorite eating establishments forced to close up. We were so wrong. Suddenly it was summer. And it lasted. And it lasted and it lasted some more. Our customers all showed up by supporting our business with local pickups for our smoked salmon or deliveries of sandwiches to new home offices and socially-distant cubicles.
Meanwhile up on the third floor, our usually-sleepy-in-spring mail order department started looking more like the holiday season. Boxes of smoked goodness lined our hallways waiting for the big brown truck to come. Was this December all over again? What is happening?
We adapted by the second. We expanded our delivery zones. Our HR manager and owner would run deliveries. The culinary crew in the smokehuas proper would grab a delivery going to Gary or Deep Congdon. We juggled the phones and the online orders. The response from our customers was incredible.
The small eating area inside our deli transformed into a staging area for pickups and deliveries in March of 2020. Photo courtesy of Derek Montgomery Photography
We tried to plan for the time being only to discover we needed to tweak the plan. And then make a new plan. And then another. And maybe some more adjustments here… or there. And suddenly we are over a year into life in a pandemic world. And guess what? We are still adapting. It’s not a reflection of our inability to commit, rather, learning from all of our customers on the best way to deliver our products and quality service. The Smokehaus is a place of a constant effort to get it right.
I write this post with much gratitude for all our customers who helped keep The Smokehaus open for business. I would be remiss if I also didn’t acknowledge the incredible group of people I get to work with everyday. They took on the challenges in such admirable, whatever-it-takes attitudes. It was remarkable.
There have been times over the last year where I would pause and wonder what the magic was that helped us come together to accomplish what we have this past year. A lifelong student of studying team and workplace cultures, it was fascinating. Some of my coworkers nerd out about music, some over fishing, some over food. I nerd out about what makes people come together to do remarkable things. We have great people with great character that work here. They are people committed to their craft and each other. But we have something a lot of places don't: Eric Goerdt.
Eric, our founder and owner, is responsible for this magic. He is the secret sauce. He brings a relentless level of energy and positivity to each department-- every. single.day. It is difficult for me to eloquently describe Eric's effect on this business and after trashing five paragraphs trying to describe this, I realized someone much more skilled with pen and paper has already done so. Steve Hoffman wrote a piece on The Smokehaus back in 2018 for The Growler. He says:
In Eric Goerdt’s vision, we live in a world where it is possible for a tiny deli counter, with next to no seating, in a mixed-use warehouse building in Duluth, to sell enough carefully made, world-class salumi, smoked fish, and cured meats each year to reliably employ 43 Minnesotans on an ongoing basis. All it takes is virtue.
What that virtue consists of, in Eric’s case, is a relentlessly cheerful insistence that employees be treated well, so that they are content in their jobs, so that, in turn, they stay around long enough to become knowledgeable, so that they will take informed and attentive care of their customers. As a result, those customers keep coming back, because they never get a single hint from the other side of the counter of rote, fast-food sullenness.
Eric Goerdt (right) and employee Steve Mann (left) decide on what orders they were going to be delivering Wednesday, March 18, 2020 in Duluth, Minn. as our regular dining area was converted to a space to organize delivery and carryout orders. The previous day, on orders from governor Tim Walz, all restaurants were ordered to cease dine-in services as part of efforts to combat the spread of the coronavirus. Immediately, Northern Waters Smokehaus owner Eric Goerdt went to work on a new business model to reflect the new reality facing the business with the goal of continuing to employ every worker who would normally be working. Photo courtesy of Derek Montgomery Photography.
As we prepare for the busy summer season ahead, we know we are not past the challenges we've faced this past year. If we've learned anything, we know there will be more. But we know that we have a crew of people ready to find ways to make sure you can still experience The Smokehaus with the same enthusiasm and attention that you received when you used to be able to walk through our front doors and gaze into our deli cases full of products we are so proud of--- because behind all of us is a guy named Eric who humbly and enthusiastically gives us the best of himself everyday.