The ultimate farm-fresh dining
Wisconsin women farmers make their marks with on-site cafés
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says about one-third of all Wisconsin farmers are women, and their work sometimes dispels preconceived notions about farm-totable dining. ❚ Popping up throughout the state are farm-based cafés that are yards, not miles, from where food is grown. On the plate are down-home recipes seasoned with ingenuity. ❚ Settings vary greatly. So do farm size and menus. ❚ Think no-fuss to country-chic décor. Thousands of acres to compact greenhouses. Comfort foods to gourmet fare. ❚ Consider this diverse quartet of cafés, for starters. Each serves breakfast and lunch, but check business hours before you plan a visit.
Farmstead Creamery and Café
Sawyer County
The owners of North Star Homestead Farm are sisters, ages 33 and 30, whose work on the edge of Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest is about growing community as well as agricultural products.
Farmers Laura and Kara Berlage use an aquaponics greenhouse to raise fish, herbs and veggies indoors all year. Outdoors are orchards, berries and livestock: sheep, poultry (chickens, turkeys, ducks) and KuneKune pigs (smaller than the average hog).
Meals at North Star’s cafe, open since 2012 in a converted barn, go beyond the basics, too. Puffy, oven-baked crepes are a breakfast special on Sundays, filled with sweet or savory fare. On a gyro platter is lamb, chevre-style cheese, pickled onions and shredded kohlrabi — all from the farm.
The farmers are cheesemakers and canners. Breads and bakery are made with einkorn (the world’s oldest wheat) and other ancient grains. Gelatos are made from sheep’s milk.
“People really need to taste the difference that local and sustainable foods make,” Laura says, to explain why the café and a gift shop (selling locally produced food plus gifts) were added. Their niche is the foodie and those with dietary restrictions.
The farm is 18 miles east of Hayward.
“Because we are so far away, we have to have more than one reason” for visitors to make the trip,” Laura says. So they arrange art, music and other “enrichment opportunities” throughout the year.
At this time of year, that means open-mic nights on Thursdays, needle felting on Fridays, one monthly gathering for writers and another for Celtic musicians.
Choices for pizza, baked Thursday and Saturday nights on a woodfired oven outdoors, might include a combo of peaches, sheep cheese and heritage pork. Fridays are chef Kara’s multicourse farm-to-table dinners for 24 guests. Why here? Loggers cleared these 100 acres of white pines long ago. The farmers’ grandparents, Chuck and Vel Steidinger, bought the acreage in the 1960s.
The sisters in 1999 moved here with their mother, physician Ann Berlage. What began as an Erdkinder exercise — a Montessori term for enriching adolescence through an appreciation for the Earth — was an immersion in rural living that turned into a multidisciplinary vocation.
Laura says she wants others to see the farm “as a refuge and home for what is good, positive, refreshing and restorative,” a place to feel “renewed and inspired.”
On the web: northstar homestead.com
Gramma Miller’s Market and Café
Waushara County The outside could be mistaken for a garden nursery, awash with flower baskets, but inside it feels like a ladylike tearoom.
On each dining table is a crocheted or other type of vintage covering. At each place setting is a matching cup with saucer and linen napkin in a fancy holder, but each table’s holders and china are a charming mismatch.
Interstate 39 separates Hancock, population 400, from Gramma’s, whose farm is “just around the corner,” says café manager Linda Breseman. Café co-owner Michelle Miller-Patterson says her father, Paul Miller, rotates crops of vegetables on up to 2,500 acres.
Each table of diners receives a complimentary relish tray of raw veggies and dill dip. After ordering, we received a couple of petite, gratis side dishes, too: pickle-pasta salad with a mayo dressing, plus a creamy peach gelatin salad.
On the menu are soups, pies (with lard in the crust) and other fare made from longtime family recipes. Chicken salad arrived on a warmed croissant. In one buttery soup of the day was slowcooked sausage, potato and kale.
Breseman says the veggies served and sold are from the farm. In the market are handcrafted gifts and other foods too. That includes Amishmade candy, ground bison and venison sausage.
Look for Gramma Jean Miller’s original 1942 pink wedding robe on display in the women’s bathroom.
The market began with the sale of fresh peas in the 1990s, and the café opened in 2016. It is open seasonally, May through October.
On the web: gramma millersmarket.com
DUTCHess Cafe
Clark County
One star in Wisconsin’s cheese industry is Marieke Penterman, whose Goudas have earned more than 100 national and international awards. That includes the Foenegreek, awarded “Best of Class” nationally when the Netherlands native was just a novice cheesemaker.
Now she makes around three dozen kinds of Gouda at the family business, Marieke Gouda and the Penterman Farm. DUTCHess Café opened in 2014, in the same building as a gift shop, and only Wisconsin 29 separates the tourist attraction from Thorp.
Diners are offered free coffee, tea or ice water while waiting for their meal. They sit at chairs and tables made of sturdy, repurposed wood. Observation windows show off the many wheels of cheese in storage.
Staff say Gouda that is four to six months old finds its way into burgers, other sandwiches, breakfast quesadillas (a special of the day) and pancakes. Yes, pancakes.
Chef Troy Schmitt says he uses the Foenegreek because of its “notes of maple and nuttiness,” which complements the sweetness of the pancakes and maple syrup that accompanies them.
Feel free to use any type of cheese in pancakes, he says, “because pancakes are just a type of bread,” but if using a savory cheese “make your own pancakes from scratch so you don’t have sugar in the batter.”
For sale in the gift shop are Gouda slabs and wedges, cheese curds and cheddar made in house (because customers seek it) and Dutchlooking souvenirs.
Within view of the building is the open-air barn where the farm’s cows are milked: Watch the process from two levels of observation windows. Add a much-bigger-than-life fiberglass cow and a huge, inflatable pillow for children to bounce.
On the web: marieke gouda.com
Double B Farm Country Store and Cafe
Rock County
Every workday is a little surprise for Dan and Barb Beeler, who eight years ago converted the milk house and part of the barn into a café, seven miles northwest of Beloit. It feels like a hangout for the locals, but newcomers are quickly drawn into conversations, too.
“If you’re in a hurry or you don’t like to talk to people, don’t come here,” he says good-naturedly. In the morning crowd are retired law enforcers who meet weekly for coffee.
On the walls are vintage farm scenes and plaques. Things like “I think, therefore I ham” (picturing a pig) and “The Naughty Chair” (above corner seating). Ready to hang is “I don’t gossip, so listen the first time.” Customers donate some of this.
Saturday pizza nights, using an outdoor brick oven, were added in 2018 “but everything depends on weather,” Dan Beeler says.
They raise three types of goats, guinea hogs, Dorper sheep and Belted Galloway cattle.
Although these meats are the backbone of the menu, which includes ribeye sandwiches, the café’s signature item is Duck Butt Muffins, in the bakery category.
During this visit, the batch vanishes within two hours. In the secret recipe are duck eggs and bourbon, and this version contains blueberries too.
“One day I had a bottle of bourbon and a carton of duck eggs and just started fooling around,” explains Barb Beeler, the café’s sole cook and baker. Some customers call ahead to order.
On the web: doubleb.farm Follow longtime travel and food writer Mary Bergin of Madison at roadstraveled.com.
Kara Berlage developed this entrée as a way to use lamb from North Star Homestead Farms. Use lamb kebab chunks or cut a leg of lamb into chunks. The kitchen stays cool because the mixture simmers all day in a crockpot.
The farm chef uses whole hulled barley in the recipe. We used medium pearled barley and added an extra cup of beef stock, after six hours of simmering in our old cooker, to thin out the thickening mixture.
From Farmstead Creamery and Café at North Star Homestead Farms comes one sweet way to perk up a salad of fresh fruit or greens. The Berlage sisters say another option is to use the dressing as a marinade.
We substituted raspberries for strawberries and drizzled part of the dressing over Bibb lettuce with cucumber slices. We also used the dressing to top a mix of fresh pineapple and blueberries.
Gramma Miller’s Market and Café bakes more than 1,000 loaves of this seasonal bread per year, and the recipe comes from the late Frances Dugenske of Green Lake, grandmother of the café’s manager.
The same recipe is used for breakfast muffins, but blueberries are substituted for rhubarb. We used blueberries instead of rhubarb when making the bread and added chopped pecans.