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Chef Bryan Morcom: A Pop-up Restaurant and "TowerKraut"

Folks in Tower Minnesota are still talking about the great food at a “pop-up” held by Chef Bryan Morcom a few weeks ago at the Black Bear Café. Even though the pop-up featured Indian food, local ingredients are a big part of Bryan’s approach to cooking. 

“I do curries during the winter because it warms your soul… So I had this idea to do a curry pop-up at the Black Bear Café up here in Tower. We have a reservation [Bois Forte Band of Chippewa] close by so their food has always intrigued me as well because it’s local. It’s the butternut squashes, it’s the wild rice, it’s the walleye, it’s the corn. So I wanted to take the two Indians—one native and one eastern Indian—and bring them together in a flavor profile up here where I think people could understand it more.

“First course, I did do a classic Indian dish and that was turkey momo, which is a dumpling with ground turkey, curry sauce, and a little tomato cilantro sauce on top of that. And then second course we had the traditional curry with the local vegetables. We did that with some naan. Naan is a traditional Indian flatbread that you use yeast and yogurt and you let it sit over so it kind of sours, and it creates this great levain in it when you toast it quickly. And we had some local herbs from the garden. Then we finished with a chokecherry sorbet, which me and my girlfriend Emily DeCesario hand-picked up here. The chokecherries are in abundance and I think we picked about 15 gallons this year.”

Bryan said the kitchen that evening “was a little chaotic because it’s a real small kitchen and I’m still offering the full menu at the Black Bear as well—hand-cut French fries, fresh-pattied burgers—they’ve been serving that since 1976 and it’s a quality product up here on the Range. It was a little chaotic with the small kitchen and working both menus.”

With a pop-up restaurant Bryan says, “You just kind of pick a cuisine and you just show up somewhere. Last year I did a ramen pop-up. I called it ‘Ramen on the Range.’ I just said ‘Hey everyone, I’m going to be here serving food at this time. Come and eat it until it’s gone.’ Pop-ups have been gaining popularity because it gives chefs that don’t necessarily own a restaurant a chance to go in and create a client base. You know, ‘Come see what I’m doing.’ Because when you work at a different restaurant you’re under the chef where you’re working. This gives you an opportunity to express yourself creatively.”

At the age of 19, Bryan joined the Navy and served four years, traveling to Bahrain, Okinawa, Thailand, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. When he got back he entered cooking school at Le Cordon Bleu in Mendota Heights. He interned and then worked at Restaurant Alma under Chef Alex Roberts for 13 years. “I saw what food could do—the power of food—and how it brought people together. I mean, everyone loves food,” he laughs. “I haven’t met anyone that does not like food. So it is mainly the’ bringing togetherness.’ You’ve got a raw product in the morning and then you create something with it and then you get to sell your product and you get to see a satisfied customer, all in one day.”

When asked to talk about TowerKraut, Bryan explains, “I love fermenting things. You create the probiotics in it and it’s really good for you. Usually when you ferment something, or change food, you create a thing called umami. They say it’s like the fifth taste bud or what not. Like when you eat Doritos and it kind of burns but you kind of like that saltiness—they call that umami. It’s found in soy sauce. That’s why I like to ferment things.

“Up here cabbage does really well because we have the cold and cabbage loves cold. Working with a farmer down in the Cities, he had this strain, F1 Kaitlin—it’s a type of cabbage—it’s grown in Germany for sauerkraut. So I said, ‘Yeah, Greg, I want to get that. I want to see how it does up here.’ The first year I grew it…It’s huge, they’re like basketballs!

“When the cabbage is ready to harvest, I harvest the cabbage and I have it shredded within an hour of it being harvested. So it’s the utmost freshest. And the only thing with sauerkraut is you add salt.”

Demand has been “huge. Last year I couldn’t give it away. I was out there going ‘C’mon, buy it, buy it.’ Now that people have had it, I’ve gotta keep making more.”

This year Bryan and his girlfriend made 150 jars. Some is processed and some is fresh. “I’ve been thinking about doing a release party. Cook dishes with the sauerkraut and then have it available for people to purchase it there—so I don’t have to be running around everywhere. I don’t know if anyone’s had a release party before. You see it with wine and beer, so why not sauerkraut?”

No date has been established yet for the TowerKraut release party but on October 28th Chef Bryan Morcom is planning another pop-up at the Black Bear to commemorate the Vikings game against the New Orleans Saints.

“As a kid I traveled to New Orleans with my family because my uncle lived down there, and we always had shrimp boil. So I figured I’d give the Iron Range a classic, authentic shrimp boil…It’s a very spicy liquid that you add in there; corn, red potatoes, bay leaf, thyme, garlic, celery, onion, lemon. You boil all that up, so you’re basically making this spicy vegetable broth, and then you get a big cauldron of it and then you start adding shrimp to it. You cook the shrimp in there 6, 7 minutes, and you continue to do that. You’re building this amazing flavor in the stock pot because you’re poaching all that shrimp in there and the shrimp flavor is going in there and it intensifies as it goes… It’s considered a family meal or community, so you just dump heaping loads of that—shrimp and corn and everything—and people just grab and make a plate from it.”

Eventually Bryan would like to open his own restaurant in Tower. “It would be focused on sustainability and local whenever possible, even though we know that’s very difficult up here because there’s such a short growing season. But if you can start growing mass quantities of some things and getting into root cellaring and things like that, I still believe you could have root vegetables in the winter. So you’re still serving a local product.”

Listen to the entire interview with Chef Bryan Morcom below.

Maggie is a rural public radio guru; someone who can get you through both minor jams and near catastrophes and still come out ahead of the game. She pens our grants, reports to the Board of Directors and helps guide our station into the dawn of a new era. Maggie is a locavore to the max (as evidenced on Wednesday mornings), brings in months’ worth of kale each fall, has heat on in her office 12 months a year, and drinks coffee out of a plastic 1987 KAXE mug every day. Doting parents and grandparents, she and her husband Dennis live in the asphalt jungle of East Nary.