- [Announcer] Funding for "Off 90" is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(loon calling) (dynamic music) (energetic music) - Cruising your way next "Off 90," what might be the oldest Dairy Queen in Minnesota, a candy maker known for nuts and nougat, a tattoo designer from Rochester, and a potter from Albert Lea.

It's all coming up on your next stop "Off 90."

(energetic music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Hi, I'm Barbara Keith.

Thanks for joining me on this trip "Off 90."

Downtown Rochester has changed a lot since 1947, but one thing that remains is the Dairy Queen on North Broadway.

It's said to be the oldest Dairy Queen in Minnesota and still features the old style walk-up windows.

It has been owned by the same family since the beginning.

(upbeat music) - This is the oldest Dairy Queen in Minnesota, and I can prove it.

We've got some documentation.

International Dairy Queen put out a book in 1990 to celebrate the 50th anniversary, and it states in there that we opened the first Dairy Queen in the state of Minnesota.

(upbeat music) How Dairy Queen got going was a gentleman invented the Dairy Queen machine, the soft serve machine.

And the Dairy Queen mix formula is patented.

No one else can sell it.

And what it is, is Dairy Queen soft serve comes out fresh at the spigot, as it's as fresh as fresh can be.

The great thing about this store is it's still run by the same family, the Spratte family.

The third generation owns it, and the fifth generation is working in it, and there aren't a lot of businesses that can say that.

(upbeat music) Oh, it's just great memories.

Great working with family members, great working with my grandfather, my father, my siblings, my kids, nephews and nieces.

Just really makes for a closeness.

And it's just been a great family operation, great opportunity to serve the community.

(upbeat music) Myself and my sister Diana and then her son Chris, we're the three managers.

And at any given time, one of us are here.

There's always a family member here.

- It's really cool.

I love working with my mom.

I can't imagine it any other way.

Yeah, Tim's pretty cool too.

We all get along pretty well.

So been working here on and off for about 38 years.

I first started when I was 11, doing like pick up trash outside and like stock work and everything.

It was like in '85, like first year the Blizzard came out.

So it was an exciting year.

- The big change would've been when the Blizzards came out, and that just blew up.

That was just fantastic for Dairy Queen.

And to this day, probably, oh boy, at least 50% of our business is the Blizzard product.

(upbeat music) - [Chris] Oreo is probably the most popular Blizzard, and then probably after that would be peanut butter cup Blizzard.

- I would say an Oreo Blizzard or a cookie dough Blizzard.

- And we don't really have to here, but I always flip Blizzards 'cause why not?

People, they get pretty excited about it.

- [Interviewer] Have you ever tried to flip something and it fell out?

- Nope, it's never happened.

- [Interviewer] Okay.

- I'm pretty good at this stuff after this many years.

- My favorite thing probably is to see the repeat customers.

You know, someone maybe used to work here, they come back, or their kids or their grandkids, they bring them with.

And it's just great to see them and visit with them and have 'em come back for another year.

- I can't think of doing anything different.

It's been a long time that I've been working here, but it's a pretty rewarding job.

Lot of happy people.

- Oh, I just enjoy the people, enjoy the employees.

We get to know them pretty well.

And a lot of the kids who work here work all through high school and then in the summers when they're in college.

And they come back, and they always know that they've got a job waiting for 'em if they want when they come back.

You know, we've got a lot of employees who work here, you know, six, seven, eight, nine plus years.

(upbeat music) We've had Rich Little came here.

Remember him?

Harry Blackmun, the Supreme Court Justice.

He had a Rochester connection.

He was on staff at Mayo.

But he would come back.

I think he maybe even had a residence here.

He'd come back.

And Burt Reynolds was here.

Wynonna Judd was playing in town.

She came down here.

(upbeat music) Well, it just, a lot of new construction, a lot of... 'Cause of the proximity to downtown and the Mayo Clinic, seems to be a lot of downtown expansion this way.

And now with the renovation of Broadway, which has turned out very nice, and we've noticed a lot more foot traffic and bike traffic that's come.

And we do our job.

We've been here and grown up in the business, so we feel we do a pretty good job here at the Dairy Queen.

And, you know, we'll close here for the season shortly and, you know, take a little break and, you know, maybe go on vacation, do a few things.

And before you know it, we're kinda chomping at the bit to get back in and get things ready for the next season.

(upbeat music) (energetic music) - What does the candy bar called the Salted Nut Roll have to do with hardware stores?

We find out in this story about the Pearson Candy Company of Saint Paul.

Pearson's also makes Nut Goodies and Mint Patties and has been in the Twin Cities since its beginning back in 1909.

Pearson's let us pull back the curtain and go behind the scenes.

(playful music) - The American diet is one of those funny things that everybody is trying to be healthier, but they like to indulge and sneak a treat.

People are craving more and more flavor.

We've gone from a dozen SKUs to hundreds of SKUs.

We have a lot going on in our small factory.

(playful music) We've been making candy in the Twin Cities area for 123 years.

Mars started their Snickers bar here in Minneapolis within a very short window of the Nut Goodie.

They both started here in Minneapolis.

Pearson's Candy started in 1909 as a small candy shop in downtown Minneapolis.

(playful music) We moved into the building we're currently in in 1958, so we're coming around on 75 years of being a manufacturing plant.

We have several different product lines making a couple of different things.

The Salted Nut Roll is a peanut caramel nougat bar.

It's got a vanilla nougat in the middle, caramel around the outside, and salted peanuts around that.

It was considered a high calorie, low cost food for people during the Great Depression.

Its original name was the Chicken Dinner Bar.

So it was meant to have the protein from the peanuts and some good flavor in the middle.

And then at one point it became the Choo-Choo Bar and then eventually just became the Salted Nut Roll because that's what it is.

It's a Salted Nut Roll.

(playful music) The Salted Nut Roll is definitely a piece of Americana, especially up here in the Northern Plains.

It's very well-known throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin, and then we're getting a lot more reach and distribution as it's getting out there and selling.

It's a good to go anywhere sort of bar.

We make about 70,000 of them a day.

Something like 25 million Salted Nut Rolls get made a year and another 25 million of the bite-size versions.

It's actually the number one selling SKU at Ace Hardware nationwide.

They sell more Salted Nut Roll than paintbrushes or nails or anything else.

The number one thing they sell is Salted Nut Roll.

If you go on Google Patents search and search for Pearson's Candy, you'll see the original hand-drawn patent application from when William Pearson and his engineers developed this process in the 1950s.

It's been running just like this since the late 1950s in this building, when they built this building specifically to make these Salted Nut Rolls.

We take our salted peanuts from downstairs, we lay them on a nice bed, put on a ribbon of caramel, put in the vanilla center, another ribbon of caramel, squeeze them into a roll, and cut 'em to length.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) We have had a lot of different candy and also other things made here.

So the Nature Valley granola bar actually started here as a prototype line with a partnership with General Mills in the 1980s before they built their own plants and started building it.

And then we also used to make a Seven Up Bar.

People ask all the time, can we bring back our Seven Up Bar?

And they probably remember maybe the one or two flavors that they loved and don't quite remember all the flavors that they didn't like.

That's the problem when you have a seven-flavor piece of candy.

Nobody likes all seven.

We get that request all the time if we can bring back the Seven Up Bar, and unfortunately it's not gonna be coming back.

This is corn syrup and sugar.

And this is where we make our delicious caramel for our Salted Nut Roll.

We make it from scratch every day.

We get our milk products from Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The sugar is coming from the Red River Valley in North Dakota and Minnesota.

And the corn syrup is a mix of farms with Minnesota and Wisconsin as well.

We make these batches every day where we mix our corn syrup, our sugar, and our milk powder.

We make a delicious sweet cream that we put into these cooking kettles.

Our candy maker Greg, he adds in a little bit of palm oil, some salt, a little bit more corn syrup, and then we cook it up to about 243 degrees, where it gets nice and warm and creamy.

What happens in that process is the sugar molecules and the milk molecules interact, and it creates a process called caramelization.

It's that mix of the milk and the protein powders and the sugar that really makes it have all sorts of those unique flavors and deliciousness.

Here is where we take all of that sugar.

You can see the crystals there.

It looks like snow.

That's billions of micro crystals suspended in candy corn syrup and sugar.

This that's coming down is called fondants.

We take that fondant sugar, and then we have this marshmallow nougat, which is sugar, corn syrup, and egg whites whipped up and fluffy.

And the two of those are blending together into this candy here.

So we've got this aerated sweet candy with a little bit of structure, and then we add in some salt for some flavor, some mint for mints we're making today, or we'll add vanilla for Salted Nut Roll or maple for our maple candy, such as our Bun or our Nut Goodies.

(horn honking) (dynamic music) We got through lots and lots and lots of peanuts.

These are plump peanuts.

They're round and delicious and full of good protein and delicious fats that go great on our Salted Nut Roll.

And they put just a light roast on them for us, and then we coat them in a little bit of coconut oil from Cargill with a little bit of a natural antioxidant made from rosemary and vitamin E. We coat those in salt, and then they go downstairs and get combined with the caramel and the vanilla center to make our Salted Nut Roll.

(dynamic music) Salt is one of those make everything better kind of flavors.

And especially as we've been improving our peanut butter Salted Nut Roll centers, we've found that the salt content there has a huge difference on the flavor.

It really helps the peanut oils and flavors really come out by getting enough salt on there.

Our chocolate comes to use straight from the chocolate factory where it's made with different sugars and milk proteins and different cocoa amounts, so that we have a milk chocolate, we have a dark chocolate, and then we have a dark dark chocolate that we use for our mints.

About every week or two, we get a full truckload of chocolate, and it goes into these giant tanks here.

We keep the chocolate warm and mixed and agitated, and then when it's needed, it's pumped out through our lines.

(dynamic music) If you take chocolate just as is, like if you do at home, and you dip strawberries in it and put it in your fridge and then you go to bite it and that chocolate falls apart and crumbles all over, that's what happens with chocolate that's not tempered, is the fat crystals within the chocolate are pointing inside out, and it just falls apart and makes a mess.

So then to temper it, we cool it down a little bit and then very carefully layer it on so that as it cools, those crystals line up together and create a shall from the outside in, layers and layers and layers of chocolate shell that form a nice hard coating around the outside, and that's what makes it shine like a mirror.

Means that we have really good chocolate coating on there.

(playful music) We do a lot of testing in-house, a lot of sampling, a little bit of adjusting here and there to make sure we're staying true to the original flavors and brands, but people's taste preferences do shift over time.

Our mint flavor within our Nut Goodie, it seems like every year we're bumping it up more and more and more because people's tastes, they demand a little bit stronger taste every year.

(bright music) We've got some equipment from the 1950s.

That is always a fun challenge to keep running.

A lot of it is rebuilding the parts in our shop because they were invented here, so when they break, we have to remake them.

And then we're also trying to modernize and bring in new equipment and new processes where it makes sense.

We wanna keep our traditional flavors, our traditional candy, but also improve them and make them as top-quality and good wrapping at right cost and points as we can across the market.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (energetic music) - Tattoo art might not be what you think.

Before someone can ink the tattoo, someone has to design it.

That's where Rochester artist Liz Forsman comes in.

Let's take a look.

(energetic music) - I was always inspired by tattoos.

And when you get a tattoo, it's like a stencil initially, so I always thought that that looked so good.

And I really was drawn to artwork without shading and line work and nature drawings and animals.

I'm Elizabeth Forsman, and I'm a freelance artist based in Rochester, Minnesota.

Fiz Lorsman Designs is a creative outlet.

It's just me.

I'm just an artist.

My main work that I do is illustrated work.

I do pen and ink, and then I also do a little bit of drawing on my phone as well through Adobe Fresco.

(energetic music) After college, I didn't really know what I wanted to do.

I wasn't sure that I wanted to do what I went to school for anymore.

I started posting my work, and it got a lot of traction.

I got shared on some Instagram pages that have a lot of followers.

Overnight, I got, you know, 10,000 followers and getting people soliciting me to do custom work for them.

And thankfully it took off and I'm able to do it to this day.

Mainly people reach out to me via Instagram or my Etsy page.

They come to me with an idea, and then I come up with a draft, and then they're able to take it to a tattoo artist to have on their skin forever.

- I've wanted this tattoo for awhile.

It was gonna be something that was gonna be visible.

It's that like I wanna wear and have pride in and show the world, like, hey, this is part of me.

And I hadn't found the right artist to draw it, and then it just kinda dawned on me, like, hey, this is right in Elizabeth's wheelhouse, like she's gonna do something that's unique, means a lot.

I know her, so I reached out to her.

Within the week, she had drawn up this tattoo and sent it to me, and I was like, yeah, that's more than what I even could've expected.

- I'm kind of a niche in the market, where I'm somebody you can solicit online to do a custom for you, and you can just bring it into a tattoo artist.

I do a lot of line work they're able to take in.

It's like a skeleton.

If they wanna add shading, a tattoo artist can definitely do that.

They can add color.

They can add anything that they want.

- Getting it put on was a lot of fun to watch it just kinda come together into exactly what I was looking for.

I would watch him put down a line and then wipe it away, and then I think like the roundness of the arm matches the jar so well.

- At Threshold, I have a couple things displayed.

I really enjoy having tangible stuff for sale.

And sometimes it's a little bit hard to just sell all those online on a shop, and it's nice to have an in-person shop to visit where you can look at my work, you can see the detail, you can see the effort that I've put in.

I have a couple public installations that are outdoors in Rochester.

Outside the Civic Center, I did a utility box painting.

And I also did a collaboration with Leah Joy Bee.

I did a lithograph mural behind the main Cafe Steam, and you can see that in the alleyway in their portion of The Cove.

You can find my full portfolio on Instagram @fiz-_lorsmandesigns.

And also on Etsy, I have prints and T-shirts and stickers at Fiz Lorsman Designs as well.

- [Matthew] Definitely ask for a tattoo permit or pay for a tattoo permit if you're looking to do something that she's done before.

Artists put in a lot of work, so go through the right paths.

(energetic music) - My mother is very creative, and she's always supported having a creative outlet in my life.

I like it because you're able to create something that might not have existed before.

It's really empowering to have something come from nothing, and it's like sometimes it's all I can think about.

(laughs) (gentle music) (upbeat music) - Steve Tubbs discovered pottery in high school.

He went on to explore clay in college, first at Riverland Community College in Austin and then at the University of Minnesota.

Now he's what's called a production potter.

Let's see what he's spinning today.

(peaceful music) - I think the most important thing to me with pottery is the creative process, that I'm involved with making something that eventually will be used in someone else's life.

My name is Steve Tubbs, and I make pottery.

I started making pottery in high school.

And that wouldn't be the full story because as we grew up, you know, we always had clay as part of our art classes, and you would do these little odd projects, but it wasn't until I was a senior in high school and had a class that had a potter's wheel, and it was like, oh, this is cool.

I'm what people in the know would call a production potter.

So I specialize in the objects that you would use, you know, everyday, you know, the plates, bowls, cups, mugs, serving pieces that would go along with a line of standard items that I make again and again and again.

And some potters get tired of that.

I do not.

You know, I sit down and get started to make my standard mug, and I'll make at least 16 of those, and there's pleasure in that, in repeating that form and searching for the details in that form that make it just right.

I'll start by weighing out the clay, just over a pound of clay, and I throw it to predetermined height.

Mug will need to sit and set up about one day, so up to a point called leather hard, where you can pick it up, where it doesn't deform.

And then I'll make and attach a handle to that and then allow it dry the rest of the way to a state called greenware.

It'll go into the kiln, where it's fired to over 1,800 degrees in what's called the bisque firing.

That chemically changes the clay.

After it comes out of the bisque kiln, I'll sand the edges that you would touch, you know, just to make it a little bit smoother.

And then liquid wax is applied to the bottom so that when I get my pots in buckets of glaze, the glaze will not stick to the bottom.

Glaze, which is glass-forming chemicals suspended in water, will melt, and if there's glaze on the bottom, then it sticks to the shelf.

And then I'll sand it one more time just on the bottom so that when you take it home and are enjoying that cup of coffee that, you know, you don't scratch your dining room table.

Lots of different steps, you know?

And part of the immediacy and the joy of throwing pots, it happens rather quickly, and people can go, "Wow, it doesn't take very long to make that," but yet that same standard mug, I pick up and set that mug down 30 times from the start till the time that I say, "Okay, that's done."

So it's quite a process.

And because of the drying and firing times, quickest you could turn that around is, probably quickest is even two weeks.

You know, this is something that's been practiced thousands and thousands of years, but there is one dramatic change in technology that has happened, and that has to do with the temperature control of the kilns.

When I started, you would use a manual kiln sitter, where you would put a little triangular piece of clay in the contraption, inside the kiln, and it would manually shut off the kiln when you reached the temperature you want it to.

I have to set my alarm and get up every hour, turn the dials up on the kiln so that you get the heat rise in the kiln at an acceptable and predictable rate.

Now it's all computerized.

I say cone six, no hold, preheat it for 30 minutes, start it at 11 o'clock tonight, go.

(kiln beeps) All these, the technology change I just explained, I'm still on the same potter's wheel 45 years later, 50,000 or more pots, and never had to touch it.

The thing's worked like a charm ever since.

So many people have gotten back to me and say, "This is my favorite mug, you know?

It's lightweight.

It fits my hand.

I just love the way it feels and just starts my day off in a special way."

Being inspired, and if you're lucky that never goes away.

And that joy is still there.

The hands are holding up.

And, yeah, it's like every day is a Saturday.

(peaceful music) - We've reached the end of this trip.

Thanks for riding along.

See you next time "Off 90."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (dynamic music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Off 90" is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(loon calling)