Gina and Robin love pizza, farms, and doing fun things together . Since the summer of 2012 they have developed a habit of going to Stockholm, Wisconsin and eating pizza on Tuesday nights at the A to Z pizza farm with as many friends as they can convince to make the trip. This has led them to exploring other pizza farms in Minnesota and Wisconsin and sometimes in other states as well. And since they are having so much fun doing it, they wanted to share it on the internet.
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I first heard about pizza farms in early 2012, shortly after I moved to Minneapolis. It was an unseasonably nice day in early spring and you could feel everyone in town start to remember that summer would come again. Conversations centered on all the fun things you can do in the Midwest when the weather is nice. One friend told me about “the pizza farm”, a magical sounding farm that makes fresh pizza using their own ingredients and serving them on site.
Many people don’t realize quite how many pizza farms are out there, but if you hear about “the pizza farm”, I’m willing to bet you are hearing about A to Z Produce and Bakery in Stockholm, Wisconsin, serving some of the best pizza made with some of the most delicious ingredients since 1998. Like a majority of pizza farm goers, A to Z was my first pizza farm. They only serve on Tuesdays and it is an hour and a half from Minneapolis, so getting there required some planning. We set a date, got out of work early, met up in south Minneapolis and carpooled and caravanned out to Wisconsin. I remember looking around at one point, as I do every time I end up at a pizza farm, and thinking to myself that this is about as good as it gets. I am sitting outside on a farm in early spring with a group of friends eating fresh made wood fired pizza, drinking a local beer, enjoying the rolling hills in the distance, and the chickens and cows grazing in the field next to us.
It is the experience as a whole that makes pizza farms special for me. I planned more trips, I invited more friends, I talked about it all the time and people started to talk to me about it. I learned about new places from people who wanted to go, but couldn’t make it on a Tuesday, but had heard about one on a Sunday, and they knew I would be interested in going. And the momentum grew every year. In 2016, Robin, and I went to 7 pizza farms in 31 days and we had so much fun that we decided to go to even more in 2017. Several of our friends seemed interested in our mission and a couple people suggested we blog about it, so with the encouragement of friends, Last Night’s Pizza Box Instagram, website, and Facebook came to be.
A lot of my pizza farm information comes from word of mouth. When I started doing my own online research, I found several sites that listed 3, 5, maybe even 11 farms, but none of them had a complete list. Part of my inspiration to start Last Night’s Pizza Box was that I wanted to create an easy and complete Pizza Farm Resource with a list, links, a map, and easily accessible information about when, where, and how to visit a pizza farm.
As I became more involved in the research, visited more farms, created relationships with more farmers and staff, and learned more about pizza farming, my motivations began to evolve and I started to look at Last Night’s Pizza Box as an opportunity to do even more than just create a list. Pizza farms are doing important work on several levels, from growing healthy food, to building community, to creating connections between people and the food they eat. Last Night’s Pizza Box has become a way to celebrate all of these farms and highlight the farmers’ work. I want Last Night’s Pizza Box to inspire people to visit a pizza farm and I hope that it may inspire others to develop new pizza farms and contribute to increasing the availability of local and healthy food. It is popular with many restaurants and chefs to use fresh and local ingredients and to create an authentic farm to table experience. Pizza farms have found a way to bring the table to the farm. As the A to Z website says, the farm is the table.
With Last Night’s Pizza Box, I can acknowledge the ways pizza farms are different, what I like best about them, and what makes each experience special. I have learned that most pizza farmers are living out their dreams by growing their own food, turning it into pizza, and feeding it to their community. Each place has so much to offer. Some have huge playgrounds, many have live music, one has a salted crust that you’ll never forget, one makes a perfectly cooked broccoli pizza that is bright green and with just the right crunch, and the cheese on these pizzas is what gets me just about every time. It is so fresh and flavorful. A pizza farm is a simple and pure example of food tasting great because it is made with the freshest and highest quality ingredients. Over the years, the pizza farm experience has brought me so much happiness. Last Night’s Pizza Box is my attempt to spread that joy and share that experience with as many people as I can.
