The Great Minnesota Recipe is a multi-platform project that explores the diverse culinary experience of immigrant families or those with immigrant family backgrounds in Minnesota. The project includes a broadcast series with three, thirty-minute documentary-style programs that each explore a cook or family of cooks with diverse cultural backgrounds who live in or have settled in Minnesota. Through these episodes we learn how their recipes had to adapt over time to match Minnesota’s resources, climate, and population. In a fourth, hour long competition-style episode we see these cooks go head-to-head to create their unique version of the “typical Minnesota meal”, the hot dish. Local chefs and community leaders served as the judging panel and picked one winner of The Great Minnesota Recipe. Prior to the broadcast of this fourth episode, we hosted an advance screening of the episode where our guests were served all three dishes featured in the show. Guests has an opportunity to meet the hosts, contestants, and producers.
Beyond broadcast, this project featured digital and social-exclusive content to encourage conversation around the topics covered and to promote the similar experience that can be gained through connecting over food and connecting through public media. Our Instagram series Just A Bite gave viewers another look at our contestants with a short-form recipe to try on their own. All recipes featured throughout the project were made available to our viewers. Now we are on to season 2, to dive deeper into the wide array of cultures in Minnesota!