By Kristine Hansen | Photos courtesy Sprouting Acres
Pizza nights are an event as connected to Wisconsin farms as the soil itself. Several farms across the state put a new spin on farm-to-fork cuisine by baking pizzas in wood-fired ovens, with most toppings grown on-site and the cheese locally sourced.
Cambridge’s Sprouting Acres, a certified-organic produce farm owned by Andy Watson and Kelly Bratt, hosted their first pizza night in 2019, using their lone pizza oven. Today they fire up three ovens to fulfill orders for their locally famous 16-inch pizzas (they also offer 12-inch gluten-free pies). Other menu items include a house salad, cheesy garlic bread, calzones and cheese plates.
Pizza nights are the first and third Sundays of the month, from 2:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Live music kicks off around 5 p.m. and there’s sometimes an open mic (for live music) that starts around 3 p.m., with the evening’s band playing until 7 p.m. or later. Pizza orders are placed through the farm’s website a week prior.
“Fall is one of our favorite times because it’s usually a little cooler out,” says Watson, adding that pumpkins are out on display and a photographer does mini photo sessions. “It’s a really pretty time to come. At [our] September and October Pizza Nights, one of our biggest sellers is a delicata squash, ricotta and balsamic glaze pizza.”
Before he was a farmer, Watson cooked at several Madison restaurants, including Harvest and Osteria Papavero. In fact, it was while working at the former Clay Market Cafe in Cambridge, during his teens, that a seed for his farming dreams was literally planted.
“My boss asked if I wanted to grow vegetables on our [family’s] farm for the restaurant,” explains Watson, “which turned into growing basil for a company in Madison that distributed it all over the Madison area.” This led to the farm’s Community Supported Agriculture program, which the couple ended in 2022 after 19 years.
In addition to hosting pizza nights, Watson teaches cooking classes at the farm on topics including wood-fired pizza baking, salads, pastas, vegetarian recipes, cooking with beer and more. (His next class is Nov. 5.) These are hosted in a commercial kitchen within a new blue barn on the property that was constructed out of salvaged wood — a nod to Wisconsin’s agricultural history.
