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Lori Dieckmann with KNIP Ready for Customers to ENJOY!
Head to Jack’s Food Market in Linn, KS for Some Knip!:
Specialty meat draws a tourist bus to Jack’s Food Market in Linn. “We should promote more of our niche things found in our stores.” – Marci Penner
By DanThalmann
Washington County News
June 29, 2006
Knip is the newest tourist attraction in Washington County. Huh?
For those of you who know what knip is, this statement makes no sense. For those of you who don’t know what knip is… well… I guess the statement doesn’t make sense to you either.
Knip is actually a kind of food. A meat product to be more specific. It is made of beef, pork, oatmeal and allspice, blended together to form kind of a gray block of meat. Sound appealing? It gets better.
Some people call it head cheese, because it was formerly made from the meat from the head (and other parts) of pigs and cattle. In the old days, farmers wasted nothing on their farm. Nothing.
These days they don’t use the head meat to make knip anymore, but the product is still popular with people who grew up eating it. Popular (and unusual) enough to bring an entire tourist bus from Topeka to Jack’s Food Market in Linn where knip is always available in the freezer section.
The story goes something like this:
A big tourist bus pulls up unannounced in front of the grocery store on Friday, June 16. The bus, Great Adventure Tours out of Topeka, was on a mystery tour, visiting sites along a route unannounced to its passengers.
Tour operator Oneta Ashcraft had read about the store’s selection of original meats, including knip, in the Kansas Guidebook for Explorers by Marci Penner. Ashcraft said she had recently picked up the Explorer Tourism concept promoted by Penner and has been organizing tours to visit unusual places in Kansas.
Besides the knip stop, the tour made stops at Our Daily Bread in Barnes for lunch, they went to Washington to see the free land sites, stopped at the Munchkin Mayor’s house for a while, went to the Tasty Pastry in Clay Center for nut rolls and ended the trip at Call Hall on the Kansas State University campus to eat Purple Pride ice cream.
Back to the knip.
Ashcraft said nobody on the motorcoach knew what knip was so she wanted to get some at Jack’s so everyone could try it. However, she found out it had to be cooked, so she turned her attention to “those lovely beef and pork sticks” that were for sale in a cooler nearby.
She said everyone on the coach had a piece and in the meantime, a couple people on the motorcoach knew someone at the House of Beauty next to the store so they got off the bus to talk to them. Everyone liked the sticks so well they started getting off the bus and bought Jack’s out of beef and pork sticks.
Ashcraft gave high praise to the beef and pork sticks. “They’re the very best,” said Ashcraft. “By far the best I have eaten.”
Jack’s Food Market employee Megan Holle and Jodi Dieckmann were up front when the bus pulled up. Holle gave her version of the story.
She said a lady came into the store and said she heard they sold knip there.
“K… N… I… P…” the lady spelled it out for them. Holle laughed as she told that part of the story. She and Dieckmann knew exactly what knip was. The Linn area is made up mostly of a bunch of old German families and knip was not an uncommon food to them by any means.
So she was told where the knip could be found, but the lady ended up buying the Dieck’s smoked pork sticks and beef sticks instead. Knip couldn’t really be prepared and enjoyed on a bus, but pork sticks could. She bought a couple packs and headed out to the bus.
Soon, Holle said people started streaming off the bus and into the store. Evidently the pork sticks were good, because they ended up buying them entirely out of the tasty snack sticks in all flavors and also purchased a lot of bottled water – some of the pork and beef sticks were of the spicy variety, laced with jalapeno.
The tourists had “discovered” what was well-known locally – Jack’s Food Market has an amazing assortment of meats.
Call them artisan meats, niche sausage products, great Polishes, whatever you want. Store owner Jack Dieckmann (third generation in the grocery business) said most of the meats in the display case are based on original recipes developed by Jack’s father Chuck Dieckmann. Some are made at the store – “hand tied and hand cut” – and others are made by Jack’s brother Brad Dieckmann, owner of Clay Center Locker Plant, but always based on those original recipes.
Jack said these unique meats are popular, especially when former locals are back in the area visiting for the weekend. Evidently they provide a bit of a taste of home.
Many visitors load up to take a hefty supply home with them if they don’t live nearby. Jack said a former local resident started bring Polish sausages home with them to Texas where their neighbors started craving them so they buy extra for them now. Same thing happened when someone brought some Polish sausages to Fort Riley. Evidently they’re popular there too now. When BLT season starts, Jack said people from Hanover and Waterville come to the store to buy his cured bacon.
His customers’ cravings vary as much as his offerings do. Knip, pork sticks, beef sticks, Polish sausages, summer sausage, jerky (in 12 flavors), dried beef, cured bacon, etc., with several in different flavors. Chuck used to win awards with his original products (there’s a wall of awards in the back part of the store) and they are still considered blue ribbon winners in many homes because his sons have continued to produce the meats with care.
Knip is sold in an upright freezer in the back corner of the store. Yellow letters with orange outlines spell out “knip” right on the freezer’s door.
It is prepared in several different ways. Some fry it into patties and eat it with molasses. Some heat it in a skillet and stir it until it reaches a mushy, oatmeal-like consistency and others eat it cold. It can be served straight or on bread, toast or pancakes and some like it blended with onions.
The product also has several names. Besides knip, it is sometimes called head cheese, but Jack said he connects that name to a similar product with a gelatin base. In parts of Minnesota, this exact same product is called “gritz”. Jack said a customer’s mom’s sister (in small towns, those connections are remembered) called it something else he had never heard of, but he can’t remember what.
So can something like an uncommon meat really be a tourist draw or was the stop at Jack’s a once in a lifetime event?
Kansas travel expert Marci Penner, director of the Kansas Sampler Foundation and author of the Kansas Guidebook for Explorers that led the tour bus to Jack’s, said people love finding something different. The knip at Jack’s would fit in perfectly with the experience people are demanding in their tourist outings.
She gave an example of tourists frequenting Brant’s Meat Market in Lucas (touted in the Kansas Guidebook and this year’s Kansas Travel Guide). “Buying a specialty sausage in Brant’s Meat Market is more than just buying specialty meats, it’s also an experience just going in that old-fashioned meat market,” said Penner.
Cuisine is one of the eight elements of rural culture touted by Penner as ways to attract tourists. Ethnic cuisine is food that might be sold at local cafes or grocery stores that reflect the cultures that settled the area. Knip being sold in Linn would fit that bill. There are tourists out there that seek out these things.
“Cuisine-wise explorers seek out the best of coconut cream pies, chicken fried steaks and pan-fried chicken,” said Penner. She added that any of the German sausages are sought, as are home-baked goods. “We should promote more of our niche things found in our stores.”
“It’s all in the marketing, all in creating demand and interest and intrigue,” said Penner. She said the knip event sounded like the group frenzy syndrome, where one person is crazy about something and soon, a couple other people are buying it, so everyone in the group thinks they better get on board or they’ll be missing something.
“Just like small towns, the most important thing is just simply to get the word out that you’re there… otherwise how will people know?” suggested Penner.
Will the tourist bus be back for the unusual discovery of knip in Linn?
Maybe. Great Adventure Tours hosts a mystery tour every other month and the 50+ tourists on the bus don’t ever know where they’re going, but the meats at Jack’s are no longer a secret with them.
“Who knows where I’ll show up,” said Ashcraft.
Besides whisking tourists off to places unknown in Kansas (her favorite type of tour), Oneta Ashcraft and Great Adventure Tours also does regular day trips and overnight tours, cruises, and trips to Europe. She has been in the industry for over 20 years. She can be contacted toll free at 866-862-1080 for more information.
Jack’s Food Market, whose owners Jack and Lori Dieckmann also operate Dieck’s Catering, is located in downtown Linn and is open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday. The store can be contacted at 785-348-5411.
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