Year: 2024

We’ve all made impulsive kitchen purchases — exotic ingredients or fun toys — and then never used them. When faced with a new piece of kitchen fanciness, most of us are a little gun-shy.

Today’s recipe, while extremely simple to make, uses one piece of specialized equipment and one ingredient that you probably don’t already have in your pantry: a microplane zester and lemon juice powder. Should you have a grater to zest lemons with? (Yes, because it’s incredibly cool and makes zesting citrus, hard cheese or chocolate extremely easy.) Why in the world would you have a jar of lemon juice powder in your pantry? (Short answer: to make things taste lemony without making them wetter.)

You can totally get by without either of these — grate lemons with the side of your box grater with the tiny holes, and substitute lemon zest for the powder — but making a pie (this pie, anyway) will be easier and better with them.

Crust

• ½ cup (175 g) finely ground cookie crumbs – these can be stale homemade cookies, crispy grocery store cookies or even graham crackers; your blender or food processor will do a good job of crumbifying them
• 5 to 6 Tablespoons melted butter
• 2 teaspoons lemon juice powder, or the zest of one lemon

Combine all ingredients in a bowl, then press into a 9-inch pie pan. Build up the sides of the crust if you can, but don’t let this stress you out.

Chill the crust in your refrigerator for half an hour.

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

Bake the crust for 15 to 20 minutes.

Set aside to cool.

As you pull your crumb crust out of the oven, there is a very good chance that the sides will have slumped down to the bottom of the pan and there is a giant cookie grinning up at you instead of a pie crust. This is where most of us will start second-guessing ourselves and wallowing in shame:

The thing is, it doesn’t really matter. Unless you are competing on a British baking show, nobody cares. The pie will still taste great. So what if it’s in layers? Pretend this is what you meant to do, and move on.

While the crust is cooling, make the filling:

Filling

• 1 cup (200 g) sugar
• ¼ cup (60 ml) sour cream
• 4 eggs
• zest of 2 lemons
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• ¾ cup fresh squeezed lemon juice, roughly the juice of 4 lemons

Add all the ingredients to a bowl, and mix thoroughly. If you are measuring your ingredients by weight, put the mixer bowl on your kitchen scale and add each ingredient, taring (zeroing out) the weight as you go. You’ll be surprised how relaxing this is.

Pour the filling into your prepared pie crust, and bake for 25 to 35 minutes, until the center of the pie is just a tiny bit jiggly.

Remove from the oven, and set aside to cool. Once it is cool, put it in your refrigerator.

Just before you are ready to serve, make the topping.

Topping

• 1 cup (240 ml) heavy cream
• 2 Tablespon sugar
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice powder, or the zest of another lemon

Combine all ingredients, and beat until it makes whipped cream with medium peaks. Cover the surface of your pie with whipped cream, and garnish with even more lemon zest, if that seems like the right thing to do.

This pie has an incredibly high reward-to-effort ratio. It tastes juicy and lemony. The crumb crust with added lemonosity is a revelation. It is easy to make look pretty — just slather any mistakes with whipped cream.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Derry company shakes up flavor combos

The name of the Sal Terrae Spice Company came from owner Meredith Touma’s daughter, who was studying Latin at the time.

“It means ‘Salt of the Earth,’” Touma said. “To be the salt of the earth means to be excellent; to try your hardest, but not to be perfect.”

Derry-based Sal Terrae (salterraespiceco.com, 548-1490) specializes in producing spice blends made from ingredients sourced from around the world. As an example, za’atar, a traditional Middle Eastern mixture, has sumac as a core ingredient. Sumac, a deep red, intensely tart spice, is extremely popular in other parts of the world but difficult to find and source here in the United States.

“My husband is Lebanese,” Touma said, “and I send him home several times a year to bring high-quality sumac back with him.”

Touma started her business during the Covid lockdown. She said it was an outgrowth of her personal values. At the time, she was a stay-at-home mother of four and had made a commitment to always serve homemade meals.

“I wanted to teach my children to not be scared of new cultures or flavors,” she said. “During shut-down, [a lot of] people were eager to explore new things while they were stuck at home. Suddenly, there was a market for new flavors for them.”

The spice blends Sal Terrae sells vary from the traditional, like za’atar, to new blends that Touma has developed herself.

“The Beach Blend is the most unusual blend that we make,” she said. The blend, which includes smoked paprika, oregano, ginger and cloves, was developed with seafood in mind.

“It was partly inspired by Old Bay,” she said. “It’s a classic, but it seemed like it was missing something. It needed some smokiness and depth.” The smoked paprika adds a bittersweet quality that complements the savory flavors of fish, like salmon.

“It [Beach Blend] has a little sourness to it,” she said. “That acidic quality helps bring some of the more subtle flavors to the surface. That’s why they always tell you to cook your salmon with slices of lemon on top.”

That sourness plays a background role in some of Sal Terrae’s other spice blends, such as, surprisingly, the Sugar and Spice blend. Because it has a similar color to the “warmer” ingredients, it’s visually appealing and rounds them out. Traditional baking ingredients like ginger and cloves make sense. Three types of cinnamon are exciting to spice nerds and seem like a natural in this kind of blend. The cardamom is a little surprising, but welcome. And then there’s the subtle background sourness from the sumac, which brings the other flavors into sharper focus.

According to Touma, turning the traditional concept of “warm” or “cool” spices on its head provides her a lot of room to introduce her customers to different ways of cooking and new flavor profiles. Indian and Middle Eastern cooking traditionally use mace, cinnamon and cloves in savory dishes, while most American cooks use them in sweet applications. By focusing on what sorts of profiles she wants to create, Touma puts together nontraditional combinations that give her customers new ways to appreciate their favorite foods.

“Even as the owner, I’m still learning something all the time from my own spice blends,” she said. “None of our blends are going to be completely perfect for everyone, but everyone can find one that is perfect for their taste.”

Touma said today’s cooks have resources that allow creativity that past generations couldn’t take advantage of. “They were largely limited to cookbooks or word of mouth,” she said. Today, if someone wants to try a new ingredient or to cook something completely new to them, they can look up options on the internet. This is exactly the role she hopes that Sal Terrae’s spice blends will play — being able to play with food traditions, without being locked into them.

Featured Photo: Courtesy photo.

News from the local food scene

By John Fladd
[email protected]

• Paint and Sip Night: Paint and drink wine in a relaxed, convivial atmosphere. Wine on Main (9 N. Main St., Concord, wineonmainnh.com, 897-5828) will host Paint and Sip events with art facilitator Andrea Stetson on Thursday, April 18, and Friday, April 19, at 6 p.m. These events are open to adults 21 and older. Every $50 ticket includes all materials, instruction and wine tasting. Register via Wine on Main’s website.

• Springfest: To Share Brewing Co. (720 Union St., Manchester, tosharebrewing.com, 836-6947) will hold its second annual Springfest celebration Saturday, April 20, from 1 to 9 p.m. The brewery will observe the arrival of spring and the release of its Festbier Spring Lager with bratwursts, sauerkraut and more. There will be stein-holding competitions at 2 and 6 p.m., and live music with Upright Dogs from 5 to 7 p.m.

• Foraging: Learn how to identify select wild edibles — mushrooms, berries, greens or even trees — via a slideshow and in-person samples to see and feel. The Hooksett Library (31 Mount Saint Mary’s Way, Hooksett, discover.hooksettlibrary.org, 485-6092) will host “From Field to Table: Foraging and Identifying Wild Edibles,” a presentation by Emily Makrez, owner of F-Word Farm and educator on all things fermenting, farming and foraging-related, on Wednesday April 24, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Admission is free, but registration is required via the Library’s website.