Author: John Fladd

Honey dinner

Celebrating bees with a sweet menu

According to Jeff Cole of Barr Hill Gin, Bee’s Knees Week — a national campaign, which includes Friday’s Bee’s Knees Dinner at the the Westbrook Inn (49 S. Main St, Derry., 965-6228, thewestbrookinn.com) on Friday, Oct. 25 — began as a small, almost grass-roots promotion.

“It started out as a restaurant-only program,” Cole said, “where the restaurant would make a ‘bee’s knees’ cocktail, which is a pre-Prohibition cocktail … and they’d donate a portion of every cocktail to the Bee Cause Project, which helped raise awareness for people about pollination and the importance of it. And one of the things they did was put bee observation hives into elementary schools and children’s museums.” This is a cause that was and is important to Barr Hill, because unlike most other spirits, which are distilled from grain, Barr Hill’s gins and vodka are distilled from honey.

The Bee’s Knees event grew, and today it is one of the biggest charitable promotions in the liquor world.

“Something like 3,000 to 3,500 restaurants and retailers participate,” Cole said. “It is a big deal. It’s the largest activation, I guess you’d call it, in the spirits industry.”

How to make a bee’s knees cocktail
Combine 2 ounces very cold gin (Barr Hill would work well for this), ¾ ounce honey syrup, and ¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice with ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake enthusiastically for 30 seconds or so, until you hear the ice start to break up inside the shaker. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Sip with raised eyebrows and a contented smile.

Mark Saragusa, Manager of the Westbrook Inn, said the Bee’s Knees Dinner marks a turning point in the Inn’s year. “We regularly host weddings and events May through October,” he said, “and then during the fall and winter season, outside of our peak wedding season, we were introduced to [Barr Hill]. So this dinner will be unique in that we’ll bring honey tasters for each guest, but also we ask Chef Chris [Chris Viaud of Greenleaf Restaurant in Milford] to feature honey from Bar Hill in all of his courses. He will use local ingredients and set a menu that’s specific to what’s available that week. There will be an instrumental musician playing during the night. There will be a cocktail hour, then the doors open followed by a four-course menu.”

Saragusa said that one of the special aspects of this dinner is the interaction guests have with the chef. “Typically when you go to a restaurant,” he said “you’re not really seeing the chef at all. Between each course, we ask the chef to come out and explain what they did, where they sourced the ingredients, but then also the thought behind that individual plate. And so having Chris and then even Emilee [Pastry Chef Emilee Viaud] with the dessert just gives a different interaction with the guests and the chefs.”

Chef Viaud is looking forward to the Dinner. “This dinner is going to be a fun one,” he said, “where we’re incorporating honey in each course. We are making sure that we’re kind of finding creative ways to highlight the honey so that way you can taste it throughout each course.” He used the main course as an example: “We do a take on a honey-glazed ham. So we’re going to do a coriander and a pink peppercorn honey glaze mix. [We take] a pork loin from one of the local farms and roast that just gently and then brush it with the honey glaze, then reduce that down with a little bit of butter to create a pan sauce. My wife is the pastry chef at my restaurants as well, so she’ll be making a honey panna cotta.”

“I think it’s going to be a fun-filled dinner,” Chef Viaud said.

2nd Annual Bee’s Knees Dinner
When: Friday, Oct. 25, from 6 to 9 p.m.
Where: Westbrook Inn (49 S. Main St., Derry, 965-6228, thewestbrookinn.com
Tickets: $95 at Eventbrite.com.
The four-course dinner will be cooked by two-time James Beard Award-nominated Chef Chris Viauld of Greenleaf Restaurant and Pastry Chef Emilee Viaud.

Featured Photo: Chris Viaud. Courtesy photo.

The Weekly Dish 24/10/24

News from the local food scene

• New wraps: Wrap City Sandwich Co. (1525 S. Willow St, Manchester, 782-5838, wrapcitysandwiches.com/location/willow-street) has opened in a new location in Manchester, across from the Mall of New Hampshire. Its website describes its offerings as “regional and international.”

• CodeX closed: CodeX B.A.R.on Elm Street in Nashua has closed. It was a speakeasy-style cocktail bar.

• Ansanm closed: Ansamnin Milford closed at the end of September. Owned by James Beard Award-nominated Chef Chris Viaud, it was known for its Haitian-influenced fusion cuisine. In a telephone interview Chef Viaud said, “For us, Ansanm has always been a passion project. It came time at the end of our lease where we just had to make a decision if we wanted to continue on with this passion or dedicate our time to other projects. So we’ll continue to live on through pop-up events throughout the community as well as catering opportunities.”

• BrucePac meat recalled: According to an Oct. 14 press release, the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services has issued a warning against consuming recalled BrucePac products. “The products have been recalled by the company because they have the potential to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes,” the press release read. Find a list of the specific items in the recall at fsis.usda.gov.

‘Fries are just kind of the perfect food’

Street serves them up with kimchi ketchup

According to Lynn Theth, the Chef at Street in Concord, the secret to a really good french fry is cooking it twice, then watching it like a hawk.

“We parcook [fries] just enough so they’re lightly golden,” she said. “We blanch them in canola oil just until they’re lightly crispy, just enough to hold their integrity. And then we fry them again to order, just so they get nice and crispy and nice and hot. Once they are where we like them to be, nice and golden brown on the outside, we take them and we toss them in a subarashii spice that we make in-house. [Subarashii is a Japanese term that means “splendid or glorious.”] It’s our own blend that we make just for the fries. And then those come with kimchi ketchup that we make as well and the scallion mayo to top it all off.”

The idea behind the double frying, Theth said, is to make sure the inside of a french fry is cooked enough to be fluffy and tender. That’s why she blanches the potatoes in cooler oil. She gives the fries enough time to cool down before cooking them to order. The second frying at a higher temperature brings the surface of the fries to the point where they are crispy without overcooking the interior.

That’s fine in theory, but Theth said that working the fry station in Street’s kitchen on a busy night can get complicated. The fry oil cools down a little with every batch of food that is dropped into it, then heats back up, so it’s never the same temperature for long.

“You kind of have to judge it just by the looks of it,” she said. “We have a very high volume for what we do and when we’re cooking at the volume that we are cooking at, the temperature of the fry oil fluctuates. When you’re cooking them — personally for me, I like to judge by the color depending on when you drop it. Usually, when I’m training people, I’ll talk to them about the integrity of the french fry, because if you don’t blanch them far enough they’ll get soggy and they’ll get all mushed up when you’re trying to double-cook them.”

Then there’s the sound. “When I’m cooking the fries myself,” Chef Theth said, “I usually kind of shake the basket a little bit. And then you can hear those fries like hitting the sides of the basket. And if they’re crisp enough, you can kind of hear them.”

Frying potatoes perfectly is just the first step, though, Theth said. Street is known for its condiments.

“All of the recipes have been the same since we opened,” she said. “For our kimchi ketchup, we use just regular ketchup, but we add probably about a gallon of kimchi to each batch. It’s a cabbage kimchi, just your standard cabbage kimchi. There is fish sauce and things like that in the mix, so it is not vegan, but it’s still delicious. We blend it all and puree it all down, and add a couple other things — rice wine vinegar, some shallots, and other things — then just mix that all together.”

Although Theth and her team develop recipes with elements from all over the world, she said french fries hold a special place in her heart. “You can kind of do whatever you want with them. You can put whatever you want on them. I’m a sauce girl; I love just condiments and things like that. You can use them [fries] as a vessel for whatever you want. If you get a really nice starchy potato, it can uphold whatever you’re going to use it for.”

“Fries are just kind of the perfect food, in my opinion.”

Street
76 N. Main St., Concord
333-2125, streetfood360.com

Featured Photo: Curry fries and Subarashii fries. Courtesy photo.

Mutiny of Clowns

  • ¾ ounce black rum – regular strength black rum; we’ll get to the overproof stuff in a couple of minutes
  • ¾ ounce Cynar – this is one of those low-octane, bitter Italian liqueurs that old men drink out of tiny glasses outside cafes in little alpine villages; as with most of these old-man liqueurs, it’s made with more than a dozen secret herbs, but because the label on the bottle has a giant picture of an artichoke on it, it’s a pretty good guess what one of them is
  • ¾ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
  • ½ ounce ginger syrup (see below)
  • ¼ ounce simple syrup
  • An orange slice – preferably one just big enough to cover the top of a rocks glass without falling into it.
  • A slug of overproof (151) rum

This is a presentation cocktail. It is like the trick of pulling the tablecloth out from under the dishes, but with flaming alcohol.

Start by making some ginger syrup. There are two ways of going about this:

(1) Add sugar to fresh squeezed ginger juice and simmer it briefly, until the sugar dissolves entirely into saturation, then cool it and store it in your refrigerator. This will be a powerful, spicy, slightly bitter syrup that will knock you back on your heels. The problem is that you will need a good vegetable juicer, which not everyone has lying around. If you do, you’ll need to juice about a pound of fresh ginger, and your kitchen will smell overwhelmingly of ginger for half an hour or so. Not that that is a bad thing.

(2) Alternatively, you can shred a large hand (that’s what the big clumps of ginger root you get at the grocery store are called) on a box grater. Bring it to a boil with a cup or so of sugar and an equal amount of water. Stir it well, to make certain that everything has gotten thoroughly mixed together, then take it off the heat, cover it, and leave it all day, or overnight. Strain it through a fine-mesh strainer, then squeeze the remaining ginger pulp in a tea towel, to get the last of the ginger juice out of it. Bottle and refrigerate it. This will be a gentler, more civilized ginger syrup that will work just as well but won’t carry as much street cred as the more serious stuff.

Now, assuming that you’ve gone to the liquor store, and made your syrups, and sliced an orange, all you need to do is find a rocks glass and make sure you have matches or a lighter on hand.

Fill a cocktail shaker with ice. Add all the ingredients, except the overproof rum and the orange slice, to the shaker, and shake vigorously for a full minute. Strain it into the rocks glass with no ice. Cover the glass with the orange slice, and pour a slug of 151 onto it.

Quickly but without panic, light the orange on fire. There will be a delicate blue flame and the smell of grilling citrus.

Turn the lights down but not completely out, and take half a dozen pictures of your flaming drink. When you’re done, turn the lights back up and blow on the orange to put it out. Stuff the orange slice into your drink, and top it off with two or three ice cubes. Swirl it around a few times to chill everything back down, then drink it in silence.

In spite of this drink’s dramatic presentation and name, it is surprisingly delicate, a balance of sweet syrups and rum and the bitterness from the Cynar. The ginger is not overwhelming but is definitely there, adding to the depth of flavor.

This is a drink that demands confidence to make, but once you have, it murmurs encouragement to you and reminds you of how competent and good-looking you are.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Dining among the stars at the Taste of NH

Restaurants gather at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center

The Taste of New Hampshire is a yearly opportunity for the public to spend an evening mingling, seeing and being seen, and trying food from dozens of local restaurants. It is also one of the biggest fundraisers of the year for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central and Northern New Hampshire.

Kamini Jorgensen is the Events Manager for the organization. She said Taste of New Hampshire is a big night for the capital area restaurant community. This year the event will be held at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord. Participating restaurants will be spread throughout the museum, and attendees will be able to travel from one station to another, enjoying the Discovery Center’s exhibits and trying samples from each restaurant.

“We’ll have a bunch of local restaurants downstairs,” Jorgensen said, “along with a couple upstairs where the big bar will be, which is with New Hampshire Distributors. They are spread out throughout the whole museum. Down the hallway [on the first floor] toward their planetarium there will be about five restaurants. We’ll have a bunch in the main area and then some upstairs as well.”

John Constant will be on the first floor. He is the owner of Constantly Pizza (39 S. Main St., Concord, 224-9366, constantlypizza.net). He said that in terms of catering jobs Taste of New Hampshire is pretty low-stress.

“I would say this is a medium-sized catering job,” Constant said. “This one’s just a really special job because we’re doing it to raise money for the Boys & Girls Club, so this is more of like enjoyment than actual work, you know?”

Constant will be presenting dishes from his catering menu. “We’re going to have our homemade macaroni and cheese,” he said. “We’re going to have a ravioli pasta dish, we’re going to have our calzone platters, and we’re going to be sampling our homemade meatballs.”

Devin Flanagan, the owner of Flanagan’s South Ender Deli Market (250 South St., Concord, 856-8020, flanaganssouthender.com), will be focusing on meat.

“We started a boutique butcher shop within our store,” Flanagan said, “so we will be showcasing our marinated chicken breast, our marinated steak tips and our pork tenderloin.”

Last year was Flanagan’s first time at Taste of New Hampshire, and he was impressed with the way the event’s organizers spaced out the restaurants.

“I really thought it was a great turnout last year,” he said, “and I really like how they separated all the restaurants in different rooms, so you could actually explore the area. You know, a lot of people had never been there before, and it’s just really thoughtfully laid out.”

Kamini Jorgensen said Taste of New Hampshire is a high point of her job. “I really enjoy seeing a bunch of new faces come in,” she said.

The Taste of New Hampshire
When: Tuesday, Oct. 22, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Where: McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, 2 Institute Drive, Concord, 271-7827, starhop.com

Who’s there?
Participants at Taste of New Hampshire will include

110 Grill
70 North Kitchen
Alan’s Of Boscawen
The Barley House
Boys & Girls Clubs Of Central NH
CC Tomatoes
The Common Man
Concord Country Club
Constantly Pizza
Flag Hill Winery
Flanagan’s Southender
Granite State Candy
Hermanos Cocina Mexicana
M.S. Walker
New Hampshire Distributors
O Steaks And Seafood
Pats Peak Banquet Center
Red Arrow Diner
RNDC (previously known as Horizon Beverage)
Smokeshow Barbeque
The Brussel: Custom Catering & Events
The Wine’ing Butcher
Vinnie’s Pizza
Tandy’s Top Shelf

Featured Photo: Courtesy photo.

What the Pho! finds the balance

Traditional and fusion come together at Manchester restaurant

For Chris Caddy, owner of What The Pho!, a new noodle and tiki bar in Manchester, designing a menu is about striking balances — between sweet and sour, spicy and savory, fusion and authentic. It’s a lot to keep in mind. For instance, how many different flavors or textures should you include in a dish?

“I’m trying to get multiple layers of flavors,” Caddy said. “But when you get to more than three flavor profiles, everything gets muddied.” He used What the Pho!’s beef carpaccio as an example. Traditionally a carpaccio is an appetizer made of thinly sliced, often raw, meat or fish with a sauce. For a lot of restaurants a carpaccio’s simplicity can be a trap: Too much ornamentation or competing flavors will cover up the subtleties of the protein, but if it’s not complemented in some way, there’s a danger it will just sit there and slide into a single flavor profile that loses the eater’s attention after the first bite.

Caddy worked to keep each element on his carpaccio plate simple but to provide a bite or two of side dishes to give enough of a contrast to let the beef shine through. The beef is lightly seasoned.

“There’s a toasted sesame aioli and chili oil,” he said, “and then we finish it with Himalayan sea salt. In the center there’s a little salad of cucumber and sweet onions to offset it with something cool and tossed in our poke sauce. And then we’ve got some kettle chips on the side for crunch. You’ve got different mouthfeels, you’ve got different textures and different flavors.”

As a non-Asian chef, Caddy said perfecting a quintessentially Vietnamese dish like pho — a rich, spicy noodle soup, pronounced ‘fuh’ — involved a lot of trial and error.

“It was an intensive, every single day, multiple-hour learning curve,” he said, “just researching, researching, researching, buying different ingredients I was unfamiliar with, and just tons and tons of asking questions.” One of those questions was how authentic he wanted his pho to be.

“The thing is, we’re not a pho place,” Caddy said. “We’re an Asian fusion place. And pho, it’s in the name, and I want to draw people in with that. I’m addicted to pho myself. But what I wanted isn’t a perfectly traditional pho.” And the key to a great pho is in the broth. “Every time I’ve heard a Vietnamese person talk about pho, they go into how hard it is to get the broth right. Of course, if you’re from the Vietnamese culture, you’re carrying cultural expectations with you.” Because he wasn’t trying to be authentically Vietnamese, Caddy had a little more wiggle room in how he prepared his broth. “I roast the bones so we get a darker, richer flavor,” he said. “And all the usual suspects are there — the coriander, the ginger, the cinnamon, the cardamom, and all the charred onions and all that — but one of the things I wanted to do was give it more depth. Finally we reached the point where we said, ‘Let’s not do anything more with it.’ So we’re trying to stay in the ballpark, but I’m trying to elevate things slightly So it’s not, you know, it’s not the same exact [soup] as when you walk into like a little mom-and-pop Vietnamese place. It’s going to be a slightly different thing.”

For Caddy and his staff, the mission is to give the same level of attention to the food, their cocktails and the restaurant’s decor.

“When you can do that with the drinks,” Caddy said, “and with the food, the fun thing for me is when I watch people just enjoying everything we’ve created. It makes me really happy. That’s kind of the payoff for me.”

What The Pho!
836 Elm St., Manchester (next to Bookery and Cat Alley)
606-8769, whatthephorestaurant.com
Open seven days a week: Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m to 9 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Saturday, 4 to 10 p.m., and Sunday, 4 to 9 p.m.
Orders can be placed online for pickup.

Featured Photo: Courtesy photo.

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