Author: John Fladd

It’s time for Taco Tour 2024

When the Greater Manchester Chamber organized its first outing with the Taco Tour last year, there was a steep learning curve, said Cole Riel, the Director of Taco Tour Manchester.

“Last year, we were able to get a handle on logistics, like line control and helping restaurants put out product,” he said. “It’s not what we’re used to, serving 20,000 taco-loving folks.”

This year’s Taco Tour on Thursday, May 2, from 4 to 8 p.m., in downtown Manchester promises to be the biggest yet. Started in 2011 as a way to draw attention to Manchester’s vibrant food scene, the Tour has grown each year, drawing in more and more local restaurants to participate, and increasingly larger crowds to taste their tacos or Mexican-themed dishes and vote on their favorites. The restaurant with the winning taco will win bragging rights, a trophy and $1,000 to donate to a charity of its choice. Originally conceived and organized by the Hippo, the Tour was run by Intown Manchester in 2019, then took a Covid hiatus, returning last year organized by the Greater Manchester Chamber.

According to Riel, this year’s Taco Tour will include more than just tacos.

“There will be a concert stage at the corner of Elm and Bridge streets,” Riel said. “Fun acts like the ones who will be performing just add liveliness to the event.” The acts will include Harrison Goodell (harrisongoodellmusic.com) at 4 p.m., Cody James and Joe Delault (thecodyjamesgang.com) at 5 p.m., and deSoL (desol-music.com) at 6 p.m.

According to Steve Freedman of radio station 92.5 The River, which is helping sponsor this year’s live performances, the performers are particularly well-suited for Taco Tour.

“We [The River] are proud to break new artists and promote local artists,” Freedman said. “The first two acts — Harrison Goodell, Cody James and Joe Deleault — are ‘homegrown,’ and the main act, deSoL, is a Latin rock band that we at The River have supported for over 10 years. ”

There will be other fun events, such as a pet watering station and a doggie costume contest run by the Friends of the Manchester Animal Shelter, and a Stonyfield Yogurt Family Zone at the Manchester YMCA (30 Mechanic St.).

This will be the second year that The Potato Concept has participated in Taco Tour, though the first year from their new brick-and-mortar location, on Hanover Street.

“We’re pretty proud,” said co-owner Brandon Rainer. “This event is the town jewel for Manchester.” The Potato Concept’s offering in this year’s Tour will be a “Potaco,” a twice-baked potato skin with seasoned ground beef, cheese, lettuce, tomato and sour cream. There will also be a “Vegan Potaco” with a black-bean salad filling.

900 Degrees Pizzeria (50 Dow St.) will serve chicken tacos with a house-made fresh pico de gallo.

“We love this event,” said 900 Degrees General Manager Dan Gove. “It’s a lot of fun; it gives us a chance to give people something completely different than we normally do.” He and his staff are preparing 1,000 tacos.

The overall mission of Taco Tour Manchester has remained the same since 2011: to make the public aware of the depth and diversity of Manchester’s restaurant scene.

“We want to provide an awesome, well-rounded experience for families and restaurant enthusiasts,” Riel said. “We want to remind them of restaurants they may have forgotten about since the last Tour. They will taste [our food] and make plans to come back shortly after.”

The tacos

More than 70 local restaurants are participating in this year’s Taco Tour. See the map for their locations. Here are their scheduled offerings:

815 Cocktails & Provisions – BBQChicken, Alabama white sauce, marinated collard greens, vidalia onions, lime

900 Degrees – chicken tacos

Alas De Frida – Birria Taco

Alley Cat Pizza – “El Gato” pizza folded with taco toppings

Annapurna – Steamed chicken and fried momo (dumplings) taco with an authentic Nepali sauce, and vegetable or pork steamed or fried momo taco with authentic Nepali sauce

Antojitos Colombianos – chicken, pork and vegetarian Tacos

Bad Brgr – “Smash Burger Taco” and a chicken taco

Barcode Lounge & Grill – “Mac & Cheese Tacos” with pulled pork, Jerk Chicken with pickles, as well as dessert tacos

Ben and Jerry’s – Mexicone Dream Ice Cream Nachos (Americone Dream ice cream, waffle cone “chips,” caramel drizzle)

bluAqua Restrobar – “The Jaws Taco” with fresh shark

Boards and Brews – “Garlic Parmesan Ranch Tacos” with chicken tenders and fries, and sweet potato fry tacos

Buba Noodle Bar – “Bahn Mi Taco” with lemongrass beef, Asian pickles, cucumber, cilantro, umami sauce

Campo Enoteca – Polpetti (Meatball) taco

Cat Alley Cafe – Breakfast Taco with scrambled eggs, chorizo, potatoes, and queso fresco

Consuelo’s Taqueria – “Taco’n Madre” with sauteed pork served on a corn tortilla topped with green tomatillo, guacamole salsa with onions and cilantro

DeadProof Pizza Co. @ Bonfire – Street birria taco and vegan maple gochujang cauliflower taco

Diz’s Cafe – “Diz’s Magic Taco,” a beef taco with DizSpinaca, topped with shredded lettuce and pico de gallo

DoubleTree by Hilton Manchester Downtown – birria beef taco

El Rincon – “Taco Borracho,” with carnitas, pork, and beef with caramelized onion, jalapeno, and chorizo

Firefly Bistro & Bar – “Cheesy Chicken Taco” with seasoned chicken, cheddar cheese, chipotle crema, and crunchy tortilla chips in a soft flour tortilla

Granite State Candy Shoppe – “Chocolate Taco Crunch Mix,” with chocolate-drizzled waffle cone pieces with cinnamon and chocolate

Granite YMCA (The YMCA of Downtown Manchester) – Sugar cookie taco with strawberry and whipped cream filling, oreo crumble, and orange and green sprinkles

Hooked + Ignite – fried fish tacos

Industry East – Peanut chicken satay tacos, with confit chicken, Thai spiced peanut sauce, scallions, and sesame

Keys Piano Bar & Grill – Jerk chicken soft taco with cabbage slaw and ginger, or a vegan option with grilled vegetables

Kisaki – Sushi taco, with spicy crab and lettuce with tempura seaweed skin

Margarita’s Manchester -–soft flour tortilla with carnitas, garlic crema, picked radishes and fresh cilantro

Maya’s – jerk chicken & jerk beef tacos

Manchester Fire Department Central Station – smoked pork taco with cilantro lime coleslaw and a special hot sauce

Osaka – Spicy Crab with crunch and avocado wrapped with seaweed (hand rolled) and Spicy Tuna with crunch and chopped raw tuna, wrapped with seaweed (also hand rolled)

Patz Deli – “Mexican Chicken Salad” with chicken, carrots, peas, corn, mayo, sour cream, crushed Fritos, Sriracha, in a soft flour tortilla

Pho Golden Bowl – “Pho Taco,” with beef, sour carrots, rice noodles and basil

Piccola Italia Ristorante – Chicken Parmigiana with a chicken cutlet, sauce and mozzarella, and a Chicken Caesar Taco with grilled chicken, romaine lettuce, caesar dressing, Parmigiano flakes and croutons, also a dessert Cannoli Taco

Queen City Cupcakes – Churro Cupcake

Rare Breed Coffee – Iced Horchata Cortado and Caliente Hot Chocolate

Shopper’s Pub – “American Taco” with tender broiled pork in a toasted shell with sweet pickle relish and a blend of spices

Soho Bistro & Lounge – chicken, beef, steak or scallop tacos

Stashbox – biscuit & gravy tacos

Strange Brew Tavern – whiskey-marinated shredded chicken in an ancho pepper-infused crema

Sub Zero Nitrogen Ice Cream – Ice cream tacos and nachos with waffle bowls as tacos and nacho shells

Taj India – Chicken Tikka Taco

Thai Food Connection – a wonton shell with chicken and Thai sauce

The Farm Bar and Grille – BBQ pulled pork, cheddar cheese, coleslaw, in a flour tortilla

The HopKnot – “Walking Taco” with jalepeňo honey, beer cheese, pico de gallo, and beans

The Patio @ Hilton Garden Inn Manchester – “PB&J Taco” with blueberry tarragon jam, peanut chicken, sour cream & onion potato chips, and Sriracha aioli

The Pint Publik House – Soft flour tortilla filled with Jamaican curried chicken, cheddar-jack cheese and shredded lettuce

The Potato Concept – “Potaco” with ground beef, cheddar, lettuce, tomato and sour cream

The Stoned Wall Bar & Grille – A jerked chicken and kiwi salsa taco

Thirsty Moose Taphouse – “Beef & Cheese Taco” with pico de gallo and sour cream

Thousand Crane – “Teriyaki Chicken Taco”

To Share Brewing Co. – “The Elvis” with banana slices, honey drizzle and optional bacon, on a flour tortilla

TACO TOUR
When: Thursday, May 2, from 4 to 8 p.m.
Where: downtown Manchester plus a few spots outside downtown
Cost: $3 per taco, cash only
Voting: tacotourmanchester.com/voting
The Official Taco Tour 2024 Map, available on the Taco Tour website (tacotourmanchester.com/map), includes information about locations of participating restaurants, ATM’s, portable toilets, water stations and more.

Featured Photo: Previous Taco Tour. Courtesy photo.

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.