Author: John Fladd

St. Nicholas Church has added an extra day to its Food Festival

Traditions can carry a lot of cultural inertia; food traditions especially so. So it is a big deal when a church changes the structure of a long-running event.

Nobody knows this more than Amy Valkanos, one of the organizers of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church’s Annual Lamb Barbecue, which is in its 77th year.

“We have homemade recipes,” she said, “that have been passed down from the generation that started [it] originally. That’s what we use to make our meals. The big draw is the lamb barbecue, of course, which, man, when that starts cooking, throughout the whole neighborhood the smell of it will just penetrate your nostrils and you’ve just got to go follow that smell and find out where it is coming from. It’s just so good.”

But this year, the festival has been expanded by a day. In addition to the 400 pounds of lamb that will be cooked on Saturday, Greek food enthusiasts will have an extra day devoted to gyros. A gyro is a mixture of grilled meats and tzatziki sauce served on fluffy pita bread.

“Adding a Gyro Day,” Valkanos said, “was a decision made because we know that our community and parishioners love gyros. But, given the fact that we are a small church and with a small volunteer staff, or smaller let’s say in comparison to other churches in the area, we knew that to actually include gyros on that same day would really be a huge undertaking for us. But to meet the demand and to also stick to a different palate, we decided, ‘Well, yeah, you know what? Let’s just do a Gyro Day.’ So on Sunday, that’s what we’re having. We’re cooking the gyro meat, and we’ll serve gyro sandwiches, with a bag of chips and a drink. It’s a different interest for people who want to try a different type of food and another opportunity for our community neighbors to come see us.”

The gyro meat — a combination of lamb and beef, Valkanos said — will not be cooked on traditional upright spits, but in the St. Nicholas parish hall, then sliced thin for the sandwiches served outside.

The goal, according to Valkanos, is to serve dedicated gyro fans gyros as close as possible to a perfect gyro. And that starts with the individual ingredients. The bread, for instance, is not like the flat pocket bread that you usually find in a supermarket.

“It is not the kind you would buy that opens up and you fill it up,” she said. “Rather, this is a soft and fluffy pita that acts as a plate and you wrap around the meat.”

For Valkanos, one of the things that make a gyro so special is the combination of complementary textures that goes into it.

“It’s just a combination of all the ingredients,” she said. “You’ve got great seasoned meat and then you add the tzatziki sauce to it, which is very cool on your palate. And then you add the tomatoes and a little bit of lettuce and a little onion in it, and then the soft bread to wrap it up and eat it. It’s a really good all-around, whole food sandwich.”

Regardless of whether people attend the Lamb Barbecue, Gyro Day, or both, Valkonos said, St. Nicholas’ weekend of food is an expression of an important Greek value: hospitality.

“Our festival is unique,” she said, “in that it really is reminiscent of Old World Greece, where there is this little church in the landscape in the countryside somewhere in Greece and people just come together and have a very homegrown organic experience. It feels very much like that.”

Annual Lamb Barbecue
When: Traditional Greek food and pastries Saturday, June 21, from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, June 22, will be Gyro Day — fresh gyro, a bag of chips and a drink will cost $13; gyros will be served from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Where: St. Nicholas Orthodox Church’s, 1160 Bridge St., Manchester, 625-6115, stnicholasgreekchurch.com

Featured photo: A St. Nicholas Gyro. Courtesy photo.

Woodman’s Artisan Bakery takes its farmers market success to its own shop

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

Bill Woodman makes bread — a lot of bread.

“We rotate the breads every day,” he said, “probably a good 12 to 14 potential varieties of breads that we can offer from types of sourdough, German rye, baguettes, Italian semolina with sesame seeds — that’s a nice one — a German flaxseed rye called leinsamenbrot. That’s a hearty, hearty bread. Leinsamenbrot means flaxseed bread. So with rye flour, it’s a much denser bread.”

But what Woodman, the owner of Woodman’s Artisan Bakery in Nashua, really dreams about is panettone, a tall, round loaf of enriched Italian bread.

“Right now,” he said, “the unicorn, so to speak, is probably the Italian panettone. There’s a baker in Italy — we follow him on social media — I’ve dabbled a little bit in trying to make a panettone, but I’m too busy to actually focus on it the way it needs properly. But to be able to get a nice, proper Italian panettone like he makes, with a nice open, airy crumb from the sourdough, to be able to use the exact sourdough culture, you know, it’s a pasta madre, I believe they call it in Italian. It’s like a drier starter dough and it’s like wrapped up in a towel, so it partially dries out on the outside of the actual starter dough. And it’s supposed to impart these different finer nuances into the bread. But to be able to get that, it’s something that would be very unique and very special. You just don’t see around here very often or at all. You get the stuff in the grocery stores around Christmastime, but it’s definitely not the same thing.”

Woodman started his business by selling bread at area farmers markets.

“We started at Salem [the Salem Farmers Market] on Sundays,” he said. “We started there, trying to figure out if there is a demand for breads. We make European-style artisan breads and pastries — croissants, Danishes and German pretzels. After about a season, we had picked up business, so we decided to do the winter season. At that point we picked up a couple more farmers markets for the winter season. Business picked up a little bit. You started to see your regulars coming more and more. And then the following year came and we just decided to go all in. We picked up six markets a week, so there was no sleep for me whatsoever. And it kept going from there.”

Woodman recently opened a storefront bakery in Nashua. The bakery offers sandwiches and coffees, but the main focus is on bread.

“We tell people our breads are real bread,” he said. “The pastries are real pastries, and what we mean by that is that our sourdough for instance is flour, water and salt. So it’s real ingredients, real breads. We have a lot of people who are gluten-sensitive who can eat a lot of our sourdoughs and not get sick not have a reaction. They can eat our croissants and Danishes because the flour that we use in those products comes from France and it has a lower protein content, so they can eat those and have no reaction as well.”

Woodman was approached by an importer who introduced him to French flour.

“The sales rep came in and introduced himself,” Woodman said, “and started telling us a little bit about what the product was. He had explained the company is out of France, and they sell through his company here. If we were interested, a sales rep as well as a baker would come for a couple days, work with us and teach us about the products. I thought it was a great opportunity for my staff and myself to learn about something new. And so we said, sure, let’s give it a try, so they came in and we started working with it.” It was a game-changer, Woodman said.

Woodman’s Artisan Bakery

Where: 4 Sunapee St., Nashua,
Hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
More: 718-1694, woodmansartisanbakery.com
During the summer, Woodman also sells his bread at the Concord Farmers Market on Saturdays from 8:30 a.m. to noon, at the Bedford Farmers Market on Tuesdays from 3 to 6 p.m., and at the Salem Farmers Market on Sundays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Featured photo: Woodman’s Artisan Bakery makes traditional European style breads. Photo courtesy Bill Woodman.