Author: John Fladd

Cookies

• Large handful (20 g) fresh mint leaves
• 1½ cups (320 g) white sugar
• ½ cup (1 stick) butter
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup (227 g) sour cream
• 1 Tablespoon bourbon
• 2¾ cups (330 g) all-purpose flour
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt

Frosting

• ¾ cup (1½ sticks) butter
• Small handful (10-15 g) fresh mint – stems are OK
• 3 cups (342 g) powdered sugar
• 3 Tablespoons bourbon

Cookies:

Combine the large handful of mint and the white sugar in your blender and grind together. In a mixer, cream the minty sugar and the butter together. Add the eggs, one at a time, scraping down the sides of the bowl. Mix in the sour cream and 1 Tablespoon of bourbon.

Add the dry ingredients, a little at a time, at low speed to avoid poofing yourself with flour.

Chill the cookie dough for at least one hour. Preheat your oven to 425°F.

Scoop 1- to 2-teaspoon blobs of dough onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a silicone mat about 2 inches apart. Tell the blobs how pretty they are; they might feel insecure. (Not for nothin’, but this is some of the most delicious unbaked cookie dough you are likely to run across anywhere legal.)

Bake one sheet at a time for about 8 minutes, then swap out for a new tray. Let each batch of cookies cool on the baking sheet. If you run out of baking sheets, gently pull the parchment paper or silicone mat from the baking sheet, then blob out the next batch of cookie dough.

When the cookies have cooled, remove them to a large plate or baking sheet, then frost them.

Frosting:

Melt the remaining 1½ sticks of butter in a small saucepan. Stir in the rest of the fresh mint, and spread it out so that it makes as much contact as possible with the melted butter. Remove the pan from heat, and set it aside for 30 to 45 minutes. Go work on a crossword puzzle.

While you are out of the room, the mint will be infusing into the butter. Fats and alcohol both do a really good job of stripping flavor compounds from herbs and spices. In this case, the butter is taking on the flavors of fresh mint — not a candy caney minty flavor but the taste of actual fresh mint. After the mint and the melted butter have had an opportunity to really get to know each other, strain the butter into the bowl of your mixer and add the powdered sugar and bourbon to it. Starting on the mixer’s slowest speed, beat the frosting ingredients together faster and faster, until they are fluffy.

If the frosting seems a little too soft, refrigerate it for 10 to 15 minutes.

Use a small spatula or the back of a spoon to frost the cookies. If you are taking them somewhere — a Kentucky Derby party — let the frosting firm up for about half an hour before loading them in a single layer in a pizza box. Otherwise eat them with an actual mint julep and wonder what the poor people are doing this afternoon.

By themselves, these cookies are nice but surprisingly standoffish — gently minty, with a very faint background flavor of bourbon. The frosting, on the other hand, is very in-your-face and emphatic and pairs beautifully with its more subtle partner.

Featured photo: Mint Julep Cookies. Photo by John Fladd.

One of the internet’s favorite ways to chocolate

One of the hottest food trends right now is Dubai-style chocolate. Originating in Dubai in 2021, it consists of high-end dark chocolate, pistachio paste or cream, kadayif (shredded crispy filo dough) and tahini (sesame puree). Some over-the-top brands include gold leaf.

Jaime Metzger is the manager of Granite State Candy Shoppe’s Manchester store. She first became aware of Dubai chocolate in 2024.

“I think it started to become a big trend on TikTok or YouTube or both last summer,” she said. “It started to pop up all over the place and it became a craze. It became a trend like all these new things and people were asking for it. Then it kind of fizzled like trends do, and we thought it was over, but then it came back again.”

Because of the cost of ingredients and uncertainty over how long there would be demand for it, many chocolate manufacturers have been slow to adopt Dubai chocolate, Metzger said. “Actually, for the Made in New Hampshire Expo,” she said, “we made Dubai berries. They were cut strawberries with a pistachio filling, chocolate and [kadayif], the shredded filo sprinkled on top. It was a huge hit. [Our chocolatiers] are in the process of working on a Dubai bar. They just want to do experiments to find out its shelf life, how long it’s going to last.”

One of the complications of producing a Dubai chocolate bar stems from very particular labeling regulations, Metzger said.

“Traditionally,” she explained, “the filling has tahini in it. But apparently anything with sesame paste has to have a very specific label … saying what it contains.” The usual labels apparently won’t meet the regulatory requirements, she said.

Trina Bird is the head baker at Lighthouse Local in Bedford. She agrees that Dubai chocolate has come on the scene fairly recently.

“To be honest,” Bird said, “it’s been kind of a specialty thing until recently, when people started picking up on it.”

Bird said figuring out Lighthouse Local’s pistachio filling was the longest part of working up a house recipe for a Dubai chocolate candy.

“A lot of people use pistachio cream,” she explained, “but there’s also pistachio paste, which is all-natural, literally just pistachios, salt and a bit of oil. Pistachio cream typically has sugar in it or white chocolate, which gives it a sweet creaminess. At first I was trying to make it with just the pistachio paste because I didn’t want to buy the cream, which is full of ingredients I don’t like. But then what I figured out is I can buy the paste, which is very expensive but it’s all natural, and then our chocolatier can whip me up some white chocolate and I will drizzle that in as I build an emulsion, and that gives it what people want they want, that sweet spreadability, and then I mix it with the kadayif.”

Bird said that while pistachios get the lion’s share of the attention in a Dubai chocolate, the real hero is the kadayif, which gives it some needed texture.

“The filo has a really crunchy texture,” she said, “with really tiny, crunched up little pieces. You can buy it like that already done, which is expensive, or you can buy it frozen in big long strands, and then when it comes, we have to toast it on the stove and chop it up, and then it takes a little bit longer, but it’s also much cheaper.”

Aside from the actual Dubai chocolate itself, Bird said the combination of chocolate, pistachio, and tahini lends itself to many Dubai-inspired baked goods. “We made a Dubai chocolate doughnut, and people loved it. So we’ll make Dubai cake pops, scones, anything you can put pistachios and crunchy bits in.”

Featured photo: Dubai chocolate at Lighthouse Local in Bedford. Photo by John Fladd.

News from the local food scene

• Food trucks and more: First Friday Concord returns on Friday, May 2, from 4 to 8 p.m. In addition to shopportunities, the evenings feature food trucks, community activities and more. On May 2 Concord Arts Market (concordartsmarket.org) will be on the scene along with food trucks Wicked Tasty and The Gravy Train, and The Wandering Souls are slated to play in Bicentennial Square, according to firstfridayconcord.com. The event is put on by Intown Concord, intownconcord.org.

• Farmers market: Concord Farmers Market also opens for the season on Saturday, May 3, and runs Saturdays from 8:30 a.m. to noon, through Oct. 25. See concordfarmersmarket.com for vendors and more information.

• Derby food: And they’re off! The 151st Kentucky Derby will take place on Saturday, May 3, in Louisville, Kentucky. Some area businesses have celebrations planned for the event. Peddler’s Daughter (48 Main St., Nashua, 821-7535, thepeddlersdaughter.com) will host its annual Kentucky Derby Party from 3 to 7 p.m.; bold ties and large hats are encouraged. Chunky’s Cinema Pub (707 Huse Road, Manchester, 206-3888, chunkys.com) will hold a Kentucky Derby Dinner Party beginning at 4 p.m.; tickets are $30 through the Chuncky’s website.

• Cinco de Mayo: Zorvino Vineyards (226 Main St., Sandown, 887-8463, zorvino.com) will host an Uno de Mayo Margarita Dinner on Thursday, May 1, with each course paired with a different margarita, beginning at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $80 at eventbrite.com. Flag Hill Winery (297 N. River Road, Lee, 659-2949, flaghill.com) will host a May-Garitas celebration Sunday, May 4, from noon to 3 p.m. This is a mid-afternoon luncheon, complete with a photo booth, special arrival favors, fresh made guacamole and salsa, and a May-garita flight. Tickets are $60 and are also available at eventbrite.com. Margaritas Mexican Restaurants (1037 Elm St., Manchester, 647-7717, and 1 Nashua Drive, Nashua, 883-0996, margs.com) will celebrate Five Days of Cinco de Mayo from Thursday, May 1, through Monday, May 5. Visit Margarita’s website for particulars.

She doesn’t come up in conversation very much — not today, anyway; 100 years ago it was a different story — but Mary Pickford was a deceptively powerful woman. She was by far the most popular actress of the silent movie era. She could adopt an innocent look that let her play boys and street urchins as easily as princesses or flappers. Adoring fans would freak out at the sight of her in a way Americans wouldn’t see until The Beatles. At a time when you could buy a very nice house for less than $500, she negotiated a salary of $10,000 a week. When studio heads tried to play tricks with her salary on the assumption that hey, she was just a girl, Pickford — along with her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, the biggest action star of the silent era, and Charlie Chaplin, the biggest star, period — started her own studio, United Artists.

Yes, Mary Pickford hit her peak during Prohibition, but it is still not much of a surprise that there is a classic cocktail called the Mary Pickford.

What is surprising is that it’s not a great cocktail.

A classic Mary Pickford consists of ½ ounce white rum, 1½ ounces pineapple juice, 1 teaspoon grenadine and 6 drops Luxardo maraschino liqueur.

There are any number of good cocktails that use white rum, but it is probably the least flavorful type of rum, and using half an ounce of it raises a number of questions: (a) Why bother? (b) Was this some sort of nod to her delicate beauty, or the fact that she often played children in the movies? (c) Was it some sort of sexist “girls-can’t-drink” attitude on the part of someone who had never met a flapper?

There are some exceptions, but generally I build a cocktail around a base of 2 ounces of spirits. Half an ounce is a little insulting to Ms. Pickford.

Moving on: Many — perhaps most — cocktails served in a stemmed glass, like a Mary Pickford, feature about half as much volume of fruit juice as they do spirits. There is three times as much pineapple juice in this drink as there is rum.

I’ll give you the teaspoon of grenadine. It adds a tiny bit of sweetness and a gentle pink color.

Luxardo? I don’t care for it. But I do agree that this combination could do with some added complexity.

So let’s reconfigure a Mary Pickford — not Mary Pickford herself; she was close to perfect as she was — but let’s build a drink that is more worthy of the name.

First, let’s bump the rum up to a more robust ounce and a half, and let’s make it a rum with some actual flavor — a golden, or possibly a spiced rum.

Then, let’s bring the pineapple-juice-to-rum ratio more into line. Because pineapple juice has a gentle flavor and isn’t as acidic as a citrus fruit, we can still use a bit more of it than the rum, but we’ll bring it closer to parity. Then, because it’s not acidic enough, let’s add some lime juice to give it a little bit of a backbone.

We’ll keep the grenadine. It’s been doing a good job and should be allowed to keep its job.

Finally, let’s add complexity in the form of rosewater. Normally, you have to be extremely careful to limit rosewater to a drop or two, but for some reason — perhaps known only to Mary Pickford herself — this cocktail will support a much larger amount of it than usual.

Let’s go with:

• 1 and 1/2 ounces golden rum
• 2 ounces pineapple juice
• Juice of 1/4 lime
• 1/3 teaspoon rosewater

Combine all ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker, then shake until very cold. Ask your digital assistant to play “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” by Duke Ellington.

Strain it into a stemmed cocktail glass.

Now this is a cocktail that Mary Pickford might get behind. The rum provides enough authority to make you take this seriously. The rosewater is feminine but not overwhelming, and the grenadine gives the whole enterprise a slightly pink color. Appropriately enough, two or three of these will give your face that same pink color.

Featured photo: A Mary Pickford. Photo by John Fladd.

A look at alcohol-free wines

According to Richard Jacob, one of the hottest trends in alcohol at the moment is no alcohol. “It’s a really rapidly growing industry,” he said. “There have been a lot of new businesses starting just mainly focused on producing non-alcoholic or zero ABV drinks. It’s really interesting.”

Jacob, who works for Vinilandia NH in Portsmouth, a wine importer specializing in small, estate-grown wines, says the buzz in the industry is that alcohol-free beverages are about to experience a huge growth in the beer and wine markets.

Jacob said, there is a lot of incentive for a beverage producer to make a zero-proof product. “For example,” he said, “Coca-Cola is non-alcoholic at the end of the day, right? It’s just a beverage and all you have to do is, you make it like a craft good beverage, then you can just slap the word non-alcoholic on it and it just becomes something a little special. With that, you don’t have to go through the TTB — the Trade and Tax Bureau or the Fed — as a producer, because you’re not actually producing an alcoholic drink. You’re producing something different, but [that] can be enjoyed in a similar manner. So that way, these businesses don’t have to go through the same kind of circuits that wineries or breweries or distilleries need to go through with the federal government in order to produce their product.”

There are essentially two ways to produce a non-alcoholic beverage, Jacob said. “The big difference in making an alcoholic product and removing the alcohol, and making a product that is just non-alcoholic at all, is an important one.” Because the investment in equipment to remove alcohol from beer or wine is substantial, he said, that is the route followed by big players in the industry. Smaller wineries and breweries generally take the other approach of not fermenting their product in the first place.

Emma Stetson, the owner of Wine on Main in Concord, also sees a growing trend of people looking for complex adult beverages without alcohol. She said that this is most evident after the holidays, when many of her customers observe “Dry January,” going without alcohol for the entire month.

“During January, definitely there was a focus on it,” she said. “And we sold a lot of non-alcoholic or de-alcoholized wine. It’s fallen off a little bit just because Dry January was such a focus, but we still sell a significant amount of it. It’s certainly a year-round thing now, and something that people reach for at any point even beyond Dry January.”

Stetson said some of her favorite alcohol-free wines at the moment are sparkling ones.

“I think with the sparkle and the bubble there’s so much going on on your palate already that you don’t miss the structure that alcohol provides, versus in a still wine. We have a delicious cabernet merlot de-alcoholized red wine and it tastes good. I drank a good amount of it in Dry January, but for a red wine you do miss the structure of the alcohol, the authority. The alcohol helps temper the boldness of the grapes. So you kind of miss that balance versus a sparkling wine. I feel like there’s enough else going on that you don’t notice that missing component quite so much.”

Genevieve Wolfe, the bar manager for Vine 32 Wine and Graze Bar (Bedford Square, 25 S River Road, Bedford, 935-8464, vinethirtytwo.com) sees non-alcoholic wines as a positive trend.

“I think it’s an essential addition to the market,” she said, “just to have those options so that anybody can come and participate and hang out with their friends and not feel ostracized by any means.”

Some of Wolfe’s favorites include, Prima Pavé, an Italian label that produces both a blanc de blanc white wine and a rosé and Lautus, a label out of South Africa that produces a line of white, rosé, and sparkling wines.

“At the bar right now we have Buzzkill,” she said. “The label has a little bee buzzing around, with really bright, fun colors.”

“[These wines aren’t] just for people who aren’t drinking,” Wolfe said. “They’re for pregnancy, for not wanting to have a drink that day. So I think it is just fantastic that as a whole, they’re getting better and better.”

Featured photo: Richard Jacob, Courtesy photo.