Author: John Fladd

New Dessert House satisfies a sweet tooth

By John Fladd

jfladd@hippopress.com

Some of Vasita Saktanaset’s favorite memories of growing up in Bangkok center around her grandmother’s cooking.

“She’s 82 years old right now and she’s still working,” Saktanaset said, “and her hobby is cooking. She actually used to like to open a small street restaurant. It was like a pop-up shop in front of the house. In Thailand you don’t have to have a health permit or anything like that. You can open up a restaurant and you can just say, oh today I want to sell something. You just unfold a table and you can sell it right away. She used to do that on and off for her hobbies. She loves cooking. So I grew up with a grandma who liked to feed me with her recipes.”

Saktanaset’s new restaurant, After Thai Dessert House in Concord, grew out of her love of Thai desserts. After she moved to New Hampshire, she found herself missing the sweets she grew up eating in Bangkok. There are many good Thai restaurants in the area, she said, but she found herself craving Thai desserts.

“I have a sweet tooth,” she said, “so I love dessert. I love bingsu [a treat made with shaved ice, condensed milk, and many, many other ingredients] and everything. And there’s no dessert shop around here — I mean Asian dessert shop. You have to drive like an hour to Boston to just grab a couple of bites of [Thai] ice cream or anything. It just made me miss my home country a little bit.”

Saktanaset’s husband and his family own the Siam Orchid Thai Bistro in Concord, and she said he encouraged her to open her own place.

“I saw the potential of this space downstairs from the Siam, and we already rent the whole building. [My husband said,] ‘Why don’t you use it for something that will earn money?’” At first, the idea was to open a dessert space for the restaurant upstairs, Sktanaset said, but soon the space took on a personality of its own, one that reflected hers.

“I just put all my passion in here — anything that I like. Sweets, sour foods, some cute stuff, snacks, everything here is something that I like,” she said.

Saktanaset noticed that many American desserts lacked complexity.

“The cake and foods you buy in bakeries here are a little too sweet for me,” she said. “Asian desserts are less sweet, softer in texture, and everything is light and fluffy.”

For instance, After Thai’s coconut cake is a moist cake that relies on most of its sweetness from the natural sugars in the coconut and is frosted with unsweetened whipped cream, which adds richness and even more moisture to the cake without covering up the flavor of the cream itself.

Strawberry Roti is a fusion of influences from Thailand, India and the United States.

“The roti [a flaky fried flatbread] is actually Indian,” Saktanaset said. “And you have condensed milk and strawberry sauce and condensed milk and just the whipped cream. This is street food in Thailand. It’s just like you can find anywhere there. They roll it up as a stick, but I think it’s a little hard to eat, so we adapted it a little and chopped the roti in pieces.”

After Thai serves a couple dozen desserts at any given time, including bingsu [the shaved ice], custards made with rice or taro, and bubble tea, with large tapioca pearls.

“I want to have more,” Saktanaset said, “but we want to find out what sells. Right now I only pick the ones that I like. Because if I want to have it, I can have it right away. That’s the key point of this dessert shop.”

After Thai Dessert House

Where: 4 Kennedy Lane, Concord, 229-8291
When: Thursdays 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 4 to 9 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays until 9:30 p.m., and Sundays until 9 p.m.

Desserts from After Thai can also be ordered through Siam Orchid Thai Bistro (12 N. Main St., Concord, 228-1529, siamorchid.net).

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

In springtime, foraging ramps up

By John Fladd

jfladd@hippopress.com

It’s maple season, and for Christine Gagnon that means one thing.

Mushrooms.

Gagnon is the owner and operator of the Uncanoonuc Foraging Co. (uncforaging.com) in Goffstown. Her passion is finding and identifying edible plants and fungi.

“I just love foraging,” she said..”I love being out there and finding things. It’s like a treasure hunt. Just the idea of what mushrooms do and what they are and to see the many different forms that they come in and how they—.” She paused to put her feeling into words. “It’s so vast. It’s just … vast.”

Gagnon said one type of mushroom that appears in early spring is an oyster mushroom. “Sometimes you’ll see those in the winter too,” she said. ”If you have a 60-degree day — and there can be snow in the woods, but 60, and you might see oyster mushrooms pop up on trees.” In other words, during maple season. “They like maple trees actually,” she said.

Another mushroom that makes an appearance at this time of year is called a Pheasant’s Back (Cerioporus squamosus). “Those grow on trees,” Gagnon said. “And they have a very cucumber-y, melon-y, watermelon-rind smell to them. So sometimes people will pickle them. Because smell makes up a lot of how things taste a lot of times.”

One of the things that can make finding mushrooms difficult, Gagnon explained, is that the mushrooms most of us see are just the fruiting body of a fungus (mycelium), which is usually tiny and threadlike and difficult for non-specialists to see. Depending on the variety of mushroom, finding them “is a combination of the season and when the conditions are right,” she said. “Some mushrooms will pop up all season and some are very seasonal.”

For example, morel mushrooms only happen in the spring for a very short period of time. “When the ground temperature has warmed up to a certain amount, when the air temperatures are certain, when the humidity and moisture is what it is. And then around here, we don’t really have the ‘burn morels’ [which appear after forest fires] they have out west so much, so you have to find them with the right trees, whether it’s in old orchards or elm trees The mycelium grows in or around or through roots of trees and plants and other organisms.”

But that’s not true of all mushrooms, Gagnon said. “Other ones are called saprophytic or saprotrophic; they’re breaking down dying material. They’re decomposers, which also makes sense with the fire morels like out west.”

“In the early spring,” she said, “you [find] mushrooms that are trying to get a jump on their biological competition. You can find morels if you know where to find them.” But, she said, sometimes they will spring up somewhere completely unexpected. “They are what we call ‘landscape morels’ because sometimes when people order mulch for their gardens the mulch is coming with the mycelium already in there. And so people find [a morel], and they’re like, ‘Oh, it was in my garden.’ It was, but it’s usually because the mycelium was present in the mulch.”

Mushrooms aside, early spring is also the season for ramps, sometimes called wild garlic, which Gagnon said is in the onion family. “The genus is allium,” she said, [with the scientific name] allium tricoccum or trichocum, variety braticii. They have a white stem or sometimes a red stem, but they are in the allium family. Sometimes they’re called wild onions, and sometimes they’re really called a wild leek, because you can eat the entire thing.”

Gagnon said that her biggest thrill is finding something new, especially mushrooms.

“There’s so much DNA work now being done on them. So if we’re not exactly sure what it is, we can go home and dehydrate it, upload it to iNaturalist, send a specimen in, and it gets DNA’ed, and then we get the results back in however long it takes. The great thing about taking pictures with our phones these days or with iNaturalist is it gives you the exact locations and when you took it. So you can kind of go back and look for anything later.”

Caution where you eat

Eating unidentified plants or mushrooms can be dangerous. Please forage under the supervision of a trained forager.

Featured photo: Oyster mushrooms. Photo from NH Garden Solutions.