As he walked into Quadrafonic Sound Studio to begin his band’s first album in 1972, Jon Pousette-Dart heard the strains of another session. Curious, he looked in to find Dobie Gray finishing up his classic single “Drift Away,” with a stunning group of players behind him.
Awestruck, Pousette-Dart made a mental promise in that moment to someday record with them himself.
Four decades and change later, it happened. His solo album Talk gathered together guitarist Reggie Young, who plucked the delicate chords on Gray’s song, Kenny Malone on percussion, bass player Glen Worf, and Clayton Ivey on keyboards. “All these original Muscle Shoals guys,” Pousette-Dart recalled by phone recently. “It’s got a really nice feel.”
With a roots-fueled remake of his band’s late-’70s radio hit “Amnesia” and “Invisible,” a lively rocker co-written with John Oates, Talk is also his best solo album. “The Story of My Life,” a Nathan Meckel/Blue Miller ballad that deserves to be a wedding dance standard, is another of the disc’s gems.
Alas, it’s the 21st century, where great records are born and disappear on the regular. As much as he enjoyed making Talk, Pousette-Dart wishes more people had heard the album when it came out 11 years ago. But industry economics got in the way, along with a streaming algorithm that punishes long players.
“I put a lot of work into it, and it was just typical with the way things are … it just sailed by,” he lamented. “Because the whole delivery system of records has really changed, you know?” He’s not surprised; after all, he named his 2002 album Sample This as a dare to the music business when it began to implode.
“There was an awful lot of stuff going on [at the time] that was kind of turning my stomach, so I made light of it,” he said.
So he’s adapted, releasing new music song by song. His most recent single is 2024’s “Cry No More,” with its virtual flip side, the NRBQ nugget “Only You.” His next one, “Gone,” is due soon. “It’s about the universal loss that so many people are going through right now in the world,” Pousette-Dart said.
“Gone” will have a music video, something he’s done since a film made with “Who I Am” went viral. That song, written with Dawn Young (Pousette-Dart’s wife) and singer/songwriter Jaime Kyle, addressed Young’s mother’s journey through Alzheimer’s. “That’s been in film festivals all over the world,” he said. “Because it just hits home to so many people.”
One thing he hasn’t grown weary of or cynical about is performing live. In its heyday, his eponymous band was a touring force, and since its dissolution in the 1980s Pousette-Dart has continued to play the songs that inhabited Boston radio and points beyond, like “Harder,” “What Can I Say” and “There’s Been a Mistake.”
At an upcoming show in Manchester he’ll be joined by longtime accompanist Jim Chapdelaine, who has an interesting backstory of his own. A true multi-hyphenate, Chapdelaine is an Emmy-winning composer and a producer. He’s worked with Paula Cole and Delbert McClinton, and mastered projects for Clarence Clemons with Bruce Springsteen.
They met at the Harvard Coop record store in Cambridge when both were starting out; Chapdelaine worked there, and Pousette-Dart had a deal with the store’s record buyer to trade in his used albums for new ones (side note: absolutely no one called them “vinyls” back then).
“He started a band called Mr. Right and got signed to Epic, so we were bouncing around at the same time,” Pousette-Dart recalled. “We reconnected many years later when he was playing with a friend of mine at a function. I really liked him, so I asked if he wanted to come out with the band … that’s how it started.”
Twenty-five years on, they have an easy rapport as they glide through Pousette-Dart’s catalog in a format that delights them both.
“You’re taking the songs back to where they begin … it always starts with an intimate, voice guitar setting, and that’s when you really know you have a song or you don’t,” Pousette-Dart said. “You can’t produce something into being a good song … it’s got to have it from the heart and soul.”
Jon Pousette-Dart Duo When: Friday, June 5, 7:30 p.m. Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester Tickets: $40, palacetheatre.org
High Hopes Foundation makes NH its focus at Bacon & Beer Festival
The High Hopes Foundation is a nonprofit organization committed to providing life-enhancing assistance that promotes independence, inclusion and fun for New Hampshire’s chronically ill children. According to High Hopes’ Lisa Rourke, for the past decade the answer to getting buy-in from the community has come down to two factors: beer and bacon.
On Saturday, June 6, High Hopes will host its 10th annual NH Bacon & Beer Festival in Manchester’s Arms Park.
“This is really New Hampshire’s premier all-inclusive event,” Rourke said. “It includes all-inclusive tastings of craft brews, cider, seltzer, all-inclusive tastings of the bacon creations we have going on, and live music.” For Rourke, the key term here is “all-inclusive.”
“I’ve done my due diligence,” she said. “I’ve visited other beer fests to see what’s been going on. I’ve always had a great time, but then I’d get hungry and I’ve had to go pay for food. Not here. The general admission ticket prices are $70, but you don’t take out your wallet once you get in. The food is included, the drinks are included, it’s all included.”
“The High Hopes Foundation exists to serve the state of New Hampshire only,” Rourke said, and that is represented in the food and drink at the festival. “There will be more than 20 local restaurants, and food truck vendors participating. There are about 60 local brewers and makers of cider and seltzers. They all come together to support the Foundation and our mission. We award a people’s choice prize for the best bacon sample. It’s fun to see those guys get real creative. Over the years, we’ve come a long way from a bacon jam and now we’re up to dishes like inside-out pork belly and bacon-wrapped dumplings. It’s been really fun to see those guys having fun and getting really competitive with it over the years.”
Rourke said that because one of the organizers’ main priorities is to focus on the attendees’ good time, the restaurants coming up with these bacon dishes never present them to a panel of judges. “It’s all the people’s choice,” she said. “We have about 1,500 attendees [who] come to the event,” and feeding them something great is critical.
“I think food just brings people together,” she said, “and certainly, especially in the Manchester area, there’s some culinary greatness coming out of there. And we’re excited about a lot of the restaurants we have this year, like Campo Enoteca, Stashbox, and Industry East; those guys are just so good at their craft. And they’re really good at ramping up the crowd. They’re just fun people to be around. For all of us, I think it’s more about getting together over great dishes than anything else, and just coming together for the good of the community and having a great time.”
Rourke said the Bacon & Beer Festival has become the unofficial launching point of the food festival season.
“The other thing I like about this festival,” she said, “is we promote it as a kickoff to summer. So you can go sample from 60 different breweries and figure out what they have that’s new and fresh and that you want to bring to the lake with you all summer. We hope. that attendees have a great time, that they feel good about their ticket proceeds going to a nonprofit that supports our state. And we hope that attendees get to experience different vendors within our state and what they have to offer and hopefully remember them and visit them after the festival.”
And that they eat a lot of bacon.
10th Annual NH Bacon & Beer Festival When: Saturday, June 6, from 1:30 to 5 p.m., with last pours at 4:30 p.m. Where: Arms Park, 10 Arms St., Manchester Tickets: General admission tickets cost $70 in advance or $80 at the gate if they are still available. A three-hour session includes continuous 3.5-ounce brew tastings from 60 brewers. More: nhbaconbeer.com
NH Audubon expands plant sale with Pollinator Festival
For most non-specialists, knowledge of pollinators begins and ends with honeybees. Honeybees are certainly important, said Diane DeLuca of New Hampshire Audubon.
“They do a lot of the pollinating of our agricultural crops and fruit trees and things like that. But the native pollinators include hundreds of species of native bees in New Hampshire. We’re still learning about the native bees in New Hampshire. … We have over 100 species of butterflies in New Hampshire and we’re still learning about those as well. So in terms of pollinators we’re talking about native bees, butterflies, flies, beetles and ants. The hummingbird is really the only bird that would probably be considered a pollinator in New Hampshire.”
For many years one of the missions of NH Audubon has been to educate the public about the importance of native species. Pollinators — species of animals that carry pollen from one plant to another, fertilizing them to produce the next generation of plants — are some of the most important of those native species, DeLuca said.
“For years we’ve been having a native plant sale,” she said, “where we’ve invited native plant nurseries to come and share their plants at New Hampshire Audubon. And in the last couple of years we’ve joined that with a spring craft fair. And so up until now there’s been the native plant sale outside, and the craft fair has been inside the building. But this year we’re expanding and having what we’re calling a Pollinator Fest. It will include native plant vendors and our spring crafters and a number of pollinator conservation organizations. New Hampshire Audubon will also give garden tours and have informational tables about pollinators and gardeners. The whole thing is going to take place outside in the fields near [NH Audubon’s] McClane Center. This will be our first Pollinator Festival, and we’re pretty excited.”
“There will be activities for families,” DeLuca said, “for children. There’s going to be a story hour with crafting for children, and the nature lab’s going to be open, and there will be an hour or two of an educational staff person sharing out the animals that we have. There will also be food trucks and live music as well.”
Different species of plant blossom throughout the year, DeLuca said, so it’s possible to see many different species of pollinators at different times of the year, but June is a particularly good time to pay attention to them.
“Our spring ephemerals — our early bloomers — many of the trees are blooming or even past bloom at this point, so it’s an important time of year for blooming. It’s also an important time of year for many of the pollinators. For instance, the bees are out and about right now because the queen bees are actually gathering food so they can lay eggs and raise young, and they’re going to be doing that underground for the most part. Some of them nest in like pithy stems or woody areas and stuff, but a lot of them are just nesting underground. So it is a really important time for many of the native pollinators.” This will provide an excellent opportunity for visitors to learn about some of the hundreds of area pollinators first-hand, she said.
NH Audubon Pollinator Festival What: There will be native plants for sale, as well as a wide variety of handmade crafts by local artisans. Experts will be on hand to discuss pollination and native pollinator species. When: Saturday, June 6, with a rain date of Sunday, June 7, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Where: NH Audubon McClane Center, 84 Silk Farm Road, Concord, 224-9909 Admission: free More: nhaudubon.org/event/pollinator-fest-2026
A 3D printer hums a colorful plate into existence; handmade hula hoops and a DJ spin in tandem while hands get messy on a nearby pottery wheel. Those are just a few things planned for NH Maker Fest, the New Hampshire Children’s Museum’s annual gathering of builders, tinkerers and creators in downtown Dover.
Launched as the Dover Mini Maker Faire in 2012, the event is packed with engaging activities and is constantly evolving.
“It’s such a hard pitch to make,” Neve Cole, the museum’s communications director, said recently when asked to describe the upcoming fest. “Every year it’s such a different group of people.”
This time around, more than 35 makers from across the region, representing a dizzying range of disciplines, are on hand. There’s ceramics and coding, escape room design and entomology, bubble choreography, along with 501st New England Garrison cosplayers roaming about in handmade Star Wars regalia.
Among the fresh additions this year is Mud City Clay, with pottery wheel demonstrations and hand-building sessions.
“We haven’t had clay in a while,” Cole said. “That’s going to be super fun.” 3D printing company Flamingo Magic is also new to the fest, selling reusable plates that visitors can watch being printed on the spot.
A hula hoop dance party will also be interesting. “Three like-minded individuals got together,” Cole said — sponsor Unravel NH, as part of its Petals + People gardening activity, DJ Avery Sol playing house music, and spinning creations from SMart Circles that are so much cooler than the mass-manufactured Wham-O toys of yesteryear.
A scientist will bring his collection of elements to the festival and walk visitors through the properties of actual physical samples, some radioactive, some mundane, all fascinating. Young authors will be on hand as well, who’ve written books or created arts and crafts to sell and teach.
Another intriguing new entry is a husband-and-wife team in the middle of developing an escape room, allowing festival-goers a fun peek behind the curtain of a creative project mid-construction.
“They’re bringing some of their props and the puzzles that they’ve created that will eventually be part of their escape room,” Cole said.
Longtime attendees may remember the foam party, but this year the museum is pivoting to a bubble dance party instead. It’s still interactive, still delightfully chaotic, but with a slightly different texture. “It won’t be quite as foamy,” Cole said, with the conviction of someone who’s possibly thought through the foam-versus-bubbles paradigm.
Cole has been with the Children’s Museum for close to a decade, and part of each Maker Fest is in her tenure. When Covid happened, the events were done online, and the pandemic experience provided clarity for moving forward. The museum now runs structured morning and afternoon play sessions, separated by a midday break.
Before the shift, Cole recalled, popular exhibits were sometimes five families deep on busy days, with no room to explore. Now, everyone has space.
“We wanted to make sure people had their best experience … plus it’s good for staff morale to have a break in the middle of the day, reset the museum, and start fresh again.”
The museum is growing, with a major addition due this fall. A 40-foot Luckey Climber, the same kind of dramatic net structure as the one located in the lobby of Boston’s Children’s Museum, will open in October. The project cost $750,000, all raised by the museum, and includes LED-lit platforms integrated into the safety netting.
Cole offered a caveat for prospective visitors: Maker Fest is a different kind of day at the museum. Some exhibits will be open, but the galleries won’t be running at full capacity. The event has more of a block party energy than a typical museum visit — louder, more crowded, organized around doing rather than observing.
There are also extras like multiple food trucks for an event that happens both inside and outside. “So if you’re looking for a regular day of playing in a museum, this might not be the best one,” Cole said. “But it’s also really fun, and you’ll get a lot of unique experiences.”
NH Maker Fest When: Saturday, June 6, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Where: Children’s Museum of New Hampshire, 6 Washington St., Dover Tickets: $5, childrens-museum.org
How adding smoke can transform your favorite flavors
When most people think of smoky food, their minds go immediately to barbecue.
David Mielke is the co-owner of Smokehaus Barbecue in Amherst. He said one of the reasons we are so drawn to smokiness is that it has been with us for so long.
“Smoking meat goes way, way back…,” he said. “Originally it was used to cure meats so people could hold them for long periods of time. As time went on, I think people have figured out that you can use smoke to impart flavor.”
A smoking tradition
For Mielke, choosing what type of wood to burn is as important as choosing the right cut of meat.
“In the barbecue world,” he said, “when we use smoke we’re very particular about the type of wood that we use. There’s all sorts of different types and each gives you a different flavor. I’m very particular about really wanting wood that only comes from New Hampshire. So I only use red oak. There are a lot of other barbecue places that use hickory and pecan wood and stuff like that, but it just doesn’t grow here. That’s a southern Texas thing. We don’t do that here. Honestly, I think that red oak really gives a really nice sweet flavor to the flavor profile that I’m looking for for my meat. My oak is green. It’s not seasoned. It’s not dried. It’s green. It comes from a friend’s property. He does wood for a living and he splits it from the tree and it comes right here. What happens is when it’s green like that it still has all of its moisture content. So you get a lot longer burn time with it, a lot longer smoke time. So when I smoke, I smoke for 14 hours. My brisket and my pork goes for 14 hours.”
Mielke said the “low and slow” method of cooking meats means he can focus on cuts that are more flavorful. The most flavorful cuts, though, come from muscle groups that get a lot of exercise during an animal’s life and can be extremely tough unless they are cooked a long time to break down connective tissue into something silky and delicious.
Smokehaus Barbecue. Courtesy photo.
“The chest of the cow and the chest of the pig,” he said, “are very hard-working muscles. So you need to have a longer smoke time to be able to break those muscles down.”
“Our main items going [through the smoker],” Mielke said, “are half chickens, brisket, pulled pork, which is the butt.” (In spite of their names, the pork “butts” and “picnics” come from the shoulder and upper arm of a hog.) “I use the butt and the picnic, so it’s all one,” he said. “It’s a bone-in butt that I use, because I think it adds the best flavor. It takes longer to cook it but it adds flavor and I think it helps render the meat down better. I also do St. Louis-style ribs. I used to do baby backs, but I do St. Louis-style now. They’re pork, just a different section of the rib. So the baby back is like the top section of the rib cage, closer to the spine, and the St. Louis is a little further down the rib, you know, more toward the belly, and they are a little bit bigger,” Mielke said.
Mielke said traditional southern side dishes have a natural affinity for smoke.
“I like collard greens a lot,” he said. “We cook it for six hours to where it basically melts in your mouth. It has vinegar in it, which is one of those things that people seem to really like with barbecue.” Creamed corn is another natural with smoky barbecue, he said. “I make a creamed corn from scratch. That’s a very Texas thing, by the way. Nobody up here does it. I think that goes really well with smoked meats because it’s very balanced.”
Smoked, in a glass
And then there’s smoked beer.
Mike Neel is the owner of Candia Road Brewing Co. in Manchester. At any given time, his brewpub has at least one smoked beer on tap.
“Right now, we’ve got two,” he said. “We’ve got Grodziskie, which is a lighter, Polish-style wheat lager, and we have Brennenator, which is a darker Helles-style lager.”
While Neel and his staff make most of their beer on site, he said, they subcontract out the smoke.
“All of the smoked malt that we use was smoked at Blue Ox Malt House in Lisbon Falls, Maine. They have a small program, which has been growing. They’ve been working with distilleries to do smoked peat malt and other smoked malts to do smoked whiskeys. Grodziski is an oak-smoked wheat, where the Brennenator has a mix of alderwood and maple smoke,” Neel said.
Neel said that while a taste for smokiness can vary widely, he generally looks at smoke as an accent flavor. About a fifth of the malt he uses to brew his smoked beers is actually smoked. “Quantities really do matter,” he said. “How much you put into the beer will determine your overall effect. So Grodziskie is 20 percent of smoked malt that went into that beer.”
Because it is a light lager, he explained, it has a crispness that lets the smoke stand out.
“Brennenator is also 20 percent,” he said. “However, that is a higher ABV [Alcohol By Volume] beer. It does have some other character malts, like crystal malts to make it a little bit sweeter. It’s a sweeter style, and the sweetness covers up the amount of smoke that comes to the front when you taste it. It’s funny, the percentage of smoke malt is exactly the same between both beers. So how much it comes through, I think, has a lot to do with the character grains that are going in as well. [Some other brewers] use more smoked malt, but 20 percent is already a little terrifying for us; we throw that to a consumer and hope that it’s not too much. But there are breweries out there like Schlenkerla, who has been making smoked rauchbier in Germany for hundreds and hundreds of years. Some of theirs are 100 percent smoked malt. A lot of people will tell you it is wildly too smoky. Others will tell you that it’s perfect.”
Neel said that while he, personally, would drink a smoked beer with anything, it goes especially well with seafood.
Smoked, on the rocks
While many spirits traditionally have smoky flavor profiles — peaty scotches and some traditional tequilas, for example — for the past few years adventurous bartenders have been deliberately adding smoke to cocktails. James Brownell is a bartender at Nashua speakeasy CodeX — though at work he goes by the name Rusty. According to him, there are some drinks that are enhanced by adding smoke.
“It just adds one characteristic to the cocktails that we make,” he said, “primarily, old-fashioneds, sometimes Negronis, Boulevardiers or Manhattans. We use applewood here; it’s mostly universal. But you don’t always just have to smoke wood. You can smoke herbs and spices as well — like thyme, sage, cinnamon for various other flavors, for the oils to connect to the glass.”
Rusty said the bartenders at CodeX have two main ways of adding smoke to their cocktails.
“We either smoke the glass itself by turning it upside-down over burning wood chips,” he said. “The oils from the wood cling to the glass. So as you pour the liquid into the glass, it combines over time as the drink warms.”
“Or,” Rusty continued, “we use a top smoker, which draws the smoke into the glass from the top of the glass instead of having it vertically flipped over.” He indicated a top-smoker, a wooden disk with a pipe-like bowl in its center.
“We light some wood chips here,” he said, pointing to the bowl, “and the smoke gets sucked down into the glass.” If the drink has been properly chilled, he explained, the air left at the top of the glass will be cold and less dense than the air in the bar, and that creates negative air pressure that will draw the smoke down. ”It adds a little less smoke,” he said, “but it adds a little bit more of a show. It provides the smoke on top of the cocktail so that the guest gets that full whiff of smoke and the flavor from the wood itself. Instead of infusing the bottom smoke, the top smoke only does the top of the cocktail — not throughout the glass.”
Rusty said there are many different ways to smoke cocktails. “Another method a lot of bars use,” he said, “is they smoke the ice cubes as well, which works really well with a top-smoker, so that the smoke infuses into the cube. So what I like to do is smoke the cube and the glass. And then once the cocktail is chilled, pour it into there so that you get the smoke with the cube and the glass. And then you still get the show as well. So when you’re pouring the cocktail into here, you can see all the smoke come out of the glass.”
Smoked cheese
Smoked cheese at Fox Country Smoke House. Courtesy photo.
I don’t know how cheese-focused you are, but you’ve probably noticed that at any event where a cheese platter has been put out, the smoked Gouda always disappears first. (Followed by the pepper jack, but the smoked Gouda gets snagged first. Often by me.)
Fox Country Smoke House in Canterbury has a reputation for outstanding smoked cheeses. Owner Bill Annis said Fox Country produces 13 different smoked cheeses.
“The extra-sharp cheddar is our No. 1 seller,” he said. “And then my personal favorite is the horseradish cheddar. But we also do a pepper jack, we do a ghost pepper, and another popular one is Gouda. Then we do the specialties — Swiss, mozzarella, and provolone. We even do string cheese.”
Annis said he smokes about 600 pounds of cheese each week, but that can vary depending on the type of cheese and the time of year.
“Your mozzarella and your other soft cheeses are the hardest ones to do in the summer months. When you get a hot, humid day and night, that’s a challenge. During the winter months or cold weather, we try to do all the smoking at night, and the cheese is in [the smoker] for about 18 hours — a nice slow smoking. That runs at least once a week, and then when we get into the holidays, three times a week,” he said.
The smokehouse has been in business since 1969, Annis said. “We still use the original smokehouse, in that one room. We use hickory to smoke everything. It’s in sawdust form. It’s basically a chainsaw. It’s a very, very fine grind. The machine that we use now works on a line like a pellet stove. It has an auger, it drops the sawdust onto a hot plate and that creates the smoke for us.”
Annis said that because the cheese is a handmade product, some of it will be exposed to more smoke than other cheese in the same batch. “Any cheese that’s over that pipe gets much darker than the stuff on the other side of the room, which is much lighter. I prefer a milder smoking, but I do have customers who want the darkest possible.”
All about the wood
Smoke enthusiasts — competitive barbecuers, for instance — have strong opinions about which woods should be used to smoke particular foods. Jay Beland is a pitmaster at Lemay & Sons in Goffstown, a custom slaughter house and specialty butcher shop. According to him, successful smoking comes down to paying attention to details.
“If you’re smoking cheese,” he advised, “you have to watch the temperature [in your smoker] to make sure it doesn’t go over 100 degrees — otherwise it will start to melt. And then you need to use a milder wood, like apple, hickory or cherry. Stay away from the mesquites — mesquites will be too strong for cheese. It’ll give it a burnt flavor. You want a subtle smoke flavor and those will give you a subtle smoke flavor. I stick with apple wood for the most part. I like hickory — the most universal wood to use, and it works with most foods. I will mix in cherry sometimes, but if I’m having people over who don’t really like a strong smoke flavor, then I’ll use apple, because apple can be more subtle.”
If this all seems complicated and specialized, Beland said to think about the flavors of iconic smoked foods.
“Most bacon that you get is smoked in hickory,” he said. “It’s the most-known smoke flavor So a lot of times, you know when I have my smoker going, my neighbors say, ‘Wow, it smells like bacon!’ Or if I get it on my sweatshirt and I go somewhere, because I smell like smoke, they’ll say, ‘Do you smell like bacon?’ And I have to admit that I do.”
“Pork is a great thing to smoke for the summertime,” Beland said. “With pork, I would always go with hickory because if you think about hickory you think of bacon and bacon’s pork. You put hickory on a pork butt, you put hickory on ribs, that gives it that smoke that tastes like bacon. It’s a familiar smoke with people and it complements the pork.”
Beland said that more aggressive woods have a place in smoking.
“I like to use mesquite on beef cuts,” he said, “but I will use it sparingly. I like to get wood chunks and mix it with a lump charcoal. When I’m grilling at home, I use a Big Green Egg, and I will only put like one large chunk in the whole bundle because a little bit of mesquite goes a long way. You don’t want to overpower with mesquite because then it’s boom, it hits you hard, and it’s not tasteful.”
For seafood — especially mild fish and shellfish — Beland recommends using the same woods you might use for smoking cheese.
“I like to use hickory or cherry,” he said. “I’ve done tuna, I’ve done salmon, I’ve done haddock, swordfish, I’ve done scallops. And crab cakes; crab cakes are delicious on the smoker. I’d recommend that heavily. You get a nice crab cake, it’s delicious.”
Beland said another good rule with smoking is that the denser a food is, the longer it needs to be smoked. He loves to smoke cheese crackers — not surprisingly, with hickory — and he generally smokes them like cheese, at a cool temperature, for 45 minutes or so.
“Cheese puffs are too light to take much smoke, though,” he advised. “They aren’t dense at all. I smoke them for 15 minutes, maximum, but they are really, really good.”
The smoke panel Smokehaus Barbecue 278 Route 101, Amherst, 249-5734, smokehausbbq.com Candia Road Brewing Co. 840 Candia Road, Manchester, 935-8123, candiaroadbrewingco.com CodeX 29 Main St., Nashua, facebook.com/CodeXBARNH Fox Country Smoke House 164 Briar Bush Road, Canterbury, 783-4405, foxnh.com Lemay & Sons 116 Daniel Plummer Road, Goffstown, 622-0022, lemayandsonsbeef-bbq.com
Smoke your own
What if you want to smoke something at home? Primitive humans were smoking meat hundreds of thousands of years ago. It’s got to be pretty straightforward, right?
It turns out, if you want a dedicated smoking rig, the type designed for professional barbecuers, you’ll probably spend over $1,000 for a not-great one. The top pros have custom-built rigs that can run upwards of $30,000.
Is there a way to dip your toe into food smoking cheaply enough to try it out and see if you even like it? Spoiler alert: There is and you probably will.
In 2007, Alton Brown dedicated an episode of his Food Network show Good Eats to this problem. For cold smoking — smoking food at a low temperature without actually cooking it — he suggested using a large cardboard box. It should be a couple of feet on each side, he said. He opened each side of the box, then punched several holes near the top and inserted a couple of long wooden dowels through the box, making a resting place for one or more of the cooling racks you might use after baking a cake. (You could also use the grate from your charcoal grill.) The general idea is to suspend a food — Brown smoked a salmon; you might want to start with cheese — above a heating element. He bought a $10 single-burner hot plate from the and placed it in the bottom of the box with a pan of sawdust on it. The concept was pretty straightforward. Use the hot plate to smolder the sawdust, which will make smoke that will rise up and smoke your food. Keep the flaps of the box shut, but open them from time to time to check on whatever you’re smoking.
Here is the FladdSmokeShow Home Smoker (patent pending). It is essentially a big metal box to hold in smoke. A hot plate with wood chips smolders below, filling the top chamber with smoke. Two cooling racks hold slabs of cheese, suspended on bricks to give additional distance from the heat, to minimize melting. Your home grill is also a big metal box. You could place a hot plate at the bottom of your grill, and use the grate you already have to hold whatever food you might want to smoke. Be advised that your home grill is a much smaller metal box and will probably heat up very quickly — that’s what it’s designed to do. You will have to experiment with time, temperature and flipping to find out what works best for you. This will involve several experimental batches of smoked food, which I’m sure will be an enormous sacrifice to eat as you dial in your smoking details. Photo by John Fladd.
Here’s what I’ve been doing:
A well-meaning relative who doesn’t cook bought my wife and me an extremely affordable wood-fired pizza oven a couple of years ago. As it turns out, it is made of thin steel and doesn’t retain heat very well. Pizzas require a very hot temperature — upwards of 700 degrees — and this thing couldn’t make toast. And I got really frustrated trying to keep the fire lit and the smoke kept blowing in my face every time I opened the door, and — hey, maybe —.
So we’ve started using the “pizza oven” as a smoker. We use that same one-burner hot plate in the firebox, and suspend baking racks on top of bricks in the oven compartment to give them some distance from the heat source. We place slabs of cheese between two baking racks and suspend them in the smoke. A quick internet search reveals that the cheapest hot plates are still between $10 and $15. Wood chips for grills are available online or in any hardware or department store.
The key, we’ve found, is to flip the racks every 10 to 15 minutes, ideally when the weather is cool, in order to keep the cheese from melting through the holes in the cooling racks and forming cheese stalactites. Every smoking rig — especially a homemade one like this — will be different, and probably require different smoking times. There’s also the matter of your taste in smokiness. For us, 45 minutes to an hour is about right. We’ve smoked several different types of cheese at this point, but the winners seem to be muenster and pepper jack. We just buy the big bricks of cheese at the supermarket and cut them into slabs.
Featured photo: Smoked cocktail at CodeX. Courtesy photo.
The most common tick bite-spread infections in New Hampshire are “Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, babesiosis, Powassan virus, and hard-tick relapsing fever (Borrelia miyamotoi),” according to a May 27 press release from the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services.
The release also reminds residents that mosquitoes in New Hampshire “can spread illnesses such as Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE), West Nile Virus, and Jamestown Canyon Virus.”
“Ticks are typically most active from April to November, with tick encounters peaking in May and June. … Warmer weather also brings mosquitoes, and the risk of diseases spread by mosquitoes begins in the spring and continues throughout the summer and into the fall. DHHS partners with municipalities across the state to trap and test mosquitoes from June through October, using test results to inform communities of local risk for diseases carried by mosquitoes,” the release said. At dhhs.nh.gov, you can see the press release and find a link to the Department’s tickborne diseases page, which offers tips on protecting yourself and an explanation on the blacklegged tick (deer tick) life cycle.
According to a May 29 press release from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, while at a press conference in New Hampshire, Department Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “announced a series of major initiatives to strengthen the nation’s response to Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses.” See hhs.gov/press-room.
NH’s own Seth Meyers
Comedian and host of NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, Manchester High School West alum Seth Meyers will perform at the SNHU Arena in Manchester on Friday, Aug. 7, at 8 p.m. The performance will benefit CASA of New Hampshire and the Granite State Children’s Alliance, according to a SNHU Arena press release. See snhuarena.com for tickets.
Conference update
The New Hampshire Writers’ Project has changed the date and venue for its upcoming 603 Writers’ Conference, according to a press release. The conference will take place Saturday, Nov. 14, at Grappone Conference Center, 70 Constitution Ave. in Concord, the release said. The event will still feature keynote speaker author Chris Bohjalian and “expert-led workshops, a moderated AI panel discussion, the signature Pitch Party & Social, catered meals, and networking opportunities,” according to a press release. See nhwritersproject.org to register.
NH’s outdoors
The Granite Outdoor Alliance will hold its “Outdoor Industry Day 2026: The Barn Raiser” on Wednesday, June 10, from 5 to 8:30 p.m. at the Barn on the Pemi in Plymouth, according to a press release. “Outdoor Industry Day is GOA’s annual gathering celebrating New Hampshire’s outdoor economy and the businesses, nonprofits, public partners, and leaders helping shape the sector statewide,” the release said. See graniteoutdooralliance.org/nh-outdoor-industry-day for tickets.
Concord Parks & Rec and Merrimack River Watershed Council will hold a Park Clean Up Day on Saturday, June 6, from 9 to 11 a.m. at Healy Park and Exit 13, on Basin Street, according to the City Manager’s May 29 newsletter. Volunteers must be 18+ and sign a waiver; wear long pants and boats and bring work gloves and bug spray, the newsletter said.
Allenstown will hold a townwide yard sale on Saturday, June 6, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., according to allenstownnh.gov, where you can check for a listing of addresses holding a sale.
The summer Free Fishing Day in New Hampshire is Saturday, June 6, when residents and nonresidents can “fish any inland water — or saltwater — in New Hampshire” without a fishing license, according to wildlife.nh.gov, which noted that season dates and other fishing regulations still apply.
The Nashua ER, a free-standing emergency room that is a campus of Catholic Medical Center at 338 Amherst St. in Nashua, will hold a community event and open house on Saturday, June 6, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. featuring a touch-a-truck, free hot dogs and snow cones, kids’ games and free stuffed monkeys (while supplies last) and live entertainment, according to a press release.
