Category: Food

Amanda’s Savory Cheesecake

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

“Why don’t you ever make anything for me?” Amanda asked.

“How about some cookies?”

“No,” she said with a frown. “I’m keto.”

“Some muffins? I could make them out of almond flour?”

“Will they have sugar in them?”

“So, what would you like?”

“You know me,” she repeated with a bright smile. “I’ll like anything you make.”

Amanda’s Savory Cheesecake

Crust
Two 8-ounce bags of roasted, salted pecans
3 Tablespoons butter, melted
1 egg white

Cheesecake filling

Three 8-ounce blocks of cream cheese
½ cup (113 g) sour cream
3 Tablespoons corn starch
1 teaspoon kosher or coarse sea salt
2 eggs
2 Tablespoons capers, drained
1/3 cup (20 g) chopped chives (well, snipped actually; chives prefer to be cut with scissors)
½ 14-ounce can of artichoke hearts – four or five hearts
2 Tablespoons balsamic vinaigrette
Preheat oven to 350°F.

Grease a 9-inch springform baking pan, and line the bottom with parchment paper. Welcome the lined pan to the team, and set it aside to prepare for its upcoming mission.

Chop pecans in a blender, then transfer them to a mixing bowl. Mix the chopped pecans with the melted butter and the egg white, then transfer the mixture to the springform pan, and press it down with the bottom of a measuring cup or a coffee mug. Bake it for 20 minutes, then set it aside to cool for a few minutes, while you make the cheesecake filling. Reduce the oven temperature to 250°F.

Drain the canned artichoke hearts, then squeeze them by hand — hard, like they owe you money. They will break apart, which is what you want. Put the broken-spirited artichoke hearts into a small bowl, and add the balsamic vinaigrette. Leve the two to marinate for 15 or 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, use an electric mixer to beat the cream cheese, corn starch, sour cream and salt together until they are light and fluffy. Put the corn starch in first to avoid poof-ing. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber or silicone spatula, then beat in the eggs, one at a time.

Add the capers, chives and now thoroughly inebriated artichoke hearts to the cream cheese mixture and stir them in by hand.

Transfer the mixture to the springform pan, on top of the pecan crust. Smooth it out with the silicone spatula or the back of a large, wet spoon.

Place the cheesecake on the middle rack of your oven. (You remembered to turn the temperature down, didn’t you?) Bake it for 45 minutes, then turn the oven off, but leave the cheesecake in it for another hour. Do not open the door.

After the oven and the cheesecake have calmed down together, take the cheesecake out and leave it on the counter to continue pulling itself together. Yes, 250°F is what we would call a “gentle” heat, but it can still be traumatic to a cheesecake.

Serve at room temperature, in modest-sized slices. While it’s not a sweet dish, it is very rich, and one slice per guest will be perfect. A glass of prosecco or a cup of oolong tea will be a perfect accompaniment.

Amanda’s verdict?

“This is like the best dip I’ve ever had. But it’s a CHEESECAKE!.”

Nomad Bakery

Cheryl Holbert’s bread is available weekly at Benedikt Dairy (97 Shirley Hill Road, Goffstown, 801-7056, benediktdairy.com), on the menu at The Grind Cafe (5 W. Broadway, Derry, 260-2411, facebook.com/thegrindnh), on selected dates at the Derry Homegrown Farm & Artisan Market (1 W. Broadway, Derry, 479-5918, derryhomegrown.org) on Wednesdays, June through September. She also accepts commissions through her Facebook page, facebook.com/NomadBakery.

Featured photo: Amanda’s Savory Cheesecake. Photo by John Fladd.

Beauty and the yeast

A Derry baker creates art through bread

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

Cheryl Holbert is more than a baker and more than an artist. She creates works of art — mostly landscapes and scenes from nature — from brightly colored bread dough. The result is almost better than a painting or a sculpture, which would have the disadvantage of not making a good sandwich.

Holbert said she started baking professionally in 2014. Before that, she worked as a reporter.

“I worked for museums,” she remembered. “I was a tapestry artist. I ran a program at the Currier Museum for a while, weaving and all of that. I always loved bread; I grew up in a family that loved bread. It was my grandmother who was really the baker. I started baking bread, honestly, because after I moved away from my family in New Jersey I was homesick so I just started baking it at home.”

At the same time, she was also exploring her Jewish roots.

“I was discovering my heritage,” she said, “some roots I wasn’t familiar with and the two just dovetailed where I started baking and being very interested in the bread that my grandmother had made from her Eastern European culture — challah bread [a traditional braided Jewish egg bread]. And I ended up starting a small business, from my home, a homestead food operation, where I started baking bread for the farmers markets. I got a license so I could do it wholesale. And I started baking.”

This, Holbert said, is where her weaving background came in.

“During Covid,” she said, “everyone, including me, started a sourdough starter. Sourdough people started braiding and doing challah braiding. There were a lot of platforms at the time reaching out and looking for bakers with experience making braided beads. I started a relationship with King Arthur, contracting with them as a guest teacher. I began teaching a lot virtually.”

A series of family health emergencies kept Holbert tethered to her home, and creative baking gave her an outlet for her talent, and to support her family.

Holbert uses local and organic ingredients to make her breadscapes.

“I color the bread with food ingredients,” she said, “actual food ingredients. So in my spectrum of the reds to pinks, I use pureed beets. And then I might add beet root powder to make a little more red than a magenta. Yellow is definitely turmeric. I might add olive oil in the dough for that because that’s going to affect what kind of yellow that’s going to be. I love very highly saturated earth colors. I love saturation. I love contrast. And for me, because bread is going to put kind of a brownish hue on everything, I want to get as much color as possible, and this is the route I need to take to get that.”

Holbert usually tints her doughs before baking a breadscape, she said. “The colors will retain, if not brighten, the interior. When it’s on the exterior, you have to do some things to retain as much color as possible because it’s going to turn brown, but you can do certain things to control that a little bit. And then I have painted more on the surface design with [ingredients] like chocolate powder or espresso to create designs. You have to be intentional about what you think, where it’s going to land in the final piece.”

“It really has to do with the years of really having a passion about and developing a growing and evolving understanding of how all the natural elements work,” she said. “For me, that creates the art I want with this.”

Nomad Bakery

Cheryl Holbert’s bread is available weekly at Benedikt Dairy (97 Shirley Hill Road, Goffstown, 801-7056, benediktdairy.com), on the menu at The Grind Cafe (5 W. Broadway, Derry, 260-2411, facebook.com/thegrindnh), on selected dates at the Derry Homegrown Farm & Artisan Market (1 W. Broadway, Derry, 479-5918, derryhomegrown.org) on Wednesdays, June through September. She also accepts commissions through her Facebook page, facebook.com/NomadBakery.

Strawberries for the library

Shortcake is highlight at Windham fest

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

For the past 41 years the Friends of the Library of Windham (FLoW) have held a Strawberry Festival to raise funds to help the Nesmith Library (8 Fellows Road, Windham, 432-7154, nesmithlibrary.org) provide some of its programs.

“It used to be held in mid to late June, when strawberries were actually in season, and we would pick strawberries, and strawberry shortcakes were served at the festival,” Library Director Sylvie Brikiatis said. “Eventually it was moved to early June because mid to late June is so hot and this is an outdoor festival.”

Forty years on, the Strawberry Festival has grown to include more than just strawberries, said Mary Connelly, one of the Friends.

“In addition to the Strawberry Fest, we have a book fair as well,” Connelly said. “We have seven or eight community groups that are doing entertainment. It goes from some of the local dancing groups to a karate school and our Windham Actors Guild. We will have inflatable activities and we have a balloon artist. We have a number of food trucks that are coming. We are having — this is new this year — a children’s bicycle parade. Then we of course have our Strawberry Festival sundaes and strawberry shortcake, which this is all based on.” Connelly is in charge of the Book Fair.

Regardless of other activities, the focus of the Fair remains on strawberries.

“That’s the highlight,” said Library Director Brikiatis, “our strawberry shortcakes. That’s all community-driven. The community picks up the strawberries, slices them and puts sugar in. Other people bake the biscuits.” Sugar is added to the sliced berries, she said, to macerate them — to draw out their juices and make them syrupy.

There are two main schools of thought when it comes to strawberry shortcake; some shortcake fans have strict loyalty to a base of angel food cake, while others favor a biscuit base. The Festival volunteers fall firmly into the second camp, Brikiatis said.

“We purchase [boxed biscuit] mix, but we have our own biscuit recipe that we use with it. It’s not a back-of-the-box recipe. We want to be able to layer them so that we can break them apart for the shortcakes.”

For a one-day festival, the Friends go through a lot of biscuits and berries, Brikiatis said. “We usually buy 80 flats of strawberries.” There are usually eight quarts of strawberries to a flat, “so 80 flats is quite a lot. And we use 60 20-ounce boxes of biscuit mix. We get spray cans of whipped cream, and usually vanilla ice cream. We have a couple of people who bake gluten-free biscuits for those who need gluten-free who want biscuits.”

“It’s all focused on the shortcake,” Brikiatis said, “but we also serve [strawberry] sundaes. Oftentimes kids want sundaes, so we have a topping bar so they can put on sprinkles and M&Ms and whatever else they want on there”

In theory, Britiakis said, the volunteers will serve shortcake until the end of the afternoon, but it rarely works out that way. “Usually we either run out of shortcakes or run out of ice cream or something. If we have a lot of extra strawberries we’ll package them in quart containers and sell them for an inexpensive amount. If we have enough to do kits, we’ll do the same thing with the biscuits. But usually we’ve run out of something at that point,” she said.

Windham 40th Anniversary Strawberry Festival

When: Saturday, May 31, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where: Windham High School, 64 London Bridge Road, Windham
More: flowwindham.org/strawberry-festival

Featured photo: Courtesy Photo.

The Weekly Dish 25/05/29

News from the local food scene

• Your late-night cookie connection: There was a ribbon-cutting ceremony earlier this week for Insomnia Cookies in downtown Manchester (977 Elm St., 506-5511, insomniacookies.com). The bakery chain, known for warm cookies, ice cream and late-night deliveries, will be open 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays; 11 a.m. to 3 a.m. Thursdays and Fridays, and noon to 3 p.m. on Saturdays. Orders are available for pickup or delivery.

• Pinot and poodle skirts: LaBelle Winery Derry (14 Route 111, Derry, 672-9898, labellewinery.com/labelle-winery-derry) will host a Greased Lightning Rockabilly Dinner Party Saturday, May 31, from 7 to 10 p.m. Enjoy a fun 1950s-inspired three-course dinner followed by dancing. Diners are encouraged to dress in 1950s fashion; prizes will be awarded. Tickets are $74 each, through the LaBelle website.

• Toast and tiaras: There will be a Royal Princess Brunch at Searles Castle (23 Searles Road, Windham, 898.6597, atthecastle.com) on Sunday, June 1, from 9 to 11 a.m. There will be a whimsical tea party complete with fresh pastries, eggs, bacon, sausage and fresh fruit. Every princess will enjoy storytelling, games and a visit from special royal guests. Adult tickets are $92.55, children’s tickets are $55.20 each, and children’s VIP tickets cost $81.88, via eventbrite.com.

• Family bonding over cinnamon rolls: There will be a cinnamon roll-making class for adults with children ages 6 and up on Sunday, June 1, from 10 a.m. to noon at The Culinary Playground (16 Manning St., Derry, 339-1664, culinary-playground.com). Start your day off by making cinnamon rolls with a favorite kid. Each adult-and-child team will make rolls with two varieties of glaze, traditional vanilla and butterscotch. Tickets are $58 per team, through the Culinary Playground website.

• I didn’t even know you could make an island out of that! Tickets are on sale now for the Palace Theatre’s Kitchen Tour on Sunday, June 1. This self-guided tour will run from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at kitchens in Amherst, Bedford, Hollis and Manchester, with a lunch offered at Baron’s Major Brands in Manchester. Tickets cost $55 in advance, $65 on the day. See palacetheatre.org.

Hydrangea Daiquiri

There’s a trope called “The Ninety-Dollar Tomato.” It describes an all-too-familiar situation that many of us frustrated gardeners go through: working diligently on a tomato plant, pruning it, fertilizing it, trellising it, surrounding it with companion plants, rushing out to cover it with a sheet if the weather forecast calls for frost, and manually picking off any bug that looks at it wrong, only to end up with one medium-quality tomato at the end of the summer.

There is a certain competitiveness that can spring up throughout the growing season. It might not be as in-your-face as the Lawn Dads’ battles for sod-based superiority, but we all know somebody who is a master of the passive-aggressive comment about the state of your roses, or faux-commiseration when the deer take out your hostas.

May might be the most soul-crushing month of the year for hopeful gardeners. Anything that blooms this early in the season is out of our hands; the state of our tulips was due entirely to things we did last year but can be glossed over. “Oh, the tulips?” you might say breezily. “You should have seen them last week!”

But May is the month of flowering shrubs that can’t be swept under the rug so easily. Lilacs are going to do what they’re going to do, and display it to the world. Two scraggly heads of blossoms? The lady next door is going to have something to say about that. A crab apple tree that only flowers on one side? Oh, man, that jerk down the street is going to make some joke, asking why your tree has a comb-over.

And then there are the hydrangeas. Even if you do everything perfectly each year — prune, fertilize, check the soil pH — you still never completely know what color the poofy blossom heads are going to be, how big they’re going to be, or how many there will be.

On the other hand, there is a fantastic porch-sitting cocktail that is the same color as hydrangeas, so there is some consolation in that.

  • 2 ounces white rum
  • 1 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
  • ¾ ounce rhubarb syrup (see below)
  • Blue Curaçao

Add rum lime juice and rhubarb syrup over ice to a cocktail shaker.

Shake enthusiastically, until you hear the ice start to splinter inside the shaker.

Strain into a cocktail glass. Pour a slip of blue curacao down the side of the glass. It will pool in the bottom, coloring the bottom half of the daiquiri blue and violet. Ideally, there will be tiny ice shards floating on the surface.

The rhubarb — which has just come into season — gives this daiquiri a beautiful pastel pink color and a background taste that is both floral and sour, which plays well with the lime juice. We don’t often actually taste white rum, which is a bit of a pity; it gives this particular drink an alcoholic spine that brings everything together.

Rhubarb Simple Syrup

  • Equal amounts by weight of rhubarb stalks and sugar
  • A lemon

Clean the rhubarb, then chop it into medium-sized chunks. Put it in your freezer until it has frozen solid. Place the frozen rhubarb chunks in a small saucepan with an equal amount of sugar, and stir together.

You will look at the mixture and realize that it is way too dry to turn into anything like syrup. You’ll be tempted to add water. Don’t.

Cook the mixture slowly, over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally. The rhubarb will suddenly collapse, and the next thing you know the pot will be full of liquid. Bring it to a boil, to make sure that any remaining sugar has dissolved completely, then strain with a fine-mesh strainer. Add lemon juice to taste.

This will last about a month in your refrigerator.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

In the kitchen with Tara Bartilucci

Owner/Baker, Big Trees Baking Company

“I make sourdough bread, which I sell at some local stores and at the Canterbury Farmers’ Market,” Bartilucci said. “I have always loved baking; my mother and I baked growing up. Two years ago in 2023, when I moved to Canterbury, I decided to not buy store-bought bread anymore for the year and it turned into a little obsession. So I went to my farmers market board with bread samples and asked if they wanted a vendor. They … brought my bread around to all the other vendors to try it and everyone was so warm and welcoming. They wanted me to come back the next week to start selling, so I went home and got my watercolors out, made my logo that night and I’ve been selling at the market ever since.”

What is your must-have kitchen item?

My bench scraper. It’s a CDK bench scraper and it’s the larger size. It’s pretty much an extension of my hands. It helps me cut the dough, shape the dough, and transfer the dough. It does absolutely everything.

What would you have for your last meal?

Honestly, bread. I make bread and eat it all the time, but I do truly love bread that much. The other day we actually had an old-world sourdough with a friend around our countertop talking and we put sesame oil, avocados and sesame seeds on it and it was absolutely delicious.

What is your favorite local eatery?

I really enjoy Curry Leaf [in Concord]. I love their Malai Kofta. It’s absolutely delicious.

Who is a celebrity you would like to see eating your bread?

I guess more of a celebrity in the baking world would be James Bridges. He’s in charge of a lot of sourdough Facebook groups and Sourdough Geeks (sourdoughgeeks.com), which is a whole website and group devoted to sourdough baking. He does a lot of classes and education. He’s absolutely incredible at what he does.

Have you given your sourdough starter a name?

I have. Its name is Pineapples. When you start making a sourdough starter it smells like dirty socks at first, but after a while it gets this very yeasty fruity smell because it’s a little more on the acidic side as the good bacteria wins out. It reminded me of pineapples and that name just stuck.

What is a baking trend you see in New Hampshire right now?

Sourdough. Everyone’s making bread from home. People are really embracing that. And I think recognizing how important the farmers markets are and being able to bring their food to those and expand that local market.

What is your favorite thing to cook at home?

Anything with tofu and veggies. I’ve actually been putting tofu in the air fryer lately, just plain. And then it creates this little bit of crisp on the outside and almost gives it a subtle flavor to it. You have to use extra-firm tofu.

What do you put on your bread?

I use a lot of jam. Lindon Garlic Farm [in Gilmanton] makes a black garlic jam with blueberries or strawberries that is absolutely incredible.

What is a good resource for someone who is just learning to make their own sourdough bread?

There are a few people I would look into, actually. Tom Cucuzza, who does the Sourdough Journey (thesourdoughjourney.com), is a good one to start with. I like things in word form instead of video, and he does that well. And then there’s Maurizio Leo (theperfectloaf.com). He has a blog, he has books, he has everything. He’s very, very clear. He was an engineer prior to becoming a baker, so he kind of combines that scientific and artistic element of sourdough. Finally, the Sourdough Geeks Facebook group (facebook.com/groups/sourdoughgeeks) is a really good resource. You do have to look — I think the biggest thing is to look at people’s, the people that comment on your posts and give you advice, look at what their bread looks like and decide if it’s what you want yours to look like.

Featured Image: Tara Bartilucci. Courtesy photo.

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