Category: Food

You’ve got your crisps, your crumbles, your slumps (yes, I know, but they are delicious), your brown bettys, your cobblers and even your pandowdies. And while there are, of course, differences, and enthusiasts who take them Very Seriously, when you get right down to it you have to admit that they are all variations on Baked Fruit with a Topping.

Crisps and crumbles are almost unnervingly easy to pull off. They can be made by a drunken koala bear. They call for fruit and butter and brown sugar and flour. Did you spend an overly ambitious afternoon apple-picking? Did a neighbor leave a shopping bag full of pears on your front step in the middle of the night, ring the doorbell and run away? Did you find some forgotten rhubarb hiding behind a bag of peas in the back of your freezer?

Boom! A crumble has your back.

Fruit

• 4 cups (roughly 575 g) of chopped fall fruit – I’ve made this with pears, apples, rhubarb, cranberries, and even mangos. This past week I used two large stalks of rhubarb and a couple of Honeycrisp apples.
• ½ cup (100 g) brown sugar
• A splash (probably two teaspoons) vanilla

Topping

• 1 cup (120 g) flour
• ¼ cup (50 g) more brown sugar
• Large pinch of coarse sea salt or kosher salt
• 1/3 cup (2/3 stick) cold butter
• ¼ cup chopped nuts – purists use chopped walnuts, but though I can’t prove it, I feel like walnuts are part of a secret-but-evil conspiracy. I use chopped pecans.

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

If you’ve already peeled and chopped your fruit, this might be the simplest, most straightforward thing you’ve done this week. Put a small baking dish — I use a soufflé dish — on your scale. Dump your fruit into the dish. Tare (zero out) the scale, and spoon or sprinkle the brown sugar over the top, then add a splash of vanilla. Stir it all together, and set it aside.

Add the flour, salt, brown sugar and chopped nuts to a mixing bowl and stir to combine. If you want to use the same spoon you just used for the fruit, nobody will narc you out to the Crumble Cops.

Chop the butter into chunks, then add it to the flour mixture.

This is the part that will make you feel like you know what you’re doing:

Wash and dry your hands, then stir the butter chunks around with your fingers. Pinch the butter pieces with floury hands, and rub your fingers and thumbs together. Keep doing this until the butter is in what bakers describe as “pea-sized pieces.” That doesn’t seem very specific; peas come in a lot of different sizes. Crumbles are really forgiving, though, and as long as the butter is in small pieces it will work well.

Dump the topping on top of the fruit in the baking dish and spread it out more or less evenly. You can use your friend the Fruit Spoon for this, but your fingers will work just as well.

Put your proto-crumble in the oven and bake it for 45 to 50 minutes. When the topping is lightly browned and develops cracks with fruit lava showing through, it’s ready. Set it aside to cool enough to not destroy your mouth, then serve it warm with ice cream, or room temperature the next morning for breakfast.

Featured photo. Photo by John Fladd.

Pickles are the point at Provocative Pickle Co.

The story of how Whitney Leyland started The Provocative Pickle Co. is one as old as time: There was a woman, and a man, and too many cucumbers.

“It was kind of one of those Bob Ross, happy accident type of deals,” Leyland said. Through a string of overlapping unexpected circumstances, she found herself with a constant flood of fresh cucumbers. “And you know,” she said, “there is honestly only a certain amount of cucumbers you can rationally eat. We had massive bowls full — at one point we had three giant bowls of cucumbers in our kitchen. And I was staring at my partner Dave [business and life-partner David Bennett], and I said, ‘What am I going to do with all these?’”

“He was like, ‘I just can’t. I can’t eat any more cucumbers.’ And we just sat there, kind of laughing about it for a minute, until it dawned on me — how do you preserve a cucumber?” One thing led to another, Leyland said, and now they own a pickle company, based in Salem.

By the end of October, Leyland said, there will be two varieties of Provocative Pickles. “Currently approved, we have our Dirty Dillies, which is a spicy garlic dill pickle. We have also finished the approval process for our Honey Mustard Pickles. In my opinion, you can have a great bread and butter pickle, but I’m very picky. That’s why we do a honey mustard [pickle]. It’s my take on the bread and butter [and] still gives you that sweetness, but honey-mustard is actually a New England-based flavor, so I thought it was very fitting for us as a New England-based company to do our own take on the honey mustard pickle. We also just did a test batch for a [third] pickle that will be our jalapeño-lime pickle.” Leyland and Bennett anticipate that will be available for sale by the end of the year.

Provocative Pickles are crisp, refrigerated, sliced pickles, Leyland said.

“I’m constantly test-batching and seeing what I can do. We’re hoping to expand from just having the pickle chips — kind of having those circle cuts — to being able to do spears. Any time I change the cut of the pickle, though, I actually have to send it back out for testing. It changes the ratios of things when they’re testing it. So that’s going to be a winter project for us as well, because I personally love a spear pickle when I’m eating a sandwich in the summer.” Crispness was another important consideration when developing the recipe, she said. “They are extra-crispy. There has to be a little acidity in there, a nice, balanced bite, and you need that texture. A floppy, soggy pickle doesn’t work for anyone.”

So far Leyland and Bennett have sold all their pickles at farmers markets and festivals, Leyland said. “Currently we’re doing all in-person sales. In order to do store sales, there’s one additional course that I need to take as a manager who oversees all the processes. So that’s in my winter to-do list, once our market season wraps up. We just finished applying for a lot of our winter markets, which we’ll be doing on an every-other-week schedule. That way folks can still find us in person while I’m still working on, you know, getting my certifications; that way we can start our sales in stores.”

Leyland described her perfect sandwich-and-pickle combination: “I like to keep it nice and classic,” she said. “I like a nice turkey and cheese with our signature Dirty Dilly Spicy Garlic Dill Pickles in the sandwich and on the side. There should be yellow mustard on my bun, and then on the side I’ll have a spear of my Dirty Dillys once those are approved, and some salt and vinegar chips, which have to be very crunchy — kettle chips.”

The Provocative Pickle Co. is online at theprovocativepickleco.com.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

• Where to park when dining out: Looking for a parking spot in downtown Manchester so you can visit a restaurant? As reported in the Manchester Economic Development Office’s MEDO Minute newsletter (manchesternh.gov/Departments/Economic-Development/MEDO-Minute-Newsletter), the City of Manchester has a partially interactive parking map online to show where parking is generally available downtown, and the rates for parking there. There is real-time information for some parking garages that shows how full they are. Visit manchesternh.gov/Departments/Parking.

• Eat around the fire: From Thursday, Oct. 8, Averill House Vineyard (21 Averill Road, Brookline, 244-3165, averillhousevineyard.com) will offer Come Over October, an outdoor wine and food experience for up to eight guests around a fire table in the vineyard’s gazebo. Each ticket provides two adults and a child under 12 with a tasting of four wines, a wine slushy, or nonalcoholic beverages, and a charcuterie board for up to two adults (which can be expanded upon request). The price per ticket is $79. Check available time slots through the Averill House website.

• Sample and buy chocolate: The Chocolate Expo will take place Sunday, Oct. 11, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the DoubleTree Expo Center in downtown Manchester featuring tastings and sales of chocolates and other specialty foods as well as craft beverages, according to thechocolateexpo.com, where you can purchase tickets.

• Thoughtful dining at Arts Alley: Tuesday, Oct. 13, Arts Alley (20 S. Main St., Concord, 406-5666, artsalleyconcordnh.com) will host an Art of Dining fall dining experience from 6 to 8:30 p.m. Guests will be guided through a curated selection of pairings, each chosen to complement the menu and enhance the progression of the dining experience. Each course will be introduced, giving guests a closer look at the creativity and thought that goes into every plate. Tickets are $81.88 through artsalleyconcordnh.com/events.

• Grapes you’ve never heard of: On Wednesday, Oct. 14, Wine on Main (9 N. Main St., Concord, 897-5828, wineonmainnh.com) will host a wine class on Unusual Grapes and Where to Find Them from 6:30 to 8 p.m. There are approximately 10,000 named grape varietals in the world, but relatively few are drunk in the United States. Many of them are consumed locally and not exported while others don’t yield enough wine to see the mainstream market. This class will discuss tracking down some of these less often seen grape varietals. Tickets are $35 through the Wine on Main website and include six wines, education and light snacks.

• 1 ounce pear syrup (see below)
• Juice of 1 lime (about 1 ounce) + the carcass of half the lime
• 3 ounces pineapple juice
• 3 ounces club soda

Add the pear syrup, lime and pineapple juices, and half of the squeezed lime over ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake thoroughly.

Pour everything, including the ice, into a Collins glass. Top with club soda, then stir gently. Garnish with a paper umbrella or a plastic dinosaur. Drink with a straw. Because, reasons.

Pear syrup

• 2 pears, or five or six little ones (300 g)
• ½ cup (99 g) granulated sugar
• 1 cup (225 g) water

Wash several pears, but don’t worry about peeling or coring them. Chop them into medium dice, then put them in the freezer for a few hours or overnight, until they are completely frozen.

Imagine that you are very tiny and have just moved into a new home — the inside of a pear cell. You have just finished getting your tiny apartment set up — the cookbooks are shelved, you’ve placed your lamps and tiny houseplants arranged just so. You put some jazz on your tiny sound system — maybe “Autumn Leaves” by the Bill Evans Trio — and have put your feet up and are relaxing. Unknown to you, the big lummox who lives outside the pear chops it into pieces. It’s like an earthquake and shocks you off your recliner, onto your tiny floor. You shout and shake your fist at the cell walls, but suddenly, the temperature starts to plummet. To your horror, the cell rumbles, and giant ice crystals start bursting through the walls, tearing brutal holes in them.

It only gets worse from there.

The point of this is that by freezing fruit, you poke holes through all its cell walls, which makes it collapse and release juice better when you make your syrup.

Combine the frozen pear pieces, the sugar and the water in a saucepan and cook over medium-low heat, until it comes to a boil. Simmer the mixture for 20 minutes. About 10 minutes in, hit the pear pieces with a potato masher to encourage them to submit to the syrup process.

Remove the pear pan from the stove and let it cool for an hour or so. Strain into a jar or a small bottle, and store in the refrigerator for up to a month.

Featured photo. Photo by John Fladd.

Sugar Street Buns keeps it local in Milford

“We are a bun bakery,” said Alyssa Guzman, the owner and head baker of Sugar Street Buns in Milford. “We [make] four to five different buns every month. We will always have our original cinnamon bun, and then we do one or two other specialty sweet items. Right now we’ve got a peanut butter and jelly bun and a fluffernutter bun. We always have two savory options for the people who don’t like things too sweet. It is our same sweet dough that we use, but it’s got a savory filling. So, right now, we have a ham and cheese — it’s Swiss cheese with Dijon mustard and Black Forest ham. And then we have a spinach and artichoke bun, which is one of my favorites. It has spinach, artichoke, mozzarella, parm — all the good stuff.”

Guzman is originally from southwest Florida but moved to the Northeast about three years ago, she said.

“My fiancé and I started out in Boston. We wanted to try something different. He’s originally from Connecticut. He wanted to come back this way. I’ve never experienced seasons. So we took a leap and moved to Boston. I worked at the Four Seasons for a year, but the city was not for me. We wanted to settle down, buy a house somewhere. I had never ever been to New Hampshire. And my fiancé was like, “Oh no, I think you’re really going to like New Hampshire. And he was right.”

“We came to see a house,” Guzman continued. “We ended up loving the house; we bought the house. And it’s two minutes away from the Oval. And after we put an offer in on the house we came to Sunday’s [Ice Cream Shop] in the Oval. We got ice cream. And we’re sitting here. And we’re like, this is absolutely perfect. This downtown area is adorable. But what they’re missing is a bakery. Why doesn’t Milford have a bakery? They had a bunch of restaurants and bars, but what it was missing was a bakery.”

Guzman’s bakery on the Oval in Milford has been open for just over a month.

“This is now our fourth week.” she said “And we have had a line every single weekend and sometimes even on Wednesdays when we open up during the week. It’s unbelievable.”

One of Guzman’s goals for the bakery has been to reflect the local community, she said. “We had to build the entire space. So it was a retail space, and it was all carpet. My kitchen is downstairs in the finished basement, but it wasn’t finished all the way to what I needed. So I had to create the whole kitchen downstairs, and then upstairs I totally transformed it with the help of all of the community people. I take a lot of pride in my shop and the fact that just about every single thing from the shop is local — my plumber, my electrician, my carpenter who made all of my tables, I had two artists do all of the paintings and paint my case and my walls and do this beautiful, beautiful art. And I try to keep it going with my coffee. It comes from Union [Coffee Co. in Milford]. My tea comes from 27 Teas in downtown Manchester. And we’re slowly starting to have all of our food come from local people. Right now I’m switching my cheeses to a local sheep farmer and I’m super excited about that. But it’s little things like that and I’m trying to bring the community into what I am doing and try to keep it as local as possible.”

Sugar Street Buns
Where: 227 Union Square, Unit 1, in Milford
Hours: Wednesdays through Fridays, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. According to Sugar Street Buns’ Facebook page, the bakery will be closed for the owner’s wedding and reopen for Pumpkinfest on Friday, Oct. 9.
More: sugarstreetbuns.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.