Category: Food

New Dessert House satisfies a sweet tooth

By John Fladd

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Have you ever eaten a doughnut and thought to yourself, “This is excellent. I really, really like doughnuts, but I think it would be better if it were crispier, somehow.”?

Tanya Grenier has you covered.

She and her husband are the brains behind Tanya’s Waffle-Donuts. The Boscawen businesswoman described her product this way: “They look like a waffle,” she said. “They taste like a doughnut, but they’re not deep fried. They’re all made from homemade recipes, made from scratch.”

The idea for the waffle-doughnut came from a family trip, Grenier recalled.

“We were at an Airbnb with our daughter and our son-in-law,” she said. Her daughter asked her dad if he could make doughnuts for breakfast. “So they had all the ingredients to make them, but we didn’t check and they ended up not having oil. So we were like, ‘Oh, we can’t deep fry them.’ We ended up making pancakes with the batter. They looked like a pancake in a pan, but they tasted like a doughnut. They were amazing, but then my husband said, ‘You know what would be really cool, though? If it was the shape of a waffle it would be a little easier to pick up and like look really cool with a waffle shape.’”

The Greniers spent three years developing a recipe that would work.

“Basically,” Tanya said, “you can’t use a waffle recipe or a doughnut recipe. What you need to do is you’ve got to kind of combine them to get them to rise because most doughnut recipes are made to be deep-fried, and these are not.” Eventually, she said, the recipe came together. “The best part of these is they have less sugar than a regular doughnut, but they still taste just like a doughnut, but they’re not greasy. They’re light and fluffy. They’re not fried in oil at all. They’re all made in a waffle iron.”

Once the base recipe was worked out, the Greniers were able to develop a large number of variations on the doughnuts themselves, and an equally large number of frosting types, which have lent themselves to many combinations.

“We make a cake waffle doughnut, which is our original waffle doughnut,” Tanya said. “It has a little bit of cinnamon, a little bit of nutmeg. We make a chocolate waffle doughnut, which is like a milk chocolate, almost — not a dark chocolate but like a milk chocolate doughnut. We make maple doughnuts and apple doughnuts. We’ve done banana doughnuts. We do a cornbread waffle doughnut. We do a potato waffle doughnut. We do carrot cake ones.”

The Greniers package some waffle-doughnuts for individual sale, but they are happiest when they serve them hot and crispy from their food truck.

“The food truck is called the Waffle Donut Wagon,” Grenier said, “and then when we sell them pre-packaged it’s called Tanya’s Homemade Waffle Donut. We usually only sell [the individually wrapped ones] at special indoor craft events. We’ve done horse shows, we’ve done weddings, birthdays, bridal showers, pretty much anything you can think of. We do that with the truck just because we can offer food items plus they’re hot off the press as we call it. We cook them to order so they get them hot off the press with everything like the frosting is like put right on top melted.”

Tanya’s Waffle Donuts and the Waffle Donut Wagon

Tanya’s Waffle Donuts and the Waffle Donut Wagon can be found at events throughout New Hampshire and can cater any event. Call 785-6283 for more information, or search for “Waffle Donut Wagon” on Facebook or @waffledonutwagon on Instagram.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

New Dessert House satisfies a sweet tooth

By John Fladd

[email protected]

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.