Category: Food

In the kitchen with Emma Stetson

Emma Stetson followed a winding path to wine. “Actually I started out as a high school English teacher,” she said. “I took a Wine 101 course in college as an elective and really fell in love with it, but I was an English major, so my plan was always to stay in that field, and I got my start career-wise as a high school English teacher. But on the side I got kind of a fun freelance job writing about wine for a local food and wine publication in Connecticut. Also in college, while I was an English major, I double majored in Near Eastern Studies, like Arabic and Middle Eastern culture. A Boston-based chef was opening a restaurant in Kuwait and we got to talking and he asked for my help, like my language skills and my help to go out there and join their opening team and help them open the restaurant. So I left my teaching position because I thought that was such a cool opportunity, and went and did that with them. And then when I finished there and came back, I realized I didn’t want to go back into teaching.”

Stetson moved from writing about wine to working in a wine shop, then eventually to working for a series of wine distributors. “Wine on Main did exist in Concord for a little bit, but [the owners] quietly let me know that they were looking to sell the store, and wondered if I would know somebody [to buy it]. I told my husband and told my parents that I was trying to think of people who might be interested. And they all kind of looked at me and were like, ‘What about you? Like maybe this is a great opportunity for you and a chance to have your own store.’ So I am now the owner of Wine on Main in Concord.”

What is the most essential piece of equipment for a wine enthusiast?

Definitely a corkscrew; I prefer a waiter corkscrew. [Also known as a ‘wine key,’ this is the type of opener that is hinged to apply leverage to remove a cork.] It’s portable. I have probably about five on me at any given time. There’s like one in my purse, one in my pocket, one in the car, tons at the store.

What would you have for your last glass of wine?

A Meursault from Burgundy. It is arguably the best chardonnay in the world. Nobody does chardonnay like they do in Burgundy and Meursault is my favorite wine region.

What celebrity would you like to drink a glass of wine with?

I would say Gail Simmons. She was a judge on Top Chef. She’s more food-centric, but she got her start working for Food & Wine magazine. I read her memoir probably once every two years. In a strange way, I strive to make my wine career the way she developed her food career. Her whole philosophy was kind of starting at the bottom and tackling the industry from every side, even the unglamorous ones.

What would be an interesting wine that you would recommend to someone who was enthusiastic but not really knowledgeable?

I would say anything French, because French wines are so complex and interesting. I feel like people who don’t know a lot about wine get intimidated by French wines, but I would say, like, no, try them. I would maybe suggest starting with a Gamay, just because they’re so delicious, but they’re fruit-forward and lighter-bodied and approachable.

What do you keep in your refrigerator or your wine rack at home to drink?

I really do love a good chardonnay, so I have various chardonnays on hand, French ones and buttery, oaky California ones. I love the oakiness and the butteriness and the high acid. And you can have it on its own, but since it has the weight, it goes so well with food.

What is your best piece of advice for a wine lover?

I would just say — especially if you’re someone who’s starting your wine collection — make sure that you store your wine properly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from customers that they’ve been so excited to go get a bottle only to find that it hadn’t been stored properly and had gone bad. So maybe it’s worth investing in a small wine fridge. Find a part of your house that’s cellar temperature and at a consistent temperature, especially here in New England, that doesn’t have intense temperature fluctuations. Don’t keep the wine by your wood stove.

Local flour for better bread

How one baker focuses on the grains for better baking

Michael Williams is getting closer to baking his perfect loaf of bread.

Williams, co-owner and bread baker for Eden’s Table Farm in Dunbarton, has spent the past couple of years polishing his bread game.

“I got exposed to great bread when I went to Germany,” he said, “to flour that was local and freshly milled, and bread that was made with a natural starter. That was what was most easily available in the bakery in our tiny little 1,100-person village. I’ve been chasing that bread ever since; every refinement has been getting me closer to that experience.”

Williams and his wife, Addie Leader-Zavos, combine their passion for growing fresh, organic produce and locally made artisanal foods. While Leader-Zavos bakes virtually everything else, Williams is in charge of the bread.

The journey toward the very best bread takes the form of tiny, incremental steps, but he sees constant progress. “The best example I can give you is actually the Swedish rye. I made that for Addie on our second date. And I was using King Arthur flour, then I was using a sifted rice flour. I was using molasses instead of beet syrup, but now I’m using a Swedish baking syrup that’s beet-based. Over time, I’ve whittled it down to the essentials and getting the absolute best ingredients I can. The pursuit of that led me to constantly question, ‘Where is this coming from? How is it being processed?’ I ask that over and over and over again.”

Because his platonic ideal of a loaf of bread has very few ingredients — flour, salt, a natural sourdough starter, something to help feed that starter (that’s where the Swedish baking syrup comes in), and water — Williams has put more thought into the flour he uses than most people put into planning their retirement.

“I wanted flour that was what I refer to as ‘live flour.’ It has never been separated, and it has never been irradiated. Industrial flour is almost always separated. It is sifted hot, or it is milled hot, separated into its component parts and the germ is irradiated to denature volatile oils. When they oxidize, they become rancid. It’s a very distinct odor and it’s very unpleasant. It totally makes sense why they would not want that in their product going out into the world but unfortunately most of the nutrition is in those oils, because the best nutrition in the grain is fat-soluble. So not only that, but that’s where all the flavor is. That’s where all those aromatic esters and aldehydes are, and they get destroyed by the same process that denatures those easily oxidized oils.”

Once Williams had defined what he was looking for in a bread flour, he started using flour that was shipped from a regional mill in South Carolina. Eventually he found a mill closer to home. “We found a couple of different options, and the one that really struck us was this place in Cambridge [Massachusetts] called Elmendorf Baking Supplies. They have a mill, and they mill for themselves and for some other people. And so we started ordering from them. They source their grain regionally from small regenerative farms. They work with private grains. They work with farms in New York and Maine and Massachusetts. The step we took here, we were getting bread flour from a variety of wheat called Glenthat is 15 and a half percent protein, which is astronomically high.”

(As a point of reference, King Arthur’s bread flour, which has an excellent reputation, has a protein content of 12.7 percent. The amount of protein in a flour determines how well a baker can develop gluten, the elastic material that gives a loaf of bread a chewy texture and traps carbon dioxide to make it puff up as it bakes.)

Williams uses a mixture of the Glen flour and rye flour to make his Swedish rye bread. “One of the tricky things about baking with rye flour is that rye notoriously destroys gluten structures,” he said. “So rye has almost no protein in it. This rye bread is only like 31 percent rye. It’s not a high rye, but the blend really does a great job of holding up with that rye in it.”

But for Williams, this flour is just one more step toward a truly great bread. Eventually, he said, he and his wife would like to mill their own flour. “It’s a process of evolution,” he summed up, “First the flour, then the mill, then a wood-fired oven, because I would much rather bake bread on a wood fire.”

Bread
The farm stand at Eden’s Table Farm (240 Stark Highway North, Dunbarton, 774-1811, edenstablefarm.square.site) is closed until Feb 5. Hours when it reopens will be Wedensday-Friday 1-7pm and Saturdays from 9am-5pm.

The Weekly Dish 25/01/09

New international cuisine in Nashua: A new restaurant with a menu inspired by world street food has opened in Nashua. Local Street Eats (112 W. Pearl St., Nashua, 402-4435, local-streeteats.com) offers small bites, salads and more substantial fare including Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Indian, Central American and regional American classics.

Bottomless kolsch: Thirsty Thursdays at To Share Brewing (720 Union St., Manchester, 836-6947, tosharebrewing.com) in January will celebrate the brewery’s Krone Kolsch “via traditional service in the taproom, every Thursday until the Krone is gone,” according to a post on To Share’s Facebook page. “A server will bring around a tray (traditionally referred to as a kranz) of fresh Krone. If yours is empty, we’ll deliver a new one and mark a notch on your coaster. We will keep the fresh pours coming each time you have an empty glass. Place your coaster on top of your glass to let us know you’re done.”

Zero-proof wines: Wine on Main (9 N. Main St., Concord, 897-5828, wineonmainnh.com) will host a free tasting of non-alcoholic wines with Emily from Vinilandia, Saturday, Jan. 11, from 1 to 4 p.m. Anyone observing Dry January or just “sober-curious” is invited to taste some of the new wave of alcohol-free wines. “Technology and winemaking has come a long way and these are not the non-alcoholic options of years past. These are actual wines by established winemakers that then have the alcohol naturally removed at the end,” Wine on Main writes on its website.

Wine fun: Vine 32 Wine & Graze Bar (25 S. River Road, Unit 107, in Bedford; vinethirtytwo.com) has a few Valentine’s related events on their schedule. On Thursday, Feb. 13, from 6 to 8 p.m. it’s a Galentines Charcuterie Workshop. On Friday, Feb. 14, Partners In Wine will offer seatings for wine, charcuterie and a dessert to share at 4, 6:15 and 8:30 p.m. On Saturday, Feb. 15, it’s Galentines Barre at the Wine Bar at 1 p.m. with Barre Life. See the website for details.

Cucumber Sparkle Mocktail

By John Fladd

One of the dangers of recipes for meatless, sugar-free or zero-proof recipes is the frequent assurance that the finished product will be “just as good as the real thing.” If it really were just as good, the more virtuous version would be the default. A vegan pot roast will never be as good as your grandmother’s.

The problem with working around a dietary restriction is that most of us come at it from the point of view of taking something away from an already delicious dish, instead of starting from the ground up and adding ingredients that work on their own merits.

In this case, let’s start with an acidic — read “sour” — base. That will make this drink bracing and not too sweet. We could work with any type of citrus, but this time let’s go with lime juice. Lime is friendly and gets along with everyone. Let’s cut a fresh lime in half and squeeze the juice into a mixing glass. Just for kicks, let’s throw in one of the spent halves of the lime to let everyone know you’re taking this seriously.

Because we probably won’t want to drink straight lime juice, let’s temper the sourness with another element. There are a couple of directions we could go — spicy heat, smoke or salt — but let’s add something sweet. “Sweet and Sour” is a classic combination, whether we’re talking about children’s candy or Chinese takeout. We’ll use simple syrup, which will go into solution easily and won’t leave any sugar crystals at the bottom of our glass.

We could just top this drink off with ice and soda water at this point and call it a day. We’d have a glass of ultra-fresh limeade, and there is nothing wrong with that, but it might be interesting to add another flavor to the mix — maybe something unexpected. The fact that this drink is alcohol-free doesn’t mean it can’t have some complexity. Because lime really does go with everything, we could muddle a jalapeño in the glass at the beginning of this operation, or maybe a sprig of rosemary. Those would both be excellent, but this time let’s go with cucumber. It’s an unexpected flavor, but also reasonably non-threatening. We’ll add it with the sweet element, in the form of cucumber syrup.

Now, all we need is a sparkling element. Tonic water is a classic companion for lime juice, but it might be a little too sweet on its own here, so let’s cut it 50/50 with seltzer.

We could add more ingredients at this point, but we’d run the risk of overcomplicating things and muddying the flavor. We’ve put together a solid (well, liquid, actually), adult drink that is very good on its own merits. We can build on this someday, but for now this will do nicely.

Cucumber Sparkle

  • Juice of 1 lime, reserving the spent carcass of one half
  • 2 ounces cucumber syrup (see below)
  • 3 ounces extra bubbly seltzer – I like Topo Chico
  • 3 ounces tonic water
  • ice

Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass, and stir slowly and with gratitude.

Carefully pour everything, including the ice and the lime carcass, into a chilled rocks glass.

Ask your digital assistant to play “Rhapsody in Blue” by George Gershwin, and sip your drink with a sense of gratification. If your mood slips into one of smug satisfaction, who could blame you?

Cucumber Syrup

Wash one or more cucumbers, but leave the skins on. Chop to a medium dice, then freeze for an hour or two, until completely solid. Add an equal amount of sugar by weight, and cook over medium-low heat. The cucumbers will release a startling amount of juice. Bring to a low boil, then remove from heat. Let the cucumbers steep for 20 minutes or so, then strain the syrup. This will last for a week or two in your refrigerator.

In the kitchen with Lin Theth

Chef at Street (76 N. Main St., Concord, 333-2125, streetfood360.com)

“I started in the industry as a student. I went to high school in Dover, and I took their culinary program,” Theth said. “I did that program for two years and then proceeded to go to Johnson & Wales for school. I completed my degree there in culinary arts, and I began working at first in Portsmouth, to finish my degree. I had to do an internship, so I did it at Vida Cantina in Portsmouth. I was there for about five or so years. I started as an intern, worked up to line cook, and then I was the chef there for the last couple of years. I began working at Street at our flagship restaurant in Portsmouth. From there, I helped open their secondary location in Exeter, and then I’m currently working at their third location in Concord.”

What’s your must-have kitchen item?

Definitely a knife. Having a good chef’s knife is everything. If you pick the right one, something that’s comfortable, something that’s really tuned to your hand as an individual, you know, you can almost use it for anything.

What would your last meal be?

Anything that my mother would make me, I would gladly have. I grew up eating a lot of pho and that’s something that I could never say no to, so I’d probably say that.

What’s your favorite place to eat out at?

I’ll be honest, I don’t go out much. I typically, you know, as the industry goes, I work a lot of hours, and aside from that, I just prefer to be at home. There’s a restaurant in Lynn, Mass., called Nightshade Noodle Bar and in the summertime they do like a seafood shack situation where they do Vietnamese Cajun cuisine. And I’ve never had it, but I’ve always wanted to try. Fun stuff like that is always very interesting to see.

What’s your favorite thing on your menu?

When I first started here at Street, I used to take the Singapore salad and what I would do is I would have that with a side of Korean tenders, but I would take it and wrap it up in a falafel pita and eat it like a pita.

What’s the biggest food trend you see in New Hampshire right now?

Anything that you see on social media is huge right now. I feel like the fusion is something that people have been really gravitating toward recently. Just like the mix and match of different cultures and a single dish and that kind of thing. I’ve seen a lot of dishes like birria ramen and stuff like that, which is very interesting.

What do you cook at home?

Breakfast is huge for me. I love waking up in the morning, having my cup of tea or cup of coffee and just making breakfast. That’s always one of the staples for me. Just, you know, scrambled eggs, good scrambled eggs, some seasoned potatoes, things like that.

Dipping Sauce
From the kitchen of Lin Theth

This is something that I like to do as just a dipping sauce for proteins — chicken or whatever:

It’s a couple of tablespoons of simple syrup. You can just make it on the stove; just cook [equal amounts of] sugar and water and boil that until the sugar is dissolved. Add a little bit of garlic and chili, just to bring in some heat, just a little zestiness from the garlic. Once that’s cooled, add a couple tablespoons of fish sauce to it and a fat squeeze of lime juice.

It’s pretty simple and easy to make, but it’s one of those things where you have a little bit of everything. It’s sweet, it’s spicy, it’s salty from the fish sauce. It’s great.

A cup of civility

Honey Cup Cafe & Tearoom offers tea and a moment of calm

By John Fladd

[email protected]

If you ask Mara Witt, the owner of Honey Cup Cafe & Tearoom, what Manchester needs, she’ll tell you it’s a tea room. The tea is important, of course, but Witt said that a tea room fills a need many adults have: It’s a space to relax and spend time with other adults; to inject a little civility into their day-to-day routine.

“I think a lot of other women need something to be able to look forward to,” she said. “It just kind of elevates your daily life a little bit to be able to sit down and feel a little bit fancy with little sandwiches and enjoy a warm drink with someone. It’s nice to have something that’s not so alcohol-focused. There’s a lot to do that is alcohol-focused. It’s nice to have a way to go out with someone that you can do in the morning and not feel guilty about it that’s not coffee- or alcohol-focused.”

Since its formal opening in December, the Honey Cup has had a mixed clientele.

“I have definitely been pleasantly surprised with the amount of men,” Witt said. “It turns out that a lot of men really enjoy drinking tea. But they also like the tea room; they like the aesthetic. They find it a nice relaxing place to be.”

Although the Honey Cup serves coffee and even a few low-octane cocktails, the focus is on tea and tea-adjacent foods.

“We have a focus on vintage comfort foods,” Witt said. “The idea is a bit like a vintage lunch counter.” To that end, there are breakfast items, baked goods like scones, and finger sandwiches. “And then we do a formal tea on Saturdays and Sundays at two o’clock by reservation,” Witt added, “which is a full afternoon tea service.”

The Full Afternoon Tea is an example of curating a grown-up experience for Witt’s customers. “It’s modeled after a Victorian English version of afternoon tea,” Wit said. “We serve three tiers. The bottom tier is always finger sandwiches; we do chicken salad, deviled egg, [and] cucumber sandwiches of course, and then salmon — a lox sandwich. The second tier is always scones, so we usually have two kinds of scones to choose from. We serve that with authentic clotted cream, lemon curd, and jam to put on the scones. And then on the top we always have a [pastry] assortment — things like petit fours or macarons. Each person has a personal pot of tea and it’s a bottomless pot so they can try all the teas on our menu.”

Honey Cup Cafe and Tearoom. Photo by John Fladd.
Honey Cup Cafe and Tearoom. Photo by John Fladd.

A big part of creating a comfortable space has been building an aesthetic, Witt said.

“I guess I’m what you might describe as a maximalist. I think I identified with that. [Our look] is very vintage, floral, and a little feminine. I wanted it to feel kind of like a parlor, like you’re going to the parlor in someone’s house and enjoying tea time there, like they did in the olden days.” To that end, the wallpaper in both rooms in the cafe has a bold floral design. There are comfortable chairs to sit in, and even a sofa. Witt pointed to a floral spray in one corner of the tea parlor. “In my loan paperwork, I said I need $5,000 for a floral installation,” she said. “And my loan officer said, ‘Absolutely not.’ So I did them myself for not $5,000 and so far everyone likes my floral arrangement.”

While walk-in customers make up a sizable portion of the Honey Cup’s business, Witt’s strategy is to lean into events.
“We can host private events after four,” she said. We’re closed at three, so we can do private room rentals for sure. And we have the catering as well. I think we’ll do well with the room rentals once the word is out about that.”

The space is perfect, she said, for small gatherings like book clubs and showers.

“We’re doing a ‘Blind Book Club’,” she said, “where I wrap all the books and nobody knows what book it is before they buy it. The first time we did it, it sold out in one week and we sold all the books. Readers love it; it’s like a blind date. We set a date, then meet to have a little tea and discuss the book. And the response is just like people love it, like blind date with a book … and then we’re going to meet here on Jan. 25 and have a little tea and discuss the book. I really wanted to have a community place for knitting clubs or book clubs or things like that or a place to just come in the morning and just sit and relax.”

Honey Cup Cafe & Tearoom
150 Bridge St., Manchester, 836-6008, honeycupnh.com
Open 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. seven days a week. Catering and room rentals are available. Special events are listed on the Honey Cup website.

Featured photo: Mara Witt, owner of Honey Cup Cafe and Tearoom. Photo by John Fladd.

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!