Category: Food

Food Bank raises funds

Next week’s Winter Wine Spectacular is one of four major fundraising events for the New Hampshire Food Bank. Three of the four events — the Distiller’s Showcase in November, the Wine Spectacular in January, and the Steel Chef competition in March — are food- or drink-related. Together with a September golf tournament, these events allow the Food Bank to feed more people.

Nancy Mellitt is New Hampshire Food Bank’s Director of Development. She is one of the principal organizers of these fundraising events.

“The funds that we see from the Wine Spectacular,” she said, “will help us to … purchase food — we’re purchasing about 30 percent more food this year over last year — for distribution. About one in 10 individuals in New Hampshire — one in seven children 18 and under — are food-insecure. Those [numbers come] from Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap, and those numbers are from 2022. We all know that grocery prices are very high, fuel is high, rents are high; so it’s just difficult for people to make ends meet. And sometimes they have to make a choice between shelter and food.”

According to statistics on New Hampshire Food Bank’s website, in 2023 the organization distributed 16.3 million pounds of food and, working with more than 400 partner agencies, served 13.6 million meals across New Hampshire.

Mellitt said that events like the Winter Wine Spectacular, which is put on by the New Hampshire Liquor Commission, are an important part of meeting that mission.

“We have a very great partnership with the Liquor Commission,” she said, adding that it was the Commission that suggested this partnership. “The Liquor Commission asked the Food Bank if we would consider taking this event on. We recruit restaurants for individuals to have tastings, both in the expo and in the VIP room. We’re trying to help to solicit some auction items available for folks to bid on. And we help to recruit volunteers so that everything’s running smoothly and the guests have a fabulous experience.”

The Liquor Commission, for its part, donates 100 percent of the event’s proceeds to the Food Bank.

“The main driver of this program is that it’s a huge benefit,” said Mark Roy, Director of Marketing for the Liquor Commission. “Our beneficiary is our partner, the New Hampshire Food Bank. [The Distillers’ Showcase and the Wine Spectacular] are not only about educating our consumers about our products and our outlets and our business but it’s partnering with crucial people like the New Hampshire Food Bank. It’s a 360-degree encompassing feel-good event. You can come and have a good time and know that it’s going toward a good cause and something that New Hampshire and the Liquor Commission really supports.”

The next event on Nancy Mellitt’s radar is the Steel Chef competition in March (nhfoodbank.org/steelchef), where 680 attendees will watch a live, timed cooking competition featuring prominent New Hampshire chefs. As the chefs compete against each other to prepare their best dishes featuring a mystery ingredient, guests will eat a special dinner curated by Celebrity Chef Marcus Samuelsson. Mellitt is a big fan.

“He was fabulous last year,” she said. “Of all of the chefs that we’ve had to date, he’s been the best. The first year a chef [hosts] this event is tough for them because they’ve never done it before; they still don’t really know what to anticipate. But Chef Sameulsson just blended in. It was amazing. It was really great to meet him and work with him and we’re looking forward to it again.”

Mellitt said tickets for Steel Chef will sell out early: “I would say they will sell out probably sometime in January.”

Food Bank events
19th Annual New England Winter Wine Spectacular
When: Friday, Jan. 23, from 6 to 8:30 p.m.
Where: Doubletree Expo Center, 700 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: available through eventbrite.com.

9th Annual Steel Chef event
When: Monday, March 17
Tickets: available at nhfoodbank.org/steelchef

To learn more about food insecurity in New Hampshire and the New Hampshire Food Bank’s role in alleviating it, visit nhfoodbank.org/hunger-in-nh.

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.