Category: Food

Lebanese food is on the menu for the annual fest at Our Lady of the Cedars

“Mahrajan” — pronounced “MAR-john” — is an Arabic word that carries meanings of “festival” or “celebration.” For more than 50 years, Our Lady of the Cedars Church in Manchester has been throwing a mahrajan for the community every summer to share Lebanese food and culture with its neighbors.

“The food is Lebanese,” the Rev. Thomas Steinmetz, the Church’s pastor, said. “The parish itself was founded by people from Lebanon. And now, we have a real mix of Lebanese people and everybody else here. The Lebanese [parishioners] have taught a lot of the other people how to do [this type of] cooking too.”

Lebanese cooking has many similarities to the foods from other Mediterranean countries. A Greek or Israeli visitor to the Mahrajan Festival would feel very much at home.

“We call it a Middle Eastern food festival,” said Nikki Bullock, one of the parishioners responsible for the food, “but the emphasis is really on Lebanese specialties. We do have the classics — the lamb kebab and the chicken kebabs and the grape leaves are a big favorite — but we also have some things that maybe you can’t get as easily in this state. So we have our lamb shawarma and we have freshly made falafel, which is my favorite part of the festival.”

Unlike many food festival coordinators, who are so busy that they don’t have an opportunity to actually eat any of the food, Bullock is happy to work right next to the falafel ladies. ”So there’s crunchy, fresh falafel balls all weekend, so that’s great,” she said. “There’s just lots of home food for people who grew up with it, but also, because there’s not really many places to get it around here, it’s definitely exciting for us to be able to share it.”

Almost no Middle Eastern party would consider itself a proper mahrajan without lamb.

“Well, of course, I think the lamb is always a big hit,” Steinmetz said, “and we have that in two forms. One is the [charcoal-grilled] lamb kebabs, which is traditional, and the other is lamb shawarma.” This is a cone of thinly sliced meat that is roasted on a slow-turning vertical spit. “We also have chicken kebabs and chicken shawarma. But along with that, it’s a lot of the typical Arabic, Middle Eastern, Lebanese fare. What comes to mind is the stuffed grape leaves, which are very popular.”

The stuffed grape leaves are a good example of the attention the cooks behind the Festival bring to the details of each dish.

“We try to make everything that we can ourselves,” Bullock said. “You know, the grape leaves? Those leaves are picked from our vines. The whole church goes and picks their grape leaves. Our vine is my great-grandmother’s grape vine, so it’s special. It’s really wonderful because it is sort of this family affair, whether we’re related by blood or not.”

Guests can look forward to other Lebanese specialties like hummus, tabbouleh and kibbeh, but for many of the regulars the highlight of the Festival is the desserts, particularly the baklawa. “We call it ‘bet-LAY-wah’ in Lebanese,” Bullock said, explaining that there will be several varieties of the pastry. “We have walnut, we have pistachio, and we have a chocolate-hazelnut version. And you can buy a mix of those, which is great. And the Lebanese baklawa is a little lighter than the Greek, because It has a simple syrup versus the honey.”

This year’s festival is bittersweet for Bullock. Her mother, Marylou Lazos, whom she lost recently, was the long-time co-chair of the Festival. “She was the heart of our kitchen,” said Bullock. “All the things I know, I learned from her; our food definitely started with her in her heart.”

The from-the-heart aspect is the whole point, said Steinmetz, and something that makes him proud. “We want this to be a good kind of family-oriented event for people. We get to enjoy having people here enjoying the event. That’s a pleasure for us as well.”

Mahrajan Middle Eastern Food Festival
Our Lady of the Cedars Melkite Church, 140 Mitchell St., Manchester
Friday, Aug. 16, from 5 to 10 p.m.; Saturday, Aug. 17, from noon to 10 p.m., and Sunday, Aug. 18, from noon to 5 p.m.
Admission is free. Visit bestfestnh.com.

Dishon Bakery crafts artisanal bread loaves without the wheat

Evan Lang described his perfect, platonic ideal of a loaf of bread.

Made of flour, water, yeast and salt, it “would have a thick crust to give it a little bit of character,” he said, “baked pretty dark — caramelized in a way that you get flavor also from the crust. “The crumb should be relatively open. It should not fall apart; it should stay together, and it should not be gummy, meaning if you take the knife and you cut into it, we don’t want anything stuck on the blade.”

One of Lang’s missions in life is to make that bread, but without any gluten. At Dishon Bakery in Manchester, he is doing it.

Gluten is a stretchy protein found in wheat and a few other grains that helps give conventional bread its texture. As yeast ferments various nutrients in wheat flour, it gives off carbon dioxide gas, which is trapped by the stretchy gluten fibers in bread dough, allowing the dough to puff up — what bakers call “rise.” Unfortunately, some people — those with celiac disease, for instance — can’t digest gluten, and others choose not to eat it for nutritional reasons, so for bakers like Lang the trick is to find a way of duplicating gluten’s stretchiness without the actual gluten.

“If you go to the supermarket and you check out the gluten-free bread there, it’s not great,” Lang said. “It’s either small or crumbly. And if you’re looking at the ingredients, it’s more like cake; it’s full of sugar, it’s full of starches. We’re creating a product that’s a little more artisanal — kind of like real bread.” The secret, he said, is a slow, cold fermentation, and high hydration — meaning that his dough has more water in it than conventional wheat breads.

“Traditionally, bread and pizza have different hydration percentages,” he explained, “from 60 percent up to 100 percent for really, really Neapolitan-style pizza. “Our breads are all over 100 percent hydration.” This means that Dishon’s bread dough has more water than flour in it. By fermenting it slowly, at a low temperature, Lang gives it time to completely incorporate all that water.

Lang’s dough starts with brown rice, sorghum and millet flours — all gluten-free grains — and potato and tapioca starch, then builds the dough up to the point where it can be treated much like wheat dough.

“We bake on a stone like regular bread,” he said. “Traditionally gluten-free bread is kind of like a batter. It’s baked in a tin and ours are baked free-form on the stone.”

Dishon Bakery started as a cottage business in New Jersey in 2022.

“We were selling in farmers markets, and we very quickly outgrew that,” Lang remembered. “We moved to Philadelphia and we were baking in a commercial kitchen there and doing a lot of wholesale, continuing with farmers markets and shipping online. We were doing a pretty good online business. People would order online, we’d package it up and ship it out. We moved up here and we re-evaluated what we were doing.” The Langs decided to focus more on face-to-face interactions with their customers. “Since we did have enough demand for the product, it made no sense for us to sell more [wholesale]. So we’re going to try here to exclusively do retail, direct to consumer.”

Many gluten-free bakeries produce mostly sweet products — cookies, cakes, pastries and so on — but Dishon focuses almost exclusively on bread products. Lang keeps a freezer case with other gluten-free products for customers who are looking for something less bready.

“We have sweets that are New Hampshire-based,” Lang said. “We want to give them an outlet here. None of them are based in Manchester. So this brings their product to Manchester and also allows us to fill the case with products that we don’t do and we don’t specialize in.”

Dishon Bakery
915 Elm St., Manchester
Open Thursday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Orders can be placed online at dishonbakery.com