Category: Food

Farm to market

Sourcing from their farm and nearby at Eden’s Table Farm Store

Given how difficult it can be to find a spicy, flavorful chile in New Hampshire, is it possible to grow one here?

“We’ve had two hot peppers that I just love!” said Addie Leader-Zavos, co-owner of Eden’s Table Farm in Dunbarton. “I was shocked by how good a pepper year we had last year. We’re trialing a bunch of different paprika types this year.” The Czech Black, for instance.

Her husband, Michael Williams, agreed.

“These [the Czech Blacks] will fake you out,” he said. “They smell like mango fruit leather, but they are serious. These are a little milder than a serrano when they’re green, but then they blow way past it when they’re ripe. They go from 5,000 Scoville units [a system for rating the heat of chiles] when they’re green to 17 [thousand] to 30,000 when they’re ripe. They’re no joke.”

This is the first full season that Eden’s Table Farm has been in business. The wife-and-husband team have been building a new farm more or less from scratch.

“We are a diversified market farm,” Williams said. “We grow vegetables. We have 65 mature blueberry bushes that we inherited. We also have a rhubarb patch that we inherited from the previous owners. There are a lot of volunteer raspberry, black raspberry and blackberry bushes; we’re going to mark the ones that taste best and take cuttings and propagate for next year.”

And, of course, the chiles.

The Williamses grow many different fruits, vegetables and herbs that they sell through their farm store, but the peppers are a good illustration of the amount of thought that is put into growing them. Leader-Zavos spent months researching varieties of chiles that would do well in New Hampshire’s climate. Eventually she discovered multiple varieties from Eastern Europe, from countries with similar climates. After that, the new farmers selected the varieties with the shortest growing season to try on the Farm.

“It was really important to us to have the shortest days-to-maturity,” Leader-Zavos said. “We wanted to be able to grow varieties that will work for us when our growing season is so short.”

Growing seasons, soil acidity, and hours of sunlight are some of the factors that Williams and Leader-Zavos have been working hard to get a handle on. Since moving from Virginia, where Leader-Zavos worked as a pastry chef and Williams was a sommelier and wine marketer, the couple have tackled the steep learning curve of starting a farm and a business with enthusiasm. “Addie’s superpower is research,” Williams said. “She can find the answer to anything.”

Which is how the two ended up buying a farm in Dunbarton. They had decided to start a small farm together.

“We cast a pretty wide net when we were looking for farm properties,” Williams said, “and at one point the price on this property dropped and it showed up in our searches. [We asked ourselves] ‘Should we go to New Hampshire to look at this property?’” They visited the farm that November, and owned it by the end of January.

In addition to actually growing things, the couple’s main focus is on their farm store, which sells their own produce and baked goods, as well as other locally produced meats, dairy, wild foods and artisanal products.

“We are very locally focused in terms of sourcing,” Williams said. “Everything in here, with the exception of a very short list of items, is from New Hampshire, and the things that aren’t from New Hampshire are from Maine, and they’re all artisanal products.”

He pointed to several varieties of dried beans as an example. “These are Baer’s Best Beans,” he said. “One of the things I like to do with new suppliers is I will go to them to pick up my first order, because I want to see what they are doing and how they’re doing it. I walked in [to Baer’s] and somebody was hand-sorting beans. So I was very happy. I was like, ‘OK, these are my people.’ This is the level of detail and attention that I like.”

Not to mention that the beans will go really well with the chiles.

Eden’s Table Farm Store
240 Stark Highway N., Dunbarton Center, 774-1811
Open Thursdays and Fridays 3 to 7 p.m., Saturdays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The Weekly Dish 24/07/11

News from the local food scene

• Brew on: The annual Keep NH Brewing Festival is happening Saturday, July 13, at Kiwanis Waterfront Park behind the Everett Arena in Concord (15 Loudon Road). General admission is from 1 to 4 p.m., with VIP admission beginning at noon. The festival is the signature fundraising event for the New Hampshire Brewers Association and features one of the largest gatherings of craft beers on tap, with more than 140 options to try and more than 50 breweries represented. Food trucks, local vendors and live music will also be featured. For more information, and to purchase tickets, visit nhbrewers.org.

• Lemon up: LaBelle Winery (345 Route 101, Amherst, 672-9898, labellewinery.com) will hold I Love Lemon!, a lemon-themed wine pairing dinner, on Saturday, July 13, at 6:30 p.m.. This event will include four courses paired with LaBelle wines. LaBelle’s Chef and wine experts will share insights into each pairing with participants throughout the event. Tickets are $85 each and available through LaBelle’s website.

• Midday in the vineyard: Flag Hill Winery (297 Route 155, Lee, 659-2949, flaghill.com) will hold brunch by the vineyard on Sunday, July 14, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m Sparkling Cayuga will be served and there is a full mimosa bar. A farm-to-table brunch will feature a mac & cheese bar; fresh pastries and fruit; quiches, frittatas and more. Tickets are $65 per person and are available through Flag Hill’s website.

Not Quite Frozen Blueberry Daiquiri

The first few sips of a blender drink are virtually perfect. The problem is that a few minutes later you’ve drunk all the flavor and you’re left with a weak, sad pile of slush.

Which is why, when I want a really cold drink, I rely on crushed ice. It chills the cocktail effectively, but stays apart from it, like a, I don’t know, a lifeguard or something. This metaphor has gotten away from me.

Blueberry Daiquiri

Blueberries in Syrup

  • Frozen wild blueberries – regular blueberries are in season and would definitely work for this recipe, but wild ones generally have more flavor and are small enough to get through a large straw; regardless, they should be frozen, to help syrup-ify them
  • An equal amount of sugar, by weight
  • A pinch of salt

The Daiquiri Itself

  • 2 ounces blueberries in syrup
  • 2 ounces golden rum – white rum would be a little too subtle for this application; a dark or black rum would overpower the other ingredients; something golden like Faraday is a good daiquiri rum
  • 2 ounces fresh squeezed lemon juice
  • A splash – perhaps an ounce – of club soda
  • A large amount of crushed ice – this could be from the door in your refrigerator, or run through an old-fashioned, hand-cranked ice crusher; I prefer to wrap regular ice cubes in a bar towel and smash it up with the pestle from my largest mortar and pestle, which gives me a nice mixture of ice, from large half-cubes down to fine snow

Cook the blueberries, sugar and salt in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring occasionally. At first it will be a gloppy, slightly purple pile of sugar. Suddenly, a few minutes into the cooking process, the berries will realize the futility of their existential stubbornness and collapse into a thin jam. Keep cooking and stirring, until the liquid starts to boil. Make sure that all the sugar sticking to the sides of the pan has dissolved into the hot blueberry sauce.

Remove from heat, and set aside to cool.

Fill a mixing glass with a couple handfuls of crushed ice, then add the other ingredients. Stir gently, but thoroughly, into a more or less homogeneous solution.

Transfer into a tall glass, and top with a splash of club soda and a few syrupy blueberries.

Take your drink to your deck, or front porch, or fire escape, and drink it with an oversized boba straw while listening to “The Girl from Ipanema.” It could be the original Brazilian version, or the hep-cat, Sammy Davis big band version, or even Amy Winehouse’s take on it, but the important thing is that you can lean back and draw large amounts of blueberries, rum and lemon into yourself, until it’s difficult to know where you end and the samba music starts. In fact, you could make up an entire playlist of nothing but covers of “The Girl from Ipanema” and spend an hour or two comparing them.

Normally, one of the pillars of a good daiquiri is fresh lime juice, but blueberries and lemon get along so splendidly, whether in a cheesecake or a cocktail, that the lemon is a good substitution in this particular drink. It provides the same amount of acidity and zing, but dances — we might even say it sambas — with the blueberries. The syrupy blueberries bring sweetness and depth to the daiquiri and might even make it a little too sweet if not for the club soda, which brings additional zing to the proceedings while diluting the syrup. The crushed ice brings the temperature down enough to make drinking this cocktail intensely, almost painfully, refreshing.

Without bringing your blender into it.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

In the kitchen with Erika Follansbee

Erika Follansbee is a food photographer at Parker Street Food & Travel (parker-street.com) and a wedding photographer at Erika Follansbee Photography (erikafollansbee.com). “I strive to create inviting, ambient photos of real menu items in a restaurant’s own unique environment. At the same time, I am also a wedding photographer with 14 years of experience based in Goffstown, New Hampshire. My work has been featured in over 60 national and local magazines, blogs, and websites for my work in both weddings and food photography,” she said.

What is your must-have kitchen item?

My Dutch oven is one of my favorite kitchen items because I love the one-pot life. I become easily overwhelmed by too many dishes, so anything I can cook in one dish that goes from stovetop to oven is high on my list.

What would you have for your last meal?

My last meal could only be a smorgasbord of favorites from a life of traveling and enjoying some of the world’s great flavors. I’d need some pasta carbonara with guanciale from Rome, suadero tacos con todo from Mexico City, a full Scottish breakfast with haggis, and lastly because I’m from North Carolina I’d finish up with some Southern comfort food of Brunswick stew, hushpuppies and banana pudding.

What is your favorite local eatery?

It would kill me to choose only one. I really enjoy North End Bistro, a tiny little place on Elm Street. Other Manchester favorites include The Crown Tavern, Presto Craft Kitchen and Alas de Frida, and Street in Portsmouth.

What is a food project you would like to shoot?

I have always been interested in not only photographing a restaurant’s core menu but also returning on a regular basis to capture more fluid items like seasonal, monthly and weekly specials. Returning to a place regularly gives me a chance to really explore the ‘sense of place,’ which is an anthropological concept referring to the way a place is experienced and lived in over time, resulting in a strong sense of belonging and familiarity. I’m inspired by the light of different times of day and what a different feeling it evokes. To me, the environment of a beautiful restaurant or café goes hand in hand with the actual food photos.

I’d also like to photograph a cookbook someday.

What is your favorite food-project that you’ve shot?

My favorites have always been shoots for chefs or restaurants who had never had photos done before, especially for a first-time website. It’s very satisfying to see a website come together with beautiful photos that establish an inviting and professional-looking online presence.

What is the biggest trend in food photography right now?

There is an emphasis on authenticity in food photography, which can mean a less staged and not over-styled approach that doesn’t hide imperfections…. Dripping sauces and scattered crumbs capture a delicious moment in time. The human element is still going strong as a trend, which includes hands in the shots — holding, sharing, and passing the dishes or beverages.

What is your favorite thing to cook at home?

In the summer, I grow jalapeños just so I can make bacon-wrapped cream cheese poppers. It’s the ultimate in high effort, low reward. I get my vegetable starts from Devriendt Farm in Goffstown. Like most cooking, the results are gone in seconds, but when you grow the thing yourself for a couple of months beforehand you really appreciate that single victorious ingredient you can hold in your hand. I enjoy gardening more than I do cooking, so the growing part is fun for me.

What can a non-professional do to shoot great pictures of their food?

The most important aspect of any food photo is the quality of the light. Take your dish outside in the shade, or get next to a window. You will notice that the incandescent or LED lights of an average home interior have a very yellow cast (or sometimes greenish) and this is not ideal for a nice food photo.

Featured Photo: Erika Follansbee. Courtesy photo.

Around the world in a waffle cone

Ice cream and cookies and cookie ice cream at Social Club Creamery

Cole Gaude knew his ice cream business in Concord was facing a turning point last fall, when all three soft-serve ice cream machines at his shop broke down simultaneously.

“They’re very sensitive machines and we had three of them because that’s all we used to do — soft-serve,” Gaude said. “We had three machines that we bought pretty much within a week of each other. They were all brand new and they all broke pretty much the same week, a couple of days apart.”

Hard decisions had to be made.

At the same time, Gaude and his team had a different type of ice cream shop up and running in Laconia, the Social Club Creamery, which specializes in small-batch homemade hard ice cream and cookies.

“We said, ‘Why not make the swap [in Concord],’” Gaude said. “We decided we had to move in a different direction.” The Concord store was rebranded as a second branch of the Social Club Creamery, and switched to a very different ice cream philosophy.

“We’re a small-batch ice cream shop,” Gaude said. “We make everything ourselves. We make the ice cream. We make all the things that go in the ice cream — honeycomb candy, butter cake, brownies, things like that. Our first location in Laconia has been sending everything to Concord.”

The two locations complement each other. The Laconia location has very limited seating for customers to eat in it.

“We only have about four seats in that shop,” Gaude said. “We had to make as much room for a kitchen as possible. Of the 970 square feet, roughly 750 feet of that is kitchen.” The Concord location, on the other hand, has very little kitchen space but has 36 seats inside and another 20 outside. “That’s a pretty large seating area, so a lot of events happen there. A lot of sports teams go there after they’re done practice.”

The new setup has allowed Social Club to sell walk-in customers on its particular point of view of ice cream flavors.

“We have 16 flavors overall,” Gaude said. “Twelve of them are always on the menu; they never change. That’s stuff like vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, peppermint patty, things like that. And then every month we have four seasonal flavors. Right now we’re doing a Travel Series. It’s based on different foods from around the world — Italy, Greece, Asia and Mexico.”

The Italian-inspired item is a Pistachio Cannoli ice cream with a ricotta base.

“We take cannoli shells,” Gaude said, “we twice-bake them with some butter, sugar, a little salt, and some milk powder, and then we make a homemade pistachio drizzle that we swirl through the ice cream. It’s a good one.”

The Mexican-inspired ice cream uses a dulce de leche base, with homemade, deep-fried churros, and a dark chocolate swirl. A mango sorbet represents Asia, and the Greek-inspired offering is a baklava ice cream.

“We partnered with a local Greek bakery,” Gaude said, “and the owner provides us with trays on trays of her homemade baklava. We cut that up and then we put it into a honey-base ice cream. That one’s been the most popular this month. It’s just incredible.”

The baklava ice cream might be the most popular of the special flavors, but it doesn’t touch the popularity of Social Club’s best-selling ice cream.

“Our most popular flavor is the Cookie-Cookie-Cookie Dough,” Gaude said. “The ice cream itself has a cookie dough taste, then we make our special homemade cookie dough — which doesn’t have eggs and uses heat-treated flour, so it’s safe to eat — and then we chop up the chocolate chip cookies we sell, and throw those in as well. It’s been hugely popular. It counts for like 30 percent of our sales overall. It’s a high-selling flavor; it’s cool. But it’s a lot of cookies.”

Social Club Creamery
138 N. Main St., Concord, 333-2111
Open seven days a week, 1 to 9 p.m.
socialclubcreamery.com
Also at 51 Elm St., Laconia, 619-5098.

Poké, but vegetarian

How a Friendly Toast chef develops specials

The Friendly Toast changes its specials every eight weeks. Its special for June and July is something called a Faux-ke Poké, a vegetarian take on a Hawaiian poké bowl.

It looks exactly like poké but is made up of marinated pink pineapple, mashed avocado, pickled red onion and diced cucumber. It clearly doesn’t taste like authentic poké — no raw tuna — but it plays sweet, rich and acidic flavors off each other. In addition, each major ingredient has a different texture. On top of everything, in celebration of Pride Month, the colors — purple, green, red, and pink — are colors of the Pride rainbow flag.

How does a dish like this come about?

Justin Fischer is The Friendly Toast’s Director of Culinary Operations. Among other duties, he is in charge of recipe development for the chain’s 12 locations, which include its original spot in Portsmouth as well as locations in Bedford and Nashua as well as in Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts. He said this particular dish developed from one particular ingredient: pink pineapple.

“It’s this fantastic ingredient that I really wanted to work with,” Fischer said. “We’ve got a few distributors we work with. If I tell them, ‘I’ve got this fantastic ingredient; can you find it for me?,’ they’ll get it. Each of the pink pineapples came in its own individual box!”

Costa Rican pink pineapples have a firm texture, and a color much like that of raw tuna, though obviously they taste very different. The pineapple, which gets its pink color from lycopene, an enzyme that helps give tomatoes their color, has a sweet, perfumy taste that Fischer decided to pair with the richness of lightly mashed avocado.

“Once we added the avocado, we needed a little acidity, which we got from the pickled red onion,” Fischer said.

One of the constraints Fischer and his team work under is to keep new recipes simple to prepare and use ingredients that Friendly Toast kitchens would mostly already have in rotation.

“Originally, we tried this [dish] as a spring roll,” Fisher said. “It was good — everyone liked it — but there were a lot of steps to teach the staff at all our locations.” So the development team worked to reconfigure the recipe.

The decision was made to add more sweetness and some umami (savoriness), so maple and soy sauce were added to the dish’s marinade. Spiciness was added through an aioli flavored with Korean chiles.

“We had a spicy salmon roll toast [on the menu already],” Fischer said. “That had been one of our first attempts to make a poké-inspired dish, and we had developed the gochujang aioli for that.” Wrapping the poké spring rolls in rice paper and deep frying them had been complicated in terms of adding more steps to their preparation, and had changed the temperature, but the fried rice paper had added a welcome crunch and flavor, so as the dish developed, the team decided to fry it on its own and serve it on the side of the poké as a garnish. Traditional poké has sesame, salt and green onions, so this interpretation is sprinkled with everything bagel seasoning, which adds yet another layer of flavor, color and texture.

At the same time that Fischer and his team were developing The Friendly Toast’s spring and summer specials, they were also reconfiguring all the restaurant’s recipes to eliminate peanuts and tree nuts.

“It’s really important to us that everyone can try our food, so we spend a lot of time thinking about allergies,” said Fischer. The chain announced earlier this month that it was eliminating nuts from all its locations. “The Friendly Toast has transformed its kitchen protocols and menu to include safe meals for children with food allergies,” it announced in a press release on June 12, citing CDC data that one in 13 American children has a food allergy.

The Friendly Toast
4 Main St., Bedford, 836-8907, and 225 DW Highway, Nashua, 864-0051, thefriendlytoast.com

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