Category: Food

Sunflower fest celebrates tasty oil while flowers bloom

By Chelsea Spear
listings@hippopress.com

With their tall stems and big yellow blooms, sunflowers are the perfect symbol of the height of summer.

No one in New Hampshire knows this better than Coppal House Farm, the first farm in the state to harvest sunflowers for their oil. Coppal House will be hosting the 10th annual Sunflower Festival at its location in Lee from Saturday, July 25, to Sunday, Aug. 2.

The Sunflower Festival is a celebration of the farm’s signature crop.

“John and Carol [Hutton], who own the farm, are my aunt and uncle,” Hannah Bendroth, who organizes the festival, said in a recent Zoom call. “They started growing canola and that was the oil. They looked at the local market and saw that there was … no local oil, so they started with canola oil.”

They quickly learned canola wasn’t the best crop for a farm in New England.

“The problem with canola is that it’s a winter crop and the deer would come and eat all of it,” Bendroth said. “They did some research and they found sunflowers and they grew sunflowers for oil for a couple of years.”

Sunflower oil went over well with their clientele.

“We have people who use it for soap and for face care products, lip balm, things like that,” Bendroth said, noting that New Hampshire gourmands especially enjoyed the crop. “I personally prefer roasting my vegetables in it, so drizzling it on my veggies and then roasting it with whatever seasoning. It has a very light flavor. We like to say that it just enhances your food.”

While Coppal House Farm’s sunflowers look the same as the blooms you’d see at the florist, there are some differences between oil seed blooms and ornamental sunflowers.

“Oil seed sunflowers have bigger heads,” Bendroth says. “They are single blooms, so there is only one flower per plant. Whereas ornamentals … can either have one flower per plant [or] can have branching sunflowers, but typically those will continue to bloom longer than just the oil seed sunflowers.”

Since oil seed sunflowers bloom for just two weeks, a celebration is in order when they do. Thus Booze & Blooms will take place on Friday, July 24, from 6 to 9 p.m. This is a collaboration with Flag Hill Distillery and Winery for ages 21+, with tickets $40 per person.

“Brian, the [Flag Hill] owner, and John [Hutton] have been working together for many, many years,” Bendroth said. “We do some land share and crop sharing and equipment sharing with them. Currently Brian’s growing rye on our property…. We assist them in harvesting their corn and their rye.”

The party continues on Sunday with Sunrise in the Sunflowers, the result of another collaboration with a local farm.

“We are working with Strafford County Farm Bureau for the second year in a row … so people can come take pictures … and then they can also buy a breakfast sandwich which supports the Strafford County Farm Bureau,” Bendroth said. An array of children’s activities will be a mainstay of the event, with story times, children’s yoga, and appearances by local children’s authors scheduled for the festival and more activities to be announced.

Coppal House Farm’s spirit of community extends to the food trucks and vendors planned for the event. Larry’s Hawaiian Hut, Crescent City Kitchen, Flag Hill Distillery and Winery, Chicki’s Gourmet Grill, Mimi’s Gourmet Popcorn, Butter Belly bakery, Whipperwill Dairy homemade ice cream, and Ken and Mimi’s Gourmet Popcorn have been confirmed for the fair. Visitors can quench their thirst at Pours and Petals handcrafted lemonade trailer or at the Kona Ice food truck.

Photography and social media play a big role in this year’s Sunflower Festival.

“John, Carol, and Meghan [Kelly], the other manager, have always had an eye for how to enhance and give a little bit more to someone’s experience,” Bendroth said. “Our props range from a small white picket fence to a larger rail fence to a door that you can open and look like you’re walking through the sunflowers to a picture frame where it looks like you’re taking a selfie. … We have a chick, a tractor, a lamb, and then a sunflower. We have butterfly wings that you can take a picture with.”

The Sunflower Festival is scheduled around peak sunflower bloom.

“We can never really predict peak bloom until we’re in it,” Bendroth said. “Our goal is that we have probably 75 percent of the field in bloom for opening weekend and then continuously throughout the week the remaining 25 percent will continue to bloom. Some years they’re a little late, some years they’re a little early. Our goal is having about 75 percent in bloom for the opening weekend.” As of this writing, Coppal House Farm is on track for their bloom goal.

Sunflower Festival
When: Saturday, July 25, to Sunday, Aug. 2; daily field hours 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. (last admission at 6 p.m.)
Where: Coppal House Farm, 118 N. River Road, Lee
Tickets and more info: nhsunflower.com. General festival admission prices range from $6 to $16 per person. Special events (Booze & Blooms, Sunrise in the Sunflowers) are ticketed separately. Sunrise tickets must be purchased in advance, according to the website.

Featured photo: Photo by Ella Beth Photography.

A day in the life of a cheese maker

Peter Kress is the owner of and head cheese maker at Swallow Ridge Farm in New Boston. This is how he described a day of cheese-making:

The day starts, he said, by picking up milk in Mont Vernon, the next town over.

“I go pick up about 3,300 pounds of milk, bring it back here in my tank, and then we pump it off.” (Dairy farmers measure their milk by weight, not by volume.) Then he pasteurizes it.

“Right now, we are pasteurizing all of our milk. We used to make just raw-milk cheese, but we got just a lot of requests and people nervous with unpasteurized cheese. So we decided to make pasteurized cheese.” Kress explained that the higher the temperature milk is pasteurized at, the more the structure and flavor of the milk changes. “We take it up to 145 degrees,” he said, “and hold it for 30 minutes. We used to have a big factory in Maine, and we had a high temperature-short time process. That would take 161 degrees for 16 seconds, but we do 30 minutes at 145. And then it goes into something called a plate heat exchanger, which cools the milk down to 88 [degrees]. We run well water on one side of the plates, and then the hot milk’s on the other side.”

The actual cheese-making takes place in a large, bathtub-shaped, stainless steel container, Kress said. “That is where we make most of our cheese. We also have a copper kettle where we make most of our Swiss. I like making Swiss in the copper kettle, because in Switzerland, by law, all Swiss cheese has to be made in copper. All Gruyere has to be made in copper. All Parmesan has to be made in copper. And they feel that the copper is a better heat conductor, but they also feel it gives some property to the cheese. So I got this vat” — the bathtub-shaped one — “out of Wisconsin about 30 years ago and it’s probably about 100 years old. So the milk goes into one of these two vats, and then we do our process.”

Once the milk goes into a vat at the proper temperature — 88 degrees — Kress said, he adds culture — strains of beneficial bacteria responsible for acidifying milk and building distinct flavors and textures. “Cultures come from mostly Wisconsin, but [ours are] from France. We let the culture grow for about an hour, then we add rennet, [an enzyme] which coagulates the milk. We use a vegetable-type rennet here. It turns the milk to something like Jell-O in about 30 minutes. Then we take knives and we cut it.”

This leaves Kress with pieces of milk solids and liquid, called curds and whey.

“The curds are what we keep,” he said. “The whey, we spread on the land. If you’re a really big [cheese-making] plant, it goes to a drying plant, they might use it for baby food, potato chips, all kinds of stuff. It’s protein — whey protein powder. We’re too small to do that. The curds we will add salt to, or any other ingredients you might add, like we add jalapeño peppers, or tomato and basil.”

At that point, Kress said, it’s a matter of shaping the young cheese in hoops.

“They’re square, but they’re called hoops,” he said with a shrug — and they get pressed overnight. “In the morning, we’ll have a block of cheese. That block will go into our cooler and age up to a year. Some ages longer than that. We have some cheddars that are almost two years old now. But that’s sort of the quick version of our process.”

According to Kress not all cheeses are equally complicated.

“Swiss is the hardest cheese to make,” he said. He said that recently Swiss scientists determined that the holes in Swiss cheese are due in part to cultures clinging to bits of hay that would traditionally fall into milk that Swiss milkmaids would carry in buckets. Kress said that is difficult to reproduce in modern, sanitary cheese making.

“Those holes, they’re called eyes,” he said. “I can make good Swiss, but sometimes the eyes are not so good. Because to grow those eyes is really hard. So you add a certain kind of culture. We have to add something we call a ‘former’ that helps form gas bubbles. If you have no gas bubbles, it’s called ‘blind.’ You don’t want a blind block of Swiss cheese.”

All Swallow Ridge Farm cheeses are aged.

“Depending on the cheese,” Kress said, “it can go anywhere from 30 days, 60 days, up to a year — some more. We make 20-pound blocks [of cheese]. I can’t lift 40-pound blocks anymore.”

Kress pointed out various blocks of cheese he was aging. “This particular one, this is an Asiago-type cheese, and this one has spices in it. This is our jalapeño. We have some Gouda. We have some flavored with dill.”

Wheels of cheese receive a special coating, Kress said.

“This is a special coating that comes from Holland,” he said, pointing at a red wheel of cheese. “It’s really nice stuff because you can’t scratch it off. It’s very hard and it protects the cheese so you don’t get any mold and it keeps it from drying out too much. It’s like wax but you can feel it’s really really tight and hard.”

And then, there’s the brie.

There is a special cabinet for aging brie, Kress said.

“We don’t have any brie in there right now. This is where we age our brie, and grow the white mold that you’re so familiar with on brie. Brie’s tricky, and we have a lot of trouble with that. We made some really good tasting stuff, and then people want it.” But then, he said, demand might fall off temporarily. And brie is good for about 60 days and then you have to sell it before it starts to break down.

“The cheese business is always adventurous,” Kress said. “I’ve always liked it, I love making the cheese. The hard thing always is selling it. I can make a lot of cheese, but I have to be able to sell it all. That’s the tricky part.”

Swallow Ridge Farm
170 South Hill Road, New Boston, 325-0477, swallowridgefarm.com
Cheeses: Swallow Ridge Swiss, Swallow Ridge Gouda, Swallow Ridge Gouda Rosemary, New Boston Cheddar, New Boston Cheddar Jalapeño, New Boston Cheddar Sun-Dried Tomato & Basil, New Boston Cheddar Caraway, Tuscan (an asiago-style cheese), Tuscan Italian Herbs, Swallow Ridge Havarti, Swallow Ridge Havarti Dill
Buy the cheese: At the farm, order through the website or at farmers markets including the Concord Farmers Market, the website said.

Featured photo: Swallow Ridge cheese. Courtesy photo.