Category: Food

Plant-based plates

Manchester will host a Vegan Chef Challenge

Throughout May, restaurants across Manchester will compete to produce the best plant-based dishes.

Vegan Outreach (veganoutreach.org), a dietary advocacy group, helps cities across the country to organize month-long challenges in which restaurants add vegan dishes to their menus and compete with each other to create the most popular ones. In a given year approximately 20 cities participate in Vegan Chef Challenges. This year Manchester is one of them.

Joan O’Brien, the president of the New Hampshire Animal Rights League (nhanimalrights.org), is the organizer of the Manchester competition.
“This will be the inaugural challenge for Manchester,” she said. “This is a national campaign and different cities participate. They choose a month [to hold the event in] and they approach restaurants and chefs in their city and ask them to come up with up to three new vegan dishes for that month and to feature them in the restaurant. And then diners are invited to come out [and order them]. Veg-curious people are invited to come out, as well as people who normally eat that way, and try the dishes, and vote on their favorites. Chefs are able to win awards for things like Best Entree or Best Dessert, and diners can actually win awards as well, for the most restaurants visited, that kind of thing.” There will be an award ceremony in June.

O’Brien said many types of restaurants will participate in the Challenge. According to the event’s webpage, participating restaurants include Stark Brewing Co., The Farm Bar & Grille, Vallarta Tequila Bar, 900 Degrees Pizzeria, Stash Box, Industry East Bar, Piccola Italia Ristorante & Martini Bar, Campo Enoteca, SubZero Ice Cream, KS Kitchen, Board and Brews, The Potato Concept and 110 Grill.

“We’re approaching everybody from the fine restaurants down to the sandwich shops,” O’Brien said. “It’s a wide net that we’re throwing, and we’re finding a lot of interest. For some, May is a busy month for restaurants. Some are understaffed and they just said they can’t take it on, but we’re finding a lot of interest from others.”

O’Brien said the goal of May’s Challenge is not to raise money or convince anybody to change their diet.

“It’s just about awareness,” she said. “The immediate challenge here is just to get more plant-based options out there. This isn’t a challenge for vegans; it’s really for omnivores who might be looking to reduce how much meat they eat. It shows people that [vegan foods are] not just tofu and salads. Vegan food is just as delicious as non-vegan food. And if you want to eat, if you want someone to make delicious food, who do you ask? You ask a chef, right? The chefs [in this challenge] are going to be showcasing some things that are really delicious.”

The Vegan Chef Challenge will provide an excellent demonstration for restaurant owners to see that there is real demand for plant-based dishes, O’Brien said.

“When we come to Manchester, to go to the Palace for a show or something, we ask ourselves where we should eat. We’re looking forward to having more [vegan dining] options in Manchester. Also, many vegans have something called the Vegan Veto. When a group is choosing a place to go out to eat, if there’s nothing vegan, they get to veto the restaurant.”

O’Brien said Manchester’s changing population makes it a good city for this challenge.

“Younger people are coming in,” she said, “more people who are thinking about what they eat. They want fresh, plant-based foods. So I think we’re on the right track.”

Manchester’s Vegas Chef Challenge

Manchester’s Vegan Chef Challenge will take place throughout May. For details and a list of participating restaurants, visit veganchefchallenge.org/manchester.

Featured photo: A winning dish by Frothy Monkey in the Knoxville Vegan Chef Challenge (photo credit – Heather Mount)

The Weekly Dish 25/04/24

News from the local food scene

• Opened: There’s a new coffee bar on the north end of Manchester’s Elm Street. NXT Coffee Bar (1230 Elm St., Manchester, 413-239-5016, nxtcoffeebar.com) features coffee drinks, hot and iced non-caffeinated and tea beverages, locally sourced pastries and light breakfast options such as a variety of toasts and bagels. Gluten-free options are available.

• The power of fermentation: There will be a sauerkraut demonstration at the Concord Food Co-op (24 S. Main St., 225-6840, concordfoodcoop.com) Thursday, April 24, from 6 to 7 p.m. Join food historian Sam Pike for a sauerkraut-making demo. Learn step-by-step instructions and safety tips for a perfect batch. This is a free presentation. Visit eventbrite.com to reserve a spot.

• Wine 101: Join Vine 32 Wine and Graze Bar (Bedford Square, 25 S. River Road, Bedford, 935-8464, vinethirtytwo.com) Saturday, April 26, from 2 to 4 p.m. for an afternoon of wine exploration with Vine 32’s Wine Director, Genevieve Wolfe. This will be a fun and laid-back tasting experience for anyone looking to boost their wine game. Taste and learn about six wines from around the world. Tickets are $30 through eventbrite.com.

• Five courses, with spies: Dinner parties return to Chunky’s Cinema Pub (707 Huse Road, Manchester, 206-3888, chunkys.com) Sunday, April 27, at 6:30 p.m. Chef Keith Sarasin and his team will present a five-course meal to accompany a screening of 1995’s James Bond movie, Golden Eye with Pierce Brosnan. The dinner will feature a theme inspired by the movie. VIP ticket purchasers arrive at 5:30 p.m. for a secret chef appetizer and beer or wine. Tickets start at $75 through Chunky’s website.

• Get ready for growing season: The New Hampshire Farm, Forest & Garden Expo will offer workshops, demonstrations, a Dark Horse Lumber Jack Show and more on Friday, May 2, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday, May 3, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the Deerfield Fairgrounds (34 Stage Road in Deerfield). Tickets cost $10. See nhfarmandforestexpo.org.

Rhymes with ‘shmeegan’ lemon Bundt cake

There’s a word that rhymes with “shmeegan” that we’re not going to say, because it makes some people nervous. It brings up memories of judgmental relatives who might — or might not — have lectured them at some point about the ambiguous ethics of eating animals. Or milk. Or honey. The shmeegan-shy might think of a time in college when a very cute shmeegan fed them some cookies or beet-loaf that was allegedly “just as good as the real thing.”

Don’t worry. This Bundt cake is very good on its own merits, without comparing it to anything else.

Cake

A large spoonful of shortening and ¼ cup (about 25 g) almond flour to grease and coat your Bundt pan

1 cup (227 g) butter-flavored shortening or margarine

2 cups (397 g) sugar

1 teaspoon kosher or coarse sea salt

4 eggs’ worth of egg replacer, prepared according to instructions – I like one by Bob’s Red Mill

2 teaspoons baking powder

3 cups (360 g) all-purpose flour

1 cup (227 g) almond milk

zest of 2 lemons

1/3 cup (45 g) chopped, candied lemon peel – this is theoretically available in candy stores but is easier to find online

Glaze

1/3 cup (75 g) fresh squeezed lemon juice
¾ cup (150 g) sugar

1 Tablespoon dehydrated lemon juice powder – again, this is probably easiest to find online

Heat oven to 350°F.

Thoroughly grease your Bundt pan with shortening. Really slather it on. If it looks like you’ve used too much, it’s probably just about right. Dust the shortening with almond flour. In an hour or so, when you are able to pop your cake right out of the pan, you’ll be pleased with your foresight.

In your mixer, beat the rest of your shortening or margarine, the sugar and the salt until it is light and fluffy-looking.

Mix in the egg replacer, one half at a time, then the baking powder and flour. When you add the dry ingredients, mix them in with your lowest speed at first, or you’ll cover yourself and the kitchen with flour.

Mix in the almond milk, lemon zest and candied lemon peel, then beat on high speed for about 30 seconds.

Transfer the batter to your Bundt pan and smooth out the top with a wet spoon or silicone spatula, then put the pan in the oven. Bake for about an hour, or until it reaches an internal temperature of 200°F. Or you can do the toothpick thing.

As soon as it is cool enough to handle, depan the cake onto a large plate.

Heat the glaze ingredients in a small saucepan over medium heat, whisking occasionally, until the mixture just barely comes to a boil. You don’t actually want to cook the lemon juice; you just want to make sure that the sugar has dissolved completely.

At this point, you might ask yourself why you added lemon juice powder to the glaze, and not just squeeze another half a lemon or so. Good question. The lemon juice powder allows you to make the mixture extra lemony, without making it too liquidy.

Use a pastry brush to brush the hot glaze onto the still-hot cake. Keep brushing until it has all been absorbed. Remember to look in the bottom of the hole in the middle, where some of the glaze will have collected.

Cover the Bundt cake with a large mixing bowl to make sure your cat doesn’t get to it, and let it sit for an hour or so to completely absorb all the syrup. Slice and serve with, er, I was going to say whipped cream or ice cream, but that would sort of defeat the purpose of making this shmeegan.

Regardless, this is lemony and tender, with a slightly crunchy, sugary crust. This will really score points with the shmeegan in your life.

Featured photo: “Shmeegan” Lemon Bundt Cake. Photo by John Fladd.

For whatever you’re cooking

G-Mom’s BBQ Sauce goes beyond the grill

By John Fladd

[email protected]

Nashua sauce-maker Allison Marques’ dream recipe comes from a childhood memory she wishes she had.

“G-Mom was my grandmother,” Marques said. “G-Mom had five kids and she was the best person I ever knew, really. “She actually passed away when I was rather young. I didn’t … grow up into my late teens and twenties with her alive, but I named the sauce after her. I don’t actually have a recollection of her making the sauce with me. I really wish I had that memory.”

It was many years after her grandmother’s death that Marques connected the barbecue sauce she loved with G-Mom.

“She made lots of other delicious things,” Marques said, “but I found out that the sauce was her recipe from my uncle, because he made the sauce for a long time … and then I found out that it was actually my grandmother’s recipe. And so my uncle Ken helped me understand how to make it. Because I’m not a chef; I’m not super creative in the kitchen. But I know a good thing when I taste it.”

The result was G-Mom’s BBQ Sauce. Once Marques and her uncle worked out the specific recipe — up till then “nothing was ever measured; it was a little of this, a little of that,” she said — she and her husband Casey worked up three versions of the sauce to bring to market.

“This product is too good to not share with other people,” she said.

“All the general ingredients stay the same for the base mild recipe,” Marques said. “In my opinion, if I’m going to bring something to market, I need my customers to know that they’re going to get the same product, the same delicious product, every single time. Then, as you bring it into a medium flavor or a hot flavor, you add more peppers or sauces and things like that in order to make it hotter. We’re planning to move into an even spicier flavor, which I know some of my booth visitors are excited about at the shows we present at. But as we go to move into the hotter realms, I want to obviously be truthful and honor my grandmother’s recipe. I can always make it hotter, but we can’t always make something that’s already hot hotter and taste better.”

“My grandmother’s recipe, the G-Mom’s barbecue sauce flavoring, is unlike any other sauce that I’ve ever tasted,” Marques said. “It’s got a nice depth of flavor. It’s definitely got a sweetness to it. You definitely taste the tomato base. It’s not super vinegary, but it does have depth; I know in using Worcestershire sauce, it adds a depth to my sauce.”

Marques said that while it’s a good barbecue sauce, that label can be a little misleading.

“The sauce itself doesn’t distinctly isolate itself to barbecue,” she said. “It brings out the flavor of whatever you’re cooking and that’s really what’s so special about this sauce. When I think of ‘barbecue’, I think ‘OK, I can only have this if I make pulled pork or if I’m smoking something on my smoker.’ This sauce can really go on anything, and … I’ve had vegetarians buy the sauce, and they’re saying, ‘I want to put this on rice and vegetables. I want to put this on tofu.’”

“One of the biggest things for me,” Marques said, “is seeing children try the sauce who don’t eat anything, who are super-picky. And their moms are like, ‘I can’t believe she’s eating this right now. I can’t believe she is enjoying this.’ I have story after story after story of people trying this. Seeing the joy on their faces has been really fun.”we call it. We cook them to order so they get them hot off the press with everything like the frosting is like put right on top melted.”

G-Mom’s BBQ Sauce

G-Mom’s BBQ Sauce comes in three varieties — Mild, Medium and Hot — and is available through gmomsbbq.com.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Doughnut batter in a waffle iron

New Dessert House satisfies a sweet tooth

By John Fladd

[email protected]

Have you ever eaten a doughnut and thought to yourself, “This is excellent. I really, really like doughnuts, but I think it would be better if it were crispier, somehow.”?

Tanya Grenier has you covered.

She and her husband are the brains behind Tanya’s Waffle-Donuts. The Boscawen businesswoman described her product this way: “They look like a waffle,” she said. “They taste like a doughnut, but they’re not deep fried. They’re all made from homemade recipes, made from scratch.”

The idea for the waffle-doughnut came from a family trip, Grenier recalled.

“We were at an Airbnb with our daughter and our son-in-law,” she said. Her daughter asked her dad if he could make doughnuts for breakfast. “So they had all the ingredients to make them, but we didn’t check and they ended up not having oil. So we were like, ‘Oh, we can’t deep fry them.’ We ended up making pancakes with the batter. They looked like a pancake in a pan, but they tasted like a doughnut. They were amazing, but then my husband said, ‘You know what would be really cool, though? If it was the shape of a waffle it would be a little easier to pick up and like look really cool with a waffle shape.’”

A waffle donut covered in frosting and sprinkles.
Courtesy photo.

The Greniers spent three years developing a recipe that would work.

“Basically,” Tanya said, “you can’t use a waffle recipe or a doughnut recipe. What you need to do is you’ve got to kind of combine them to get them to rise because most doughnut recipes are made to be deep-fried, and these are not.” Eventually, she said, the recipe came together. “The best part of these is they have less sugar than a regular doughnut, but they still taste just like a doughnut, but they’re not greasy. They’re light and fluffy. They’re not fried in oil at all. They’re all made in a waffle iron.”

Once the base recipe was worked out, the Greniers were able to develop a large number of variations on the doughnuts themselves, and an equally large number of frosting types, which have lent themselves to many combinations.

“We make a cake waffle doughnut, which is our original waffle doughnut,” Tanya said. “It has a little bit of cinnamon, a little bit of nutmeg. We make a chocolate waffle doughnut, which is like a milk chocolate, almost — not a dark chocolate but like a milk chocolate doughnut. We make maple doughnuts and apple doughnuts. We’ve done banana doughnuts. We do a cornbread waffle doughnut. We do a potato waffle doughnut. We do carrot cake ones.”

The Greniers package some waffle-doughnuts for individual sale, but they are happiest when they serve them hot and crispy from their food truck.

“The food truck is called the Waffle Donut Wagon,” Grenier said, “and then when we sell them pre-packaged it’s called Tanya’s Homemade Waffle Donut. We usually only sell [the individually wrapped ones] at special indoor craft events. We’ve done horse shows, we’ve done weddings, birthdays, bridal showers, pretty much anything you can think of. We do that with the truck just because we can offer food items plus they’re hot off the press as we call it. We cook them to order so they get them hot off the press with everything like the frosting is like put right on top melted.”

Tanya’s Waffle Donuts and the Waffle Donut Wagon

Tanya’s Waffle Donuts and the Waffle Donut Wagon can be found at events throughout New Hampshire and can cater any event. Call 785-6283 for more information, or search for “Waffle Donut Wagon” on Facebook or @waffledonutwagon on Instagram.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Weekly Dish 25/04/17

News from the local food scene

By John Fladd

[email protected]

• New ownership: The Sal Terrae line of spices has been purchased by Smokin’ Tin Roof Hot Sauce (899-7369, smokintinroof.com), according to Smokin’ Tin Roof owner Phil Pelletier. According to a post on Facebook, “We are very excited to announce and welcome a new line as a part of the Smokin’ Tin Roof family, Sal Terrae Spice Co!! You will now be able to purchase these great products at events, future store locations, and online.”

• Taco Tour participating restaurants: With just two weeks left until the Taco Tour (tacotourmanchester.com), Manchester’s biggest food day of the year, the Greater Manchester Chamber released the names of more than 90 participating restaurants and organizations in an April 9 press release. The list includes businesses as different from each other as 815 Cocktails & Provisions, New Hampshire Fisher Cats, and Thai Food Connection. To view the full list of participants (as of April 8), visit manchester-chamber.org/taco-tour-manchester-2025-list-of-participating-restaurants.

• Chili cook-off: Rockingham Brewing Co. (1 Corporate Park Drive, Unit 1, Derry, 216-2324, rockinghambrewing.com) will host its Fourth Annual Chili Cook-Off on Saturday, April 19. On its Facebook page the brewery posted, “This is a non-ticketed event. We’re open 1 to 8 p.m. and as usual, chili & seating are both first come, first served. … BUT our worthy competitors are making TWICE as much chili this year, so there should be plenty for all. Please be patient as we work to get you all served ASAP.” The names of this year’s chilis are “Piggy Back,” “Silence of the Hams,” “Night Owl,” “Jort Munder” and “Ten.”

• Cooking with kids: According to The Culinary Playground’s (16 Manning St., Derry, 339-1664, culinary-playground.com) website, there are openings in two cooking classes for children this week. On Saturday, April 19, from 10 a.m. to noon, children ages 6 to 10 can learn to make a carrot cake trifle. There is a second class from 1 to 3 p.m. for kids 10 and up. On Wednesday, April 23, preschoolers can make carrot apple muffins in sessions at 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m.

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