Category: Food

Food, beer and games on the beach

Sending off summer with the Hampton Beach Seafood Festival

2026 marks the 37th year the Hampton Area Chamber of Commerce has held the Hampton Beach Seafood Festival. John Nyhan, the president of the Chamber, said that at this point the Festival is an institution.

“It’s an institution, a tradition,” he said. “[We’re] carrying forward for another year, the largest seafood festival in all of New England. Thirty-seven years ago, the Seafood Festival was a very small group of business owners from Hampton Beach [who] decided that they wanted to extend the summer months. So they all got together and created what we now know as the first Seafood Festival, made up of, oh, maybe 20, 25 food vendors. They held it at the state park’s South Beach area, but then soon after that, it got to be big and they wanted to expand not only providing food but entertainment, craft, and special events. So they moved the Seafood Festival to Ocean Boulevard, which is where we have it today, where we take over Ocean Boulevard from H Street all the way up to the Ashworth Hotel. And so this year we have over 40 food booths, we have over 70 crafters selling their products and services, we have live entertainment from noontime on Friday … until six o’clock on Sunday. We’re also known for having the largest beer festival on on a beach in all of New England.”

Each day of the Festival will have special events, Nyhan said.

“We have a food tasting contest on Friday afternoon, Nyhan said. “What we do every year is we give the opportunity for our food vendors to select from six different items what they would like to compete. So, for example there might be four vendors that do some type of chowders. Then we have nine judges [who] judge all the chowders and pick the first-place chowder winner. We do that in six categories. It’s a lot of fun, and they get a ribbon and then they put the ribbon on their food booth during the weekend to show that they have the best chowder or the best lobster roll or the best whatever.”

“We have a special 9/11 event Friday night,” Nyhan continued “which will consist of a number of young men and women [who] have now enlisted into the armed services. They will be all sworn in on a special swearing-in ceremony at 6 o’clock on Friday.”

“And then come Saturday,” Nyhan said, “we have a cornhole contest that’s already been sold out that takes place down at the Beer Tent area during the day. And then we have great fireworks at 8:30 at night.”

On Sunday, Nyhan said, there will be a 5K road race starting at 6 a.m.

“Then in the afternoon at 2 o’clock we have our traditional lobster roll-eating contest, where this year we have contestants competing for the championship.” According to the Festival’s webpage, “Eight contestants take the Seashell Stage Sunday afternoon with one goal: eat as many lobster rolls as possible in 10 minutes.”

Because the Ocean Boulevard area is crowded with seafood and seafood fans for the three days, Nyhan said, the organizers have gotten very good at arranging shuttles from off-site parking areas.

“We have eight, nine different parking lots that we use throughout the entire weekend,” he said. “We are providing shuttle service … each day, starting on Friday at noon and going all the way to 7 o’clock on Sunday. The drivers actually work as volunteers; they don’t get paid. And so it’s a great local community partnership. To be honest with you, if we didn’t have a bus it would be very difficult to have the seafood festival because we would not be able to park 60,000 to 80,000 people along the beach.”

Hampton Beach Seafood Festival
Where: along Oceanside Boulevard in Hampton Beach
When: Friday, Sept. 11, from noon to 9 p.m.; Saturday, Sept. 12, from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday, Sept. 13, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tickets are $17.85 per person per day, or $33.76 for the full three-day festival.
More: seafoodfestivalnh.com

Featured photo: Lobster dinner at Hampton Beach Seafood Festival. Courtesy photos.

The Weekly Dish 26/09/10

• Keep your hands and feet away from his mouth: According to an Aug. 26 press release from the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, “18-time Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Champion Joey Chestnut is headed to Delta Dental Stadium for New Hampshire’s game against the Harrisburg Senators on Thursday, Sept. 10. Fans can purchase a limited quantity of VIP tickets to the meet and greet with Joey Chestnut. VIP tickets start at $75 and include a guaranteed meet and greet with Chestnut, plus a Puritan Backroom chicken tender basket with fries and a 16 oz soda at the game.” Visit gofevo.com/event/Joeychestnutpuritan.

• Bourbon in the Alley: Arts Alley (20 S. Main St., Concord, 406-5666, artsalleyconcordnh.com) will host The Angel’s Share: A Bourbon Tasting Experience on Friday, Sept. 11, from 5 to 8 p.m. Discover standout bourbons from featured distilleries and distributors while enjoying live music, outdoor entertainment and more. General admission tickets are $50, and VIP tickets are $80, through the Arts Alley website.

• Coffee Liqueur dinner party: Join Flag Hill Distillery and Winery (297 N. River Road, Lee, 659-2949, flaghill.com) Friday, Sept. 11, from 6 to 9 p.m. for a special dinner celebrating the release of its newest spirit, Coffee Liqueur. You’ll have the chance to mingle with fellow wine and spirit enthusiasts as well as meet the distillers who crafted these wines and spirits; sip coffee-inspired cocktails, lounge in vintage seating, have your cards read by Flag Hill’s tarot card reader and savor coffee-inspired dinner bites while enjoying live music. Tickets are $60.43 through the Flag Hill website.

• Able Ebenezer Beer Dinner: Thursday, Sept. 10, from 6 to 9 p.m. The Bedford Village Inn (2 Olde Bedford Way, Bedford, 472-2001, bedfordvillageinn.com) will host an evening celebrating New Hampshire craft beer and exceptional cuisine, the Able Ebenezer Beer Dinner. There will be a cocktail reception with hors d’oeuvres, and a four-course dinner, with each course paired with beers from Able Ebenezer Brewing Co. Tickets are $95++ per person and must be purchased in advance through the BVI website.

• Scales and suds: There will be a Reptile Pop-Up at Feathered Friend Brewing (231 S. Main St., Concord, 715-2347, featheredfriendbrewing.com) Sunday, Sept. 13, from 1 to 3 p.m. Jonesy’s Reptiles will be on hand for a petting zoo pop-up experience. Check out all the reptiles you’ve always wanted to hold, touch or learn about. This event is free. Register online at the Feather Friend website.

• Crime Scene Investigation with beer: On Sunday, Sept. 13, from 4 to 5:30 p.m., To Share Brewing (720 Union St., Manchester, 836-6947, tosharebrewing.com) will host an evening of fingerprinting, just like real CSI — learn how to dust for prints, analyze patterns, and solve mysteries like a real detective while enjoying a pint of To Share’s finest brews. The cost is $33.85.

• Cookbook Club: The Cookbook Club at the Whipple Free Library (67 Mont Vernon Road, New Boston, 487-3391, whipplefreelibrary.org) will meet Wednesday, Sept. 16, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. This month the Club will discuss and sample dishes from My Kitchen Year by Ruth Reichl. Copies of the cookbook are available for checkout at the Circulation Desk. After perusing the book, register online with the recipe you plan to bring.

Fresh Corn Muffins

  • 1 cup (120 g) all-purpose flour
  • 3 teaspoons (= 1 Tablespoon) baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • ¼ cup (1/2 stick) butter
  • ¼ cup (50 g) sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 cup (227 g) milk
  • 4 cups (112 g) cornflakes
  • 1 cup (160 g) fresh corn kernels – 2 to 3 ears
  • 1 to 2 jalapeño peppers, finely chopped

OK, let’s talk about the jalapeños.

Yes, this is New England, and traditionally people here are nervous about spiciness. The odds are someone in your family is uncomfortable with the idea of putting salt and pepper on their sweet corn. But in the grand scheme of things, let’s face it, a jalapeño is not a life-changingly hot pepper. On top of that, the jalapeños in our supermarkets are especially mild.

Cut one of the peppers in half, then cut a tiny sliver from its side and taste it.

Not terrible, right?

It is? OK, feel free to use a small handful of diced bell pepper instead. It’s better to make a toned-down version of these muffins than to live in fear. (The rest of you, please use the jalapeños.)

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Line 12 muffin tins with paper wrappers.

In a small bowl, mix the dry ingredients — the flour, baking powder, and salt. (Sugar behaves strangely and is, for whatever reason, considered a wet ingredient. Even though it’s dry. Because, reasons.)

With your electric mixer, beat the butter and sugar together, then beat in the egg. Add the milk and cornflakes, and mix it for another minute or so. Spoon in the dry ingredients, and mix until it all just barely comes together.

With a large spoon or a silicone spatula, stir in the fresh corn and jalapeños.

Divide the batter between the 12 muffin cups, then bake for 25 minutes. Let them cool on the counter in the muffin pan for a few minutes. I’m always a little nervous about “What if these are done on the outside but gloppy in the middle?” Something called carry-over heat will take care of that.

Featured photo. Photo by John Fladd.

From hobby to homestead bakery

Conquered Bread gets creative

The thing about black sesame tomato bread, Alex Brown explained, is that you can’t find it just anywhere.

“To start with, I mill my own flour,” he said. “I mill some durum wheat that I scored in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and some spelt that was grown in western Mass. Then I use tomatoes from a farm up here in Warner called Kearsarge Gore, and they sell at the Concord Farmers Market. Anyway, I’ve gotten pretty friendly with the farmers there, so they gave me a bunch of really fresh tomatoes that couldn’t be sold — just ugly stuff that had been nicked and bumped. So I threw all of those on my grill with a wood fire and I fire-roasted them and simmered them down into a puree, so they were nice and smooth. That ended up being something like 25 percent of the hydration in this bread, and it was finished off with black sesame. I do a lot of that kind of stuff.”

Brown is the baker and owner of Conquered Bread, a from-home bakery in Concord. He said that his bakery started as a hobby that got out of control.

“I’ve been baking bread as a hobby for several years even before Covid,” he said. “But it certainly accelerated during the pandemic, and I got in the habit of bringing bread to friends and coworkers.” Brown said that although people encouraged him to start selling his bread, he wasn’t interested in selling his bread as much as he was in baking it. “But then, a couple of years ago, a colleague suggested the idea of doing like a CSA, where customers would buy a share, kind of a subscription, and pick up what I baked.”

“My original idea was to bake 12 loaves of bread a week and sell it to friends and neighbors. I have pickups and you can sign up for them and pay for the month in advance. But by October of 2024 I had sold out all of my spots through the following February, and at that point I was like, ‘Oh, I’m really sort of onto something here.’ So I bought an oven that’s small by brick and mortar bakery standards but can fit nine to 12 loaves at a time. So now I bake probably close to something like 90 loaves a week”

Brown said most of his bread is fairly conventional, but working at the scale he does gives him some freedom for experimentation.

“I’ve got a few sort of standard rotating loaves and then at least one week of every month,” he said, “sometimes two, I do a special, um, something that’s like baker’s choice — a surprise bread that I develop. I try to be pretty creative. I usually develop recipes around local ingredients that are available”

One of the breads that Brown has been working on for the fall, for instance, he said, will probably combine olives and fresh herbs.

“One of the farms that I’m in touch with grew a bunch of caraway and they’re going to give me some fresh caraway — the herb part of it, not the seed — and so I was thinking about doing a buckwheat hearth bread with caraway. I’ve been sitting on the idea of doing something like a Scandinavian rye. Because rye flour doesn’t have much gluten, in Europe it comes in a square loaf. It’s baked like that because it can’t sit up and support itself because there’s no gluten. So it has to be baked in a pan. And Scandinavian rye is usually baked with seeds and some other whole grains. They’re dense and super-nutritious.”

“The last thing that I’ve been thinking of,” Brown said, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to squeeze it in this season, but I’ve made a Normandy bread, Pom Normand, which is a French apple bread from the Normandy region. Once we get apples on the trees, that will be sort of a no-brainer.”

Conquered Bread
Conquered Bread (19 Laurel St., Concord, conqueredbread.com) is sold by subscription and can also be purchased at the Concord Food Co-op (24 S. Main St., 225-6840, concordfoodcoop.com) and Revelstoke Coffee (100 N. Main St., Concord, 715-5821, revelstokecoffee.com).

Featured photo: Roasted Tomato Durum. Photo by Conquered Bread.

The Weekly Dish 26/09/03

• Farmers market: The Pittsfield Farmers Market will run this Saturday, Sept. 5, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the parking lot of Local, 1009 Upper City Road in Pittsfield, according to an organizer email. See facebook.com/sugarslocal for updates.

• New hours on the roof: According to an Aug. 25 press release, Rooftop Social (20 S. Main St., Concord, 406-5666, artsalleyconcordnh.com/portfolio/rooftop-social), the lounge atop Arts Alley in Concord, has changed its fall hours. Starting Sept. 1 it will be open Wednesday through Friday from 4 to 9 p.m., Saturday from noon to 8 p.m., and closed Sunday through Tuesday.

• When the bao breaks…: There will be a Bao Bun Making class for kids 12+ at The Culinary Playground (16 Manning St., Derry, 339-1664, culinary-playground.com) Saturday, Sept. 5, from 4 to 6 p.m. Kids will make fresh steamed bao buns to fill with garlic honey shredded chicken and a tangy slaw, then sit together and eat them. The cost is $60 per student through the Culinary Playground website.

• Sourdough 101: Tuscan Market (Tuscan Village, 9 Via Toscana, Salem, 912-5467, tuscanbrands.com) has a class for the sourdough-curious. This beginners class, Wednesday, Sept. 9, from 5 to 7 p.m. is mostly a demonstration and instruction class walking you through the steps of making sour dough. The instructor will have each stage of the dough in class and bake off a loaf for tasting. You will leave with a starter and recipes to begin your journey. The cost is $60 per student through the Tuscan Brands website.

• Charcuterie and wine: There will be a Charcuterie Workshop and Wine Tasting with The Funky Squid, Wednesday, Sept. 9, at Wine on Main (9 N. Main St., Concord, 897-5828, wineonmainnh.com), from 6 to 8 p.m. Learn techniques to build your own charcuterie arrangement using fresh ingredients while enjoying a wine tasting. Tickets are $71.21 through the Wine on Main website.

• Wine and popcorn are secretly best friends: Averill House Vineyard (21 Averill Road, Brookline, 244-3165, averillhousevineyard.com) is offering Wine and Kettlecorn pairings Wednesdays through Sundays in September and October. The rich, fancy flavors of popcorn complement the nuanced flavors of the wine, creating a unique and satisfying experience. Combine gluten-free, kosher, non-GMO popcorn with Averill House’s artisanal wines. You select the wine and your associate will pair the perfect popcorn pairing. The cost is $22.53 per person.

Peach Ranch Water

Ingredients

  • 1 small peach
  • 3 ounces jalapeño-infused tequila – I like Tanteo
  • 1 lime
  • Ice
  • Plain seltzer or club soda

Equipment

  • Long-handled bar spoon
  • Needle-nosed plyers
  • A tall glass – You might not actually own a Foghorn Leghorn commemorative glass, but if you do, this is the time to break it out.
  • A strainer
  • Straw – the kind you drink through, not the type you line a manger with.
  • A sense of righteous anger

Examine your peach. Along the top you will find a crease. Open your needle-nosed pliers and position the prongs on either side of it. Thank the peach for its sacrifice, then stab your pliers into the flesh and seize the pit. Grasp it firmly, and pull it through the top of the peach.

This will make you feel very clever. Well done, you.

This is where your sense of righteous anger comes in: Crush the peach in your fist, until the peach glop runs through your fingers and into your cocktail shaker or mixing glass. Feel free to make a fierce face while you do this. Add the tequila, and stir with your long-handled bar spoon. Warning: You will get peach guts all over everything. That’s the price you pay when emotions run high.

Go wash the evidence of your peachy crime of passion from your hands, leaving time for the alcohol to strip away the not-water-soluble compounds from the fruit.

Slice the lime in half, and squeeze it into the peach-tequila mixture. You can use your fist for this again, or a more conventional juice-squeezer; it’s a judgment call. Stir everything again.

Fill your tall glass with ice, and strain the peach mixture into it. Top with club soda and stir with your straw.

This is a perfect thirst-quencher. It is barely sweet; it depends on the peach you just violated. It is bubbly and perfect for a post-yardwork hammock nap. Remember that the end of the napping season is almost here, and if you want to make the nationals this year, you’re going to have to put in some training.

Featured photo. Photo by John Fladd.

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