In springtime, foraging ramps up

By John Fladd

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It’s maple season, and for Christine Gagnon that means one thing.

Mushrooms.

Gagnon is the owner and operator of the Uncanoonuc Foraging Co. (uncforaging.com) in Goffstown. Her passion is finding and identifying edible plants and fungi.

“I just love foraging,” she said..”I love being out there and finding things. It’s like a treasure hunt. Just the idea of what mushrooms do and what they are and to see the many different forms that they come in and how they—.” She paused to put her feeling into words. “It’s so vast. It’s just … vast.”

Gagnon said one type of mushroom that appears in early spring is an oyster mushroom. “Sometimes you’ll see those in the winter too,” she said. ”If you have a 60-degree day — and there can be snow in the woods, but 60, and you might see oyster mushrooms pop up on trees.” In other words, during maple season. “They like maple trees actually,” she said.

Another mushroom that makes an appearance at this time of year is called a Pheasant’s Back (Cerioporus squamosus). “Those grow on trees,” Gagnon said. “And they have a very cucumber-y, melon-y, watermelon-rind smell to them. So sometimes people will pickle them. Because smell makes up a lot of how things taste a lot of times.”

One of the things that can make finding mushrooms difficult, Gagnon explained, is that the mushrooms most of us see are just the fruiting body of a fungus (mycelium), which is usually tiny and threadlike and difficult for non-specialists to see. Depending on the variety of mushroom, finding them “is a combination of the season and when the conditions are right,” she said. “Some mushrooms will pop up all season and some are very seasonal.”

For example, morel mushrooms only happen in the spring for a very short period of time. “When the ground temperature has warmed up to a certain amount, when the air temperatures are certain, when the humidity and moisture is what it is. And then around here, we don’t really have the ‘burn morels’ [which appear after forest fires] they have out west so much, so you have to find them with the right trees, whether it’s in old orchards or elm trees The mycelium grows in or around or through roots of trees and plants and other organisms.”

But that’s not true of all mushrooms, Gagnon said. “Other ones are called saprophytic or saprotrophic; they’re breaking down dying material. They’re decomposers, which also makes sense with the fire morels like out west.”

“In the early spring,” she said, “you [find] mushrooms that are trying to get a jump on their biological competition. You can find morels if you know where to find them.” But, she said, sometimes they will spring up somewhere completely unexpected. “They are what we call ‘landscape morels’ because sometimes when people order mulch for their gardens the mulch is coming with the mycelium already in there. And so people find [a morel], and they’re like, ‘Oh, it was in my garden.’ It was, but it’s usually because the mycelium was present in the mulch.”

Mushrooms aside, early spring is also the season for ramps, sometimes called wild garlic, which Gagnon said is in the onion family. “The genus is allium,” she said, [with the scientific name] allium tricoccum or trichocum, variety braticii. They have a white stem or sometimes a red stem, but they are in the allium family. Sometimes they’re called wild onions, and sometimes they’re really called a wild leek, because you can eat the entire thing.”

Gagnon said that her biggest thrill is finding something new, especially mushrooms.

“There’s so much DNA work now being done on them. So if we’re not exactly sure what it is, we can go home and dehydrate it, upload it to iNaturalist, send a specimen in, and it gets DNA’ed, and then we get the results back in however long it takes. The great thing about taking pictures with our phones these days or with iNaturalist is it gives you the exact locations and when you took it. So you can kind of go back and look for anything later.”

Caution where you eat

Eating unidentified plants or mushrooms can be dangerous. Please forage under the supervision of a trained forager.

Featured photo: Oyster mushrooms. Photo from NH Garden Solutions.

A lot has changed, but not the french fries

By John Fladd

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If you had asked Peter Macone in 2019 what he saw himself doing in six years, it probably wouldn’t have been running a brewery. “It would be running two stores on Elm Street 110 steps apart,” he said.

Macone is a veteran restaurateur. For many years he was a part owner and the operating manager of two popular restaurants in downtown Manchester — the Republic Cafe (now closed) and Campo Enoteca, which merged with Republic before being sold to new owners.

“Then Covid happened,” Macone said.

According to Macone, the pandemic shook up the restaurant industry and changed the way it viewed itself.

“Covid was sort of the earliest catalyst for where we are today,” he said. “It changed the expectation and the way that we express farm-to-table food.” One of the most dramatic changes was in the role breweries played. “Breweries are a market that are just absorbing so many markets now,” Macone said. “People go to breweries instead of brunch, breweries instead of a lunch place, breweries instead of a bar after work, breweries for dinner. I saw that and I saw the ability to have a more sustainable lifestyle for myself in the long run. I have a six-week-old.”

Eventually, this led to the Republic Brewing Co., a partnership with Mike Brown, the owner of Hometown Coffee Roasters. Macone said each partner brought a particular set of skills to the new business.

“I know about food and hospitality,” Macone said. “I partnered with Mike, [who] made some of the most top-notch beer right out of the gate. And there was a day where he presented me with a beer and said, ‘I think this will be our flagship.’ I tasted it and I was like, ‘All right, we’re going to do just fine with the beer.’”

That was Republic’s Bella, a single-hopped New England-style India Pale Ale, or IPA. Macone said he and Brown made the decision early on to focus on a few core beer recipes.

“We want to have staples people know they can get, and stand by their quality,” he said. “They’re really quality products, but we’re not looking to fill a portfolio with 700 zillion names. For instance, next winter, Michael will be, without a doubt, doing a dark beer — likely involving coffee, as he has Hometown next door.”

In addition to its own core slate of beers, Macone said it’s important to both partners to feature beers from other area breweries.

“We’ll always have a guest tap here,” he said. “We always look to feature our friends in the area. So we have a Kettlehead guest tap right now. I believe we have a To Share coming up. We’ve [featured] To Share in the past; Post and Beam, Spyglass — all people that have helped us get open in the industry. And so we kind of want to return that favor. And plus, it’s just great to be talking about other people’s breweries and representing them. And they’ll help fill the gaps of what we don’t have.”

On the food side of the business, Macone said he has brought a focus with him from the original Republic Cafe and applied it to pub food.

“We’re maintaining the same farm-to- table aspect and the farms that we used to work with. So the same farmer that brought us pork at Republic is bringing us pork here. The same farmer that brought us beef is bringing us beef here. And the same goes for chicken. And eggs, we have a local farmer bringing us eggs. This is a way to continue those relationships that are over a decade old.”

“There are a couple little recipes that we’ve carried over [from Republic],” he said. “But most of it has been tweaked into more of a brewery format menu. One thing that is a straight carryover is our french fries. Republic’s french fries were award-winning. We brought those straight over just as they were, and people are really excited about it. They’re hand cut, blanched, and fried with capers and a bunch of other little things in there that make them unique”

“It’s been important for us to focus on the beer and the food,” Macone said, “and that’s why it’s nice to have Mike and I both involved. We have sort of a left brain and right brain, and we can both really dig into what our piece of the pie is, and it allows us to work on elevating the beer and the food at the same time and try to give people that experience of both. So that on Friday night, you know, we don’t just have people coming to drink beer after work, we have people coming here for their Friday night dinner.”

The Republic Brewing Co.

Where: 72 Old Granite St., Manchester, 836-3188, republicbrewingcompany.com
Hours: Open from 3 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays; 1 to 9 p.m. Fridays; noon to 9 p.m. Saturdays, and noon to 7 p.m. on Sundays. There is free off-street parking.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.