Northeast FLAVOR

NEW ENGLAND’S FOOD AND WINE MAGAZINE

NEWSSTAND EDITION COVER

RATED A

Hitting Vermont’s

cheese trail

TOP 10 MAGAZINE OF 2011!

page 32

35 DELICIOUS NEW RECIPES YOU’LL LOVE! MAKE THIS TONIGHT: Grilled Corn, Red Pepper, and Goat Cheese Pizza p.52

Anne Burrell Rocks page 24 the Kitchen page 24

plus: Discover Long Island’s North Fork Explore World Cuisine in New Haven

GET MORE FLAVOR! Like us on Facebook and you could win big prizes!

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Savor a New England Classic: BOSTON BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD

Departments * Fall 2012

Food + Cooking 12 HEALTHY FLAVORS Peace, Love, and Granola

By Paula Sullivan p. 66

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Chefs + Restaurants 14 DINING OUT Worldwide Cuisine in New Haven

By Linda Guica

In the Glass

Northeast Traditions 58 CLASSIC Spilling the Beans on a Northeast Favorite

By Sandy Oliver

22 WINE FINDS Reasons for Riesling

By Win Rhodes

48 SPIRITS Vodka: The Clear New England Choice

By Paul Goodwin

Get Inspired 62 IN THE KITCHEN WITH… Daniel Bruce: Way Out of the Woods

By Carolyn Faye Fox

66 THINGS WE LOVE Taking Your Show On The Road

By Elaine Tomasini

Local + Sustainable

58

50 SEASONAL FLAVORS Sweet Sweet Corn

By Heather Milliman

54 FLAVOR FOCUS

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Growing America’s Comfort Food

By Crystal Ward Kent

IN EVERY ISSUE Editor’s Letter 7 Featured Contributors 8 Ask the Editors 10 The Book & Blog Club 68 Recipes 69 Advertiser directory 70 Next Issue Highlights 71 Roots 72

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Goat Cheese Crostini with Grilled Vegetables

Photograph courtesy of Allison Hooper and The Countryman Press

(recipe on p. 37)

Features * Fall 2012 24 Rockin’ the Kitchen with Anne Burrell

32 Hitting the Vermont Cheese Trail

40 Wining Our Way Down the North Fork

Good food and trash talk from the Food Network’s newest star.

Traveling up North for a turophile’s dream vacation.

For great wines, get in a New York state of mind.

By Lisa Goell Sinicki

By Sarah Spigelman

By Mike Morin

On our cover (digital edition): Boston Baked Beans and Brown Bread, featured on page 58.

Photograph by Glenn Scott. Recipe preparation and styling by Jessica Weatherhead.

On our cover (print edition): Grilled Corn, Red Pepper and Goat Cheese Pizza, recipe on page 52.

Photograph by Greg West. Recipe preparation and styling by Heather Milliman.

Photograph of Anne Burrell courtesy of the Food Network.

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CHEFS + RESTAURANTS | Dining Out

Worldwide Cuisine in New Haven

BY LINDA GIUCA | PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMY ETRA

IF YOU’RE LIKE ME, the best vacations center around food. Days may be filled with museum-hopping, drinking in a breathtaking landscape, or touring monuments, but the highlight of each day is finding the out-of-the-way spots where the locals eat, and exploring the culture through the food.

Alas, globe-trotting is expensive and time-consuming. Luckily, tastes of exotic cuisines abound in New England, in particular, in New Haven, Connecticut, which has a well-deserved reputation as a serious restaurant town.

The Elm City, nicknamed for an extensive public tree-planting project, has long laid claim to at least two major contributions to the annals of food history. Louis’ Lunch, which opened as a lunch wagon in 1895, claims to be the first restaurant in the United States to serve a hamburger.

Naples, Italy, the epicenter of great pizza, may overshadow New Haven’s Wooster Street, home to two of the city’s most famous pizzerias, but only by a nose.

Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletan, nicknamed Pepe’s, and Sally Apizza, operating, respectively, since 1925 and 1938, continue to set the standard for thin-crust, brick-oven pizza in America.

New Haven’s landscape is dotted with restaurants devoted to familiar cuisines — Italian, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican — as well as top notch vegetarian fare embodied by the landmark Claire’s Corner Copia.

More recently-arrived immigrants have only added to the dizzyingly delicious array of cuisines represented in this diverse city. For a fraction of the cost of a plane ticket to the southern hemisphere or the Middle East, foodies searching for a different approach to food and spice combinations gain an introduction to a new culture.

Newcomers to Lalibela Ethiopian Restaurant (www.lalibelarestaurantct.com)

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Lalibela’s Doro Wat — Chicken cooked in butter and sautéed onions, seasoned with garlic, fresh ginger, berbere and herbs; recipe on page 19.

Ethiopian food is a healthful way of eating that doesn’t overdo the use of fats. “Most of the dishes are very light, and we eat a lot of vegan and vegetarian dishes.” will sample not only a different culinary style but also a different way to eat. Forget the knife and fork; in the Ethiopian culture, a spongy flat bread called injera is the go-to “utensil.” Main dish sautés and stews along with their sauces are heaped atop the injera, which is made from teff, a grain native to Ethiopia. You break off a piece of

the bread, pinch a piece of meat and eat the two together. The sauces, redolent with the aromatic red chile and spice blend called berbere, are meant to be mopped up to the last drop with bits of injera.

“Spices are essential to Ethiopian cooking,” says Shilmat Tessema, chef/owner of the unpretentious restaurant named after

Above: Lalibela’s Sampler features Doro Wat, Yemisir Wat (lentils), Ater Kik (yellow split peas), Fosolia (green beans, carrots and onions), Gomen (collard greens), Kosta (spinach and potatoes), and Atkilt Besiga (beef, potatoes and carrots).

Left: Shilmat Tessema, Chef/Owner of Lalibela Ethopian Restaurant.

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ROCKIN’ THE KITCHEN with Anne Burrell

BY MIKE MORIN IMAGES USED COURTESY OF CROWN PUBLISHING/RANDOM HOUSE

When Food Network celebrity chef Anne Burrell sets out on a mission, get out of her way.

24 FALL 2012

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Hitting the Vermont Cheese Trail

BY LISA GOELL SINICKI

I’d landed the most exciting assignment of my writing career thus far: write a story about the Vermont Cheese Trail. Four days of swooping green hills, picturesque farms, homey inns, and cheese, cheese, cheese.

My exhilaration stemmed from three things: 1. I love cheese; 2. Vermont cheeses are wonderful; 3. I love cheese.

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reameries in the United States have upped their game over the past 15 years and the days of European cheese domination are over or at least contested. At the 2012 World Champion Cheese Contest, seven of the top 16 finalists were U.S. creameries. (Vermont’s top finisher was Cabot Creamery’s aged Cheddar which placed 15th.)

This trip was my opportunity to get up close and personal with some of the cheeses that I might not ordinarily find readily at home in Maine. This is because small producers’ goods tend not to make it very far from the creamery. Many produce such small batches that few of their cheeses make it over the state line before they are sold out.

With the help of the Vermont Cheese Council (www.vtcheese.com), I planned my route. Assessing the map of creameries on its website, it was evident that there is no real physical trail, just a long, narrow state dotted with a lot of places I wanted to visit. There are 44 creameries, located across the four corners of the state and everywhere in between, that belong to the Vermont Cheese Council.

Based on my research, I chose a variety of creameries. I included goat, sheep, and cow farms to ensure a wide range of cheese types.

I selected small operations that make farmstead cheese which means cheese made from the milk of a single herd of animals. And I selected larger operations that source their milk from outside dairies.

Two weeks of planning later, my husband and I headed out. We drove, ate cheese, then drove and ate more cheese. I returned home with a smile on my face and a cooler full of even more cheese. I am about three pounds heavier than when I started. But that’s OK; fat and happy isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Day 1 Vermont Shepherd Creamery, Putney www.vermontshepherd.com David Major grew up in Vermont and chose to raise sheep. When the domestic wool market fell apart, he turned to cheese. He and his wife, Yesenia, maintain a flock of 300 ewes. Every morning, they turn those ewes’ fresh milk into smooth cheeses that are ripened in their own cave. As the sheep’s milk has a different quality in the spring (when the sheep graze on shoots and buds) versus fall and winter (when the sheep eat tougher plants and seeds), David and Yesenia make two cheeses: Verano is the spring cheese, and Invierno the winter cheese.

Grafton Village Cheese, Grafton www.graftonvillagecheese.com Grafton originally made all of its cheese at its own creamery in Grafton Village. Now its larger-scale cheesemaking takes place in a new creamery in Brattleboro, while in this creamery, a team led by Dane Huebner, creates specialty cheeses.

Visitors can watch a video of how the cheese is made or peer through the window to watch Dane and his team create Queen of Quality, a cloth-aged Cheddar that Dane hopes will bring home some big prizes at cheese competitions. There is also a shop where visitors can sample cheeses and experience for themselves how the taste of Cheddar evolves after one, two, three, and four years of aging.

The Grafton Inn, Grafton [1] Grafton Inn. [2] Vermont Shepherd Creamery. [3] Lambs at Vermont Shepherd Creamery. [4] Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery’s Cremont, an aged goat and cow milk cheese, named for the “Cream of Vermont.” [5] Grafton Village Cheese.

[6] Cows at Shelburne Farms. [7] In the aging room at Grafton Village Cheese.

[8] Cheesemaker at Vermont Shepherd Creamery. [9] A calf at Shelburne Farms.

[10] Picturesque Grafton Village in the fall.

www.graftoninnvermont.com Our room was comfortable and cozy. We were too tired to go anywhere, so it was perfect that all we had to do was wander downstairs for dinner. The roast chicken and artichoke/ eggplant entrees were the perfect balance to the nothing-butcheese diet we’d been on all day.

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Wining Our Way Down the North Fork

BY SARAH SPIGELMAN | PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOMINIC PERRI

Facing page: The unspoiled North Fork of Long Island features miles and miles of vineyards. This page, clockwise from top left: Vineyards are planted in the French style, with vines close together; Castello di Borghese uses some of the oldest and most venerated vines in the North Fork; the Jamesport Country Kitchen features gourmet fare as well as stocking over 140 varieties of local wines; McCall’s Pinot Noir and Merlot are served at many of Manhattan’s finest restaurants.

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LOCAL + SUSTAINABLE | Seasonal Flavors

Sweet Sweet Corn B Y H E AT H E R M I L L I M A N | P H O T O G R A P H S B Y G R E G W E S T

HOW TO SELECT AND STORE Look for bright green, moist husks, silks that are shiny, and kernels which are developed, rounded, and glossy, not sunken or discolored.

The sugar in corn starts converting to starch immediately after picking; in fact, corn loses 25% of its sugar within 24 hours of being picked. Ideally, fresh corn should be cooked and eaten the day it is picked.

Bring a cooler with you to the farm stand to refrigerate your corn for the trip home, and cook within 2 to 3 days.

BEST METHODS TO PREPARE • In water: Choose a pot with room to hold both your corn and water to cover it.

Bring the water to a boil, add the corn, and cook for 3 to 4 minutes.

VARIETIES Named after its high-sugar content, sweet corn (called butter and sugar corn in New England) is a variety of field corn with a genetic mutation producing kernels higher in sugar rather than starch, as is typically the case for other varieties of corn (such as feed corn).

Available in yellow, white, or bicolored varieties, sweet corn is an easy-to-grow, late summer favorite among New England home gardeners. It produces sweeter tasting ears and stores better (that is, longer) than older corn cultivars. Though it is best for larger gardens — only one or two ears are produced per plant — small plantings can be successful, too, if carefully planned.

Since the process of maturation converts sugar to starch, sweet corn stores must be eaten fresh, canned, or frozen before the kernels become too starchy.

The Iroquois gave the first recorded sweet corn to European settlers in 1779 (for over a century before that, maize was “the” corn). This new sweet corn soon became a food staple in southern and central regions of the U.S, as well as all over the world.

50 FALL 2012

“Sex is good, but not as good as fresh, sweet corn.”

— Garrison Keillor

WHY YOU SHOULD TRY Cooked sweet corn is a significant source of antioxidants, which have been suggested to reduce the chances of cancer and heart disease. It is a rich source of vitamins A, B, and E. One cup of corn contains 18.4% of the daily recommended amount of fiber, which may help prevent digestive ailments like hemorrhoids and colorectal cancer.

A rich source of calories, corn is a major global food source, providing between 90–130 calories per 3.5 ounce serving. Corn is also rich in vitamin B, thiamin, and niacin, important in maintaining nerve function. High in folic acid, corn provides a large dose of the daily folate requirements, helping prevent neural tube defects in infants. Let’s not forget that yellow corn is also a rich source of beta-carotene, which is essential for healthy skin and good vision.

• On the grill: Keeping the husk intact at the base, peel the husk back to reveal the silk. Remove the silk, move the husk back into place, and soak in water for a minimum of 1 hour. Grill over high heat (or bake in 400˚F oven), turning every 5 minutes until fragrant and steaming (about 15 minutes). Husk and serve immediately.

Or, remove the husk and silks, place over hot coals, and turn every few minutes until corn is toasted and fragrant.

• In the microwave: Remove silk, keep husks intact. Microwave individually for 5 minutes an ear.

FLAVOR BOOST There are thousands of ways to prepare corn, but nothing compares to the elegant simplicity of a boiled ear of corn with some butter and salt. At my house, I make a compound butter studded with sweet basil, Parmesan, and ground black pepper to spread generously on a hot ear of corn.

It’s heaven.

DID YOU KNOW? Though it originated in the New World, corn is now grown on every continent except Antarctica.

Grilled Corn, Red Pepper, and Goat Cheese Pizza (recipe on p.52)

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Recipes

books

Breakfasts Autumn Apple Parfait . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mom’s Homemade Granola . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Stirling House Dutch Pancakes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Taber’s Classic Granola . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

page 13 page 13 page 47 page 13

Soups and Starters Baked Onion Apple Cider Soup with Smoked Cheddar Cheese Gratinee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inside Front Cover Goat Cheese Crostini with Grilled Vegetables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 37 Grafton Cheddar Puffs with Roasted Tomato Salsa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 36 Harvest Vegetable Soup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 63 Jamesport Country Kitchen’s Peconic Bay Scallops with Brie and Garlic Spinach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 47 Wild Mushroom, Apple, and Smoked Pecan Salad with Melted Red Onion and Bacon Dressing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 63 Truffled Deviled Eggs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 30

$27.00

“A wonderful book about fish and shellfish cookery” —Mary Ann Esposito

“A feast for the eyes and the stomach” —Jasper White

Main Courses Cornmeal Crêpes with Corn, Basil, and Mozzarella . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Duck Breast with Dried Fruit and Vin Santo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Grilled Corn, Red Pepper, and Goat Cheese Pizza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Lalibela’s Doro Wat (Ethiopian Chicken in Red Pepper Paste) . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Macaroni and Cheese with Ham and Horseradish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sea Salt Butter Basted Chicken . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Soul de Cuba’s Lechon Asado (Marinated Roast Pork) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Thali’s Konkan Crab . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

$16.95 page 52 page 29 page 52 page 19 page 38 page 38 page 19 page 21

Sauces and Sides Baked Potatoes Primavera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 57 Blissful and Elegant Potatoes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 57 Boston Baked Beans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 61 Brown Bread . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 60 Crispy Crunchy Duck Fat Potatoes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 29 Maine Baked Beans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 60 Melted Red Onion and Bacon Dressing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 63 Potato Bread . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 57 The Blue Room Baked Beans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 60

“You can’t go wrong with Union Oyster House Cookbook” —Bobby Flay

$12.95

Sweets Bartlett Pear and Nutmeg Fritters with Cider Syrup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 64 Devil’s Food Chocolate Cupcakes with Crème Fraîche Cherry Ice Cream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 39 Pear Tarte Tatin with Shortbread Crust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 30

Cocktails Classic Bloody Mary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Skip and Go Naked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Vodka Martini . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Vodka Stinger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

For more great recipes, visit our website: www.northeastflavor.com

page 49 page 49 page 49 page 49

$17.95 “An innovative cookbook” —Bon Appetit

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