Issue link: http://osercommunicationsgroup.uberflip.com/i/789177
NATURALLY HEALTHY www.gourmetnews.com n MARCH 2017 n GOURMET NEWS N H 1 4 2 A Serious Foodie Delivers a World of Peppers By Lorrie Baumann Jim Pachence takes peppers more seriously than most. He's the entrepreneur behind Se- rious Foodie, which offers a line of cooking and finishing sauces that feature fusion fla- vors, most of which celebrate the flavors of peppers grown around the world. His idea was to focus on the unique flavors of the pep- pers, rather than relying solely on their burn. Pachence, who has a Ph.D. in biophysics, started Serious Foodie in 2015 after a 40-year career as a serial entrepreneur in the medical devices industry, followed by culinary train- ing in the U.S. and Europe. He and his family then worked for a few years to develop recipes based on the peppers and flavors he'd discovered during his world travels. "I started off as a very serious amateur cook," he said. "While phasing out my biotech career, I wanted to do something around the culinary business. We had thought of wanting to do something in culi- nary art, and I had an interest in – not neces- sarily hot – peppers. I wanted to know why the world has so many peppers. Why and how do peppers taste different when they're grown in different places?" "Some chiles are very harsh and are bred simply to be hot, not to be flavorful, some- times painful," he continued. "We started to look at the opposite: What are the species that are bred to be flavorful? Why are there a thousand Mexican varietals?" The answer to those questions, he decided, is that different varieties of peppers are cul- tivated around the world to complement the various flavors that typify their cuisines as a whole. For instance, the aji panca pepper from Peru is used in just about every Peru- vian dish in one way or another, Pachence said. It's used both fresh and dried, some- times in a paste. When it's fresh, it has a sweet, slightly smoky, fruity flavor that in- spired Pachence to experiment with how it could be used in sauces that would comple- ment the vegetables and proteins that com- prise the American culinary lexicon. "It's slightly spicy, has multiple levels of flavor, is truly unique to the cooking of that coun- try," he said. "The taste is used everywhere. The Peruvians use it on their vegetables, so we played with that. Meaty fish, incorpo- rated into a ceviche – those are some of the examples where we reflect how the sauce is used in the U.S. versus how it's used in Peru. We made a Blood Orange and Aji Panca sauce, which reflects the bracing acidity that you see in the Peruvian dishes, but using our own fusion twist." The Blood Orange and Aji Panca Cooking Sauce is one of seven different sauces in the line that started three years ago with Roasted Hatch Chile Cooking Sauce, which was the re- sult of a friend's invitation to visit him in New Mexico and take in the Hatch Chile Festi- val, an annual Labor Day weekend celebration of south- ern New Mexico's most fa- mous crop. "As I started to do my culinary experiences, I was interested in the local cuisines of semi-exotic places around the world," Pachence says as he explains how a visit to a small-town harvest festival evolved into a family business that employs his son, Paul, as its marketing executive and his daughter Lisa as a part-time sales executive, with the occa- sional assistance of his wife, who's still a prac- ticing physician. "I wanted to teach my children what it meant to be an entrepreneur," he said. "I'm just very strong on the entrepre- neurial spirit and how that helps people around the community. It helps create jobs. It helps improve the local community. I like to connect the community – that whole idea of thinking globally but acting locally." "The science geek in me went about cre- ating the sauces systematically, trying to find the flavors in the chile that would match with flavor profiles," he said. He ordered himself a supply of Hatch chiles and started playing with different combinations of fruits and herbs with the peppers, and ended up with a blend of the peppers with passionfruit juice and herbs. "We created something that peo- ple really liked and wanted to buy," he said. From there, the line grew to seven differ- ent sauces targeted at consumers from 25 to 55 with discretionary income, who are really interested in both gourmet food and healthy eating, but who don't nec- essarily have a lot of time to exper- iment with flavors in their own cooking. The sauces are all natural with no artificial preservatives or genetically modified organisms. They have low salt and low sugar. "We approach cooking as a holistic, healthy, flavor-packed experience," he said. "We show people how you can make a gour- met meal without using a lot of fat that adds extraneous calories." The sauces are also gluten-free, and while a couple of them include anchovies, the oth- ers are vegan. They're made in small test market batches at a commercial kitchen in St. Petersburg, Florida, and by a co-packer based in Albany, New York, who's familiar with the demands of artisanal food produc- tion, according to Pachence. "We try to keep the flavor profile medium or lower, as far as the spiciness is concerned," he said. "Most people can tolerate the sauce. We always say that you can always add hot back into it, but you can't take it away." The sauces are currently sold in 150 stores around the country and perform best for medium-size gourmet shops that also have meat and cheese departments, Pachence said. "Almost every sauce we have has a personal travel experience associated with it," he added. "We'd tasted something like this somewhere else that we wanted to recreate." For more information, visit www.serious- foodie.com. Small Specialty Food Producers Find a Genuine Local Home in New Hampshire By Lorrie Baumann Mary Macdonald got just three weeks' notice that her business, The Discerning Palate, was about to lose its home because the facility in which she was making and packing Swine- heart's Signature Sauces, Old's Cool Wild Game Sauces and Our Local Table specialty food products had been sold and was closing. The other New Hampshire food producers who shared the space with her were out on the street just as suddenly. She and her husband Gavin responded by building Genuine Local, a specialty food production facility that functions as an incu- bator for specialty food businesses, a shared use kitchen, co-packer and the new home of her house brands. "We wanted to figure out how to make something that worked for the people who were also displaced," she said. "We found that not only did the people who were displaced by the other facility need a new production facility, but there was also a need within the central part of the state be- cause there were no other resources like this anywhere." Genuine Local opened for business on Jan- uary 2016 in a 1,800 square-foot former ware- house, and now has 125 to 150 products coming out of the kitchen from 23 different producers. "We received our final notice of occupancy on January 25, 2016 at about 10:00 in the morning," Macdonald said. "By 1:00, the first batch of sauce was in the kettle." In December 2016, Local Baskit, a meal kit subscription service owned by Beth Richards of Concord, New Hampshire, be- came Genuine Local's first graduate. Local Baskit had launched in June 2016 using Gen- uine Local's facility as the base of operations in which Richards packaged all her meal kits. As the business grew, she shifted her at- tention to customer service and recipe devel- opment, while Genuine Local took on assembling the meal kits. Then in December, Richards relocated her business to a space that will allow her to expand her offerings to include cooking and nutrition classes. "At lightning speed, she leaped and she landed," Macdonald said. Genuine Local, located in Meredith, New Hampshire, is in the middle of the state, about 40 miles north of the state capital in Concord and about 80 miles west of Port- land, Maine, as the crow flies. It's equipped as a small-scale commercial kitchen with 40- gallon kettles, which is large for a catering kitchen but small for a production facility. "We expect that people will come in and work for a year or two, but then move on as they outgrow what we're here to offer," Macdonald said. "The group that I'm most excited about working with are all the spe- cialty food producers who need to take the next step." The facility doesn't have a USDA license, so it's not for meat products, and there's no cold chain production capacity. "We don't do cheese, but we can pretty much work with anybody else," Macdonald said. "It's a very purpose-built facility, so it has a very func- tional footprint. All of the equipment is on wheels. Everything we have is semi-auto- mated, including the bottler and the labeler. It's all about being the bridge." The 23 producers who are currently shar- ing the space make a variety of products, in- cluding conventional hot pack products and a range of ethnic foods that include a unique West African pepper relish, Ruth's Mustards, Little Acre Gourmet Foods' condiments and Bleuberet's microbatch relishes and jams. Local caterers also use the facility. "Products coming out of here are in distribution throughout New England into upstate New York, as well as pushing down into New York City. We have one customer that's fea- tured in all of the Eataly stores," McDonald said. "We have another customer that's really happy being able to drive to every single store that carries their product, and that's where they want to be." "We have everything from one company that makes a northern Indian-style eggplant relish, and that's their only product, to Little Acre Gourmet, which is really pushing to ex- pand their line," she added. "I'm thinking that in three years, we're not going to be big enough for her, but we are for now, and we're very glad." The facility is also home to The Discerning Palate's house brands. They include Swine- heart's Signature Sauces, which offers seven flavors of handcrafted, small-batch sauces representing various styles of American bar- becue. "We got into the food business as a hobby gone wrong. The kids gave their dad a small smoker for Father's Day about 10 years ago," Macdonald recalls. From that begin- ning, the Macdonalds started competing in the barbecue circuit and developed their own sauces. "From there, people started wanting to purchase the sauce, and the company just grew," she said. Once they'd decided to pro- duce the first Swineheart's Signature Sauces on a commercial basis, they set up shop in a copacking facility that also rented space on an hourly basis. "It was historically a culinary training program run by the county," Mac- donald said. "It was set up as a catering kitchen that transformed into a production fa- cility, whereas ours was set up to be a pro- duction facility from the get-go." New brands grew up around that 2010 start, including Our Local Table, which offers a trio of onion relishes as well as salsas and spicy Peri Peri sauces, and Old's Cool, a line of three sauces designed for wild game. "They're fat-free and made with gluten-free ingredients with no preservatives or artificial flavors or colors," Macdonald said. Genuine Local is also home to Genuine Local's Bootstraps Program, an a la carte business development program that works by subscription and offers assistance with all the myriad problems that people have to solve when they're starting a food business: labeling and nutrition panels, licensing, mar- ket development and recipe development. "For regular business planning, we refer those out. There are simply not enough hours in the day," Macdonald said. "We have some people who are qualified to do a variety of types of production, and they're willing to work with people on a freelance basis, so we do make those types of connections as well." "We developed that Bootstraps Program out of recognition that we'd never have been able to do what we've done without the gen- erosity of other people," she added. "It's frankly not rocket science, but there's no manual. We have a really strong commit- ment, with our focus on local, to help people take the next step."