By Gillian O’Callaghan   –   Boston Globe

SALEM — Maitland Mountain Farm, this city’s only urban farm, is a bit of a conundrum. How can there be a farm and a mountain in this seaside city with almost 5,000 residents per square mile?

Carved out of a residential neighborhood, the farm is perched on a 2½-acre lot not far from a Staples and Dunkin’ Donuts. The name came from a family friend of Peter Maitland, who with his wife, Barbara, raised four children on this property. The friend used to ride his bike up the steep hill to visit and after struggling each time to navigate the incline, he dubbed the spot “Maitland Mountain.”

For the past six years, the Maitlands’ daughter Holly, 33, and her husband, Andy Varela, 30, have been growing a host of farmers’ market vegetables and testing the appeal of others. Kohlrabi was a successful experiment, though it took some convincing for skeptical shoppers to try the odd-looking orb. The farm is not organic, but on rare occasions uses organic insecticides. “This year we haven’t sprayed anything,” says Varela. If you grow what’s in season, he says, there’s little need for fighting pests.

Making a living from a small farm is difficult, so the duo developed two big additional income sources: sweet-smelling flowers and sour-tasting pickles. Until the end of October, the farm will deliver 40 to 50 bouquets a week to local florists, as well as a weekly flower share to Farm Direct Coop, a North Shore CSA. The mainstays are more than 40 varieties of dahlias, which are paired with zinnias, celosia, lemon basil, or amaranth.

And then there are the pickles. “I have always been a pickle lover at heart,” says Holly Maitland. One year, her father grew a “plethora of pickling cucumbers.” She tried a couple recipes for quick refrigerator pickles. “They came out so good that I was hoarding them for myself.”

When Varela moved to the farm and tried them he said, “You’ve got to do something with this.” That summer, they were selling pickles at farmers’ markets, and within two years had a contract with Costa Fruit & Produce of Charlestown to distribute pickled products and horseradish to kitchens across New England. “It’s helping us make it through the winter,” says Maitland. To keep up with demand, they buy cucumbers from neighboring farms and other places. A cold-brine method keeps the vegetables crisp and crunchy. Jett’s Spears are mild, and Holly’s Spears are spicy. Peter’s Giardiniera, a mix of carrots, cucumbers, cauliflower, celery, and peppers, in a briny concoction of spices, has plenty of garlic and red chile flakes.

Peter Maitland and his brother, Greg, built the house on this property. Now Holly and Varela, and their 3-year-old son Jett (the same Jett of the mild pickles), live here with Peter and Barbara. Peter, a retired merchant marine engineer, always had an extensive garden and raised chickens.

Holly moved home after finishing Massachusetts College of Art and Design and started working for a landscape design company. In 2009, the year the Salem farmers’ market launched, the father-daughter duo tried a small stand with eggs, vegetables, and flowers, and the farm has been expanding ever since.

She and Varela met on eHarmony, drawn together by shared careers in the food industry. Within five months, Varela, originally from Southern California, arrived in Salem from Montauk, N.Y., where he was working in a restaurant. He quickly embraced the role of family farmer. As relatively new growers, the two have learned by trial and error. “It’s not what you know about farming,” says Varela, “it’s about how much work you want to put in.”

They find support among fellow farmers and restaurants they supply. The Sea Level Oyster Bar on Salem Harbor offers Maitland’s spicy pickle chips, fried to a crisp and served with chipotle dipping sauce. “They are great pickles to start with. And then you add that they are local, and made right in Salem, you can’t get better than that,” says culinary director Serie Keezer, who also oversees Finz Seafood & Grill on the harbor.

The pickles are also at Milk & Honey Green Grocer in Salem. “It’s great to be able to offer customers products that come right from their own town,” says owner Sharon Driscoll. She’s had customers so enamored of Holly’s Spears that they’ve wiped out her entire stock in one purchase.

And, no, the young farmers never get sick of pickles. Varela likes to dice them, and, with a generous splash of brine, make a pickle guacamole. And Maitland, the original pickle lover, dips her spicy spears in hummus.

They’ve built a very sweet and sour life atop Maitland Mountain.

Maitland Mountain Farm pickles available at Milk & Honey Green Grocer, 32 Church St., Salem, 978-744-6639; The Corner Butcher Shop, 240 Elliott St., Beverly, 978-969-3194; Willow Rest, 1 Holly St., Gloucester, 978-283-2417; Appleton Farms Dairy Store, 209 Country Road, Ipswich, 978-356-3825; Appleton Farms at Boston Public Market, 100 Hanover St., Boston. Flowers, produce, and pickles available through Oct. 22 at the Salem farmers’ market in Derby Square on Thursdays.

Gillian O’Callaghan can be reached at gillian.ocallaghan@globe.com.

BY ANDREA WEIGL – Charlotte Observer

aweigl@newsobserver.com

State fair food vendors are always in search of the next big deep-fried thing.

They hope to create a deep-fried delicacy that will join the ranks of the N.C. State Fair’s greatest hits: deep-fried candy Snickers, deep-fried HoHos and the Krispy Kreme cheeseburger.

Several vendors will share samples of their creations at an event at 11:30 a.m. Monday in Raleigh that state Agriculture officials put on for the media. The fair is Oct. 15-25 at Raleigh fairgrounds.

Food vendors have incentive to create the next popular deep-fried treat: increased sales.

The deep-fried bananas foster that the Ragin’ Cajun booth served last year increased their sales by 20 percent, according to owner Chris Wrenn. Although Wrenn has been serving food at the fair since 2009, he hadn’t tried to compete in the annual scrum of the best new deep-fried treat at the fair.

But this year, Wrenn and his business partner, chef Joseph Fasy, began working on what they hope will be a follow-up hit: pimento cheese hushpuppies with bacon and jalapeno and served with a sriracha bang bang sauce.

Pimento cheese seems to be popular item this year. The folks behind Woody’s, a sports bar in Raleigh and Cary, are doing deep-fried wontons filled with pimento cheese. “The whole world is crazy for pimento cheese,” said Woody’s co-owner Shawn Whisnant. “So we thought why not deep fry it for the fair?”

Wrenn and Fasy sat down recently to talk about how they tried to come up with a deep-fried fair hit.

The men met about three years ago. Wrenn owns Old North State Catering, which he runs out of a fully equipped 42-foot trailer. Wrenn’s church, The Gathering, cooks a meal once a month for families in need and someone reached out to Fasy to help with the Thanksgiving feast. Fasy is a longtime hotel chef who has worked for Hyatt and the Biltmore Hotel.

“We’ve been together ever since,” Fasy said.

Wrenn added, “My wife calls it a bromance.”

Fasy helps Wrenn develop menus for his catering events, pairing his classical cuisine credentials with Wrenn’s down-home Southern cooking. The men use those events as opportunities to test recipes that may also work for the fair. This year’s pimento cheese hush puppies were a big hit at a recent wedding. The men only recently completed the recipe, increasing the amount of jalapenos and brine in the batter.

“We got it right on the jalapenos this time,” Wrenn said after taking a bite of the most recent batch.

Not every dish will work at the fair, the men said. Their attempt to make a barbecue chicken and waffle sandwich failed. The dish was delicious with homemade waffles, but those can’t be done at the fair and a frozen waffle just didn’t taste good enough.

Wrenn and Fasy certainly learned some lessons from their bananas foster success: Have one dedicated line, register and deep fryer for what you hope will be your breakout hit. And be prepared.

This year, Fasy is planning to make 35 gallons of sriracha bang bang sauce.

• APOORVA SRIPATHI   –   The Hindu

Pickles are one of the greatest comforts of life. We’ve all grown up amidst bottles and bottles of homemade and store-bought ones; some of us with more enterprising mothers would’ve eagerly awaited summer to watch mangoes being cut lovingly, slathered in masala and oil, and being bottled for days together, before one could eat a piece on the sly. For some of us, curd rice was an excuse to enjoy a giant piece of red-flecked avakkai in its entire briny, spicy glory. And for some others, paranthas would’ve been incomplete without aam ka achar.

Today, most of us neither have the time nor the interest to slave over batches of lemon or mango pickles, let alone experiment with Western-sounding ones such as dill or gherkins. That’s whereGoosebumps Pickles, an online store that lets you customise your pickles, comes in. Started three years ago by Pinank Shah, the Mumbai-based brand makes pickles at home and initially offered nine varieties. Now it offers 16, from experimental ones such as jalapeño and olive to vintage choices including mango-ginger (or curcuma amada), gor keri (mango-jaggery) and good old sour lime pickle. The varieties are a combination of North-meets-South and it’s because Shah is from Gujarat and his mother-in-law, from whom this business took roots, from the south.

Starting a pickle company seems like a throwback to the nineties, especially to Tamil cinema, that helped a lot of fictional women entrepreneurs get back on their feet by making humble pickles in their stuffy kitchens. They’d then go house to house and deal with the struggles of selling it, only to be finally rescued by a clever daughter-in-law or neighbour or a son who realises he must support the family. Goosebumps Pickles’ story is similar in the sense that it did start from the humble kitchen of Shah’s mother-in-law. “She makes around 700 kg every year for family and friends. Before I got married, I was working on mobile apps and websites, and soon afterwards, I realised that there was no website retailing pickles,” Shah says. “Think about it like this. What chocolates are to the Swiss, pickles are to Indians. It gives us goosebumps and that’s how we came up with the name — there was no strategy, no deep discussions,” he says.

The exciting part about buying pickles is making one yourself — and by that, I mean you can choose from a list of seven ingredients (lemon, ginger, carrot, kerda, green chilli, asparagus root and karvanda or conkerberry) over a base of mango masala blended in mustard oil for adding that zing. The website allows for a minimum order of 250 gm and the pickles are packed in five layers to render it leak-proof.

That’s not all they offer: you can choose from spices and blends such as tea masala, molagai podi, methimasala, rasam and sambar masala, all made in-house. So the next time you feel your meal is incomplete, round it off with a pickle you designed without breaking a sweat; Goosebumps Pickles will make it for you.

You can now have your pickle and eat it too.

By Aatish Nath   –   The Times of India

Home chefs are cashing in on a new demand for pickles that are made with meat Kairi, already tangy, takes on an ability to have you involuntarily squint when eaten pickled.

The unripe mango, floating in coral red oil, along with mustard and fenugreek seeds, is what most people think about when you mention achaar, but a new breed of home chefs is introducing city folk to a wholly different meat-based pickle -inspired by regional recipes and some imagination.

Gitika Saikia, who originally hails from Dibrugarh in upper Assam, has been hosting North Eastern meals at her home in Juhu.Seeing the demand for her pork pickle (the recipe, she confesses, is her mother-in-law’s), she was soon doling out the piquant meat to friends and lunch attendees. She soon decided to extend her business and started selling it, along with other vegetarian variants. Saikia, however, cautions, “It’s a North Eastern pork pickle, so it’s not like other varieties such as the spicy Goan pork pickle. This doesn’t contain any masalas.”

In fact, the ingredient list is relatively short and consists of a little vinegar, mustard oil, bhut jolokia (which she sources from back home), ginger, garlic and onions. Due to the low amount of vinegar used, the pickle can only keep for about 40 days. Using technology to her advantage, this and other (vegetarian) pickles from her, can be ordered on yummade.in, a website that allows home chefs to connect with customers.

Also on Yummade is William Pinto, who makes pickles under the name, The Pickled Chick. As the moniker suggests, he makes only chicken pickles in five different styles. A former chocolate maker, he made the switch to savoury pickles in 2012.Pinto explains, “I started making Kerala-styled pickles from my family’s recipes.”

He now prepares Andhra, Punjabi and Goan versions of pickles, along with a chicken balchao spread, “that isn’t as spicy as his other variants”. The recipes for all his offerings have come from observing flavour profiles from each region and trying to match his pickles to it. With a three-month shelf life, the pickles are a hit with paying guest students and those who want their meat fix without the headache of cooking a meal.

In fact, one of the reasons Pinto started the venture was because he wanted meat in the fridge, “after a hard days’ work”. He shares, “I’m a hardcore non-vegetarian and I need my chicken and pork at the end of the day.” Returning home and finding no meat in the fridge got him started on pickling chicken and his venture has only grown. Says Pinto, “I only started in May of this year with Small Fry Co’s Bombay Local and the response has been great,” smiles Pinto, who will be spending this weekend in Pune, at a farmers MARKET for home chefs.

Zinobia Schroff seems to have an innate knack for spices. A Parsi caterer based in Dadar, her reper toire of pickles extends from the popular prawn to the harder-tosource fish roe (she makes it with eggs from bhing also known as hilsa) and chicken, mutton, pork and bombil (Bombay duck). For those looking for a lip-smacking preserve of a particular type of fish, she pickles most types that can be found in local waters. The monsoon is the best time to source the roe needed to make her garbh nu achar, but it’s been getting harder to find and more expensive these days. Schroff says, “I keep getting standing orders for the bhing roe preserve, but in recent years, I have had a hard time keeping up.” This monsoon season, though, she managed to make more than enough, and has bottles left for the taking. Prices vary from Rs 250 a for quarter kilo of chicken or pork, to Rs 550 for 250 gms of the bhing roe pickle. Schroff, who had spent her childhood watching her grandmother pickle, ensures that her variants are all preservative free.

Artisanal, small batch pickles, may seem to be too off the moment, but these three pickle makers aren’t trying to cash in on any trend. For Saikia, it is a chance to showcase the often overlooked cuisine of India’s North East, while Schroff prefers to prepare most of her pickles in the Parsi style even if she hasn’t learnt the recipes from anyone in her family. The spurt in flea MARKETS and pop up bazaars too has allowed interested chefs to test out recipes and concepts before setting up busi nesses. Insia Lacewalla, who runs Small Fry Co, the company that regularly hosts weekend bazaars under the name Bombay Local, says, “Most home chefs have started pickling in response to customer demand. The knowledgeable consumer is always looking for something new, and these pickle-makers have cashed in on the demand.”