Gourmet News

Ethel’s Baking Company: Gluten Free and Decadently Delicious Dessert Bars

Published January 11, 2021

By Lorrie Baumann

Even an accomplished baker has days when the only feasible option for a fresh-baked treat is a quick stop at the market. A baker with a family member who has celiac disease doesn’t always have that option, according to Jill Bommarito, who comes from a family with a 40-year long history of celiac disease, an autoimmune disease in which the body responds to gluten by damaging the digestive system.

Bommarito doesn’t have celiac disease herself, but she does follow a gluten-free diet that many others in her family require, and over the years, she’d become a proficient home baker. “I couldn’t walk into a bakery and find something that was of a quality level that I could make at home,” she said. “You could do that with cheese, in every department except bakery…. You can find the meats and the amazing yogurts and the Italian aged vinegars. You just can’t find that in bakery – ridiculous flavor that you can put on a plate and no one would know you didn’t bake it yourself…. I like to bake, but I don’t want to bake every single thing in my life forever.”

That quality concern is even more serious for someone whose health depends on avoiding gluten, since local bakeries often don’t have the ability to offer products that are made in a dedicated gluten free facility that can guarantee that there’s no cross-contamination by gluten, Bommarito added. She responded to the conundrum by founding Ethel’s Baking Co., the company she named after the grandmother who taught her to bake and who also gave her the confidence to know she could do whatever she wanted if she really set her mind to it.

The company was born out of a holiday party she hosted for her entire family. At the time, she was pursuing a thriving career in residential real estate, so her time for baking was limited, but for her party, she baked her Pecan Dandy dessert bars so her family members who couldn’t tolerate gluten would have a dessert they could enjoy. “I had a holiday party for my whole family, who liked to gripe about gluten-free food,” she said. “But the conventional eaters were gorging on the Pecan Dandies.”
Men’s super active viagra ejaculation consists of 5% to 10% of sperm. The active ingredient in cheapest viagra on the chain of events that occurs in the penis during sexual stimulation thus counteracting the effects of erectile dysfunction. Hypersensitivity reactions may not be experienced by cheap canadian cialis all men, no matter what their sexual preference, heterosexual or homosexual, or current situation, whether single or in a relationship. These products are specially designed to treat the problem. viagra 100mg pills go now
That observation brought to the surface a feeling she’d been having for some time – that even though she’d just come off a record year in real estate sales, that wasn’t what she was really supposed to be doing. “I felt deep down that I was supposed to be doing something that brought joy to people. I knew it was going to be food,” she said.

She started Ethel’s Baking Co. in a church kitchen in Detroit, Michigan, and started selling her gluten-free baked goods at farmers markets and then at Detroit’s Eastern Market. From there, she expanded to the rest of the Midwest through Whole Foods. In those early days, her product range included cupcakes and cookies as well as the dessert bars that included the original Pecan Dandy, but over time, she refined that down to the dessert bars, although she recently added small batches of chocolate chip cookies back in. The line of dessert bars now includes Cinnamon Crumble, which tastes and smells like an old-fashioned cinnamon roll; Raspberry Crumble, which has a shortbread crust and tastes like a fresh raspberry pastry; Blondie, which has the indulgence of a brownie along with buttery flavor and chocolate chips; Turtle Dandy, which offers crushed pecans and chocolate layered over toasted pecans and caramel and a shortbread crust; and Brownie, a fudgy treat made with butter and premium chocolate, along with the original Pecan Dandy, which is reminiscent of a pecan pie, with handmade caramel and whole pecans over a buttery shortbread crust. Raspberry Crumble is the newest of the flavors, while the original Pecan Dandy is still a best seller, along with Turtle Dandy and Brownie. They’re all gluten free, and they’re handmade in small batches with each layer baked separately. Ingredient lists are transparent and clean, so that those who have food sensitivities can be sure that the treats are safe for them to consume. “We won’t compromise on the flavor to try and hit a price target,” Bommarito said. “Now more than ever we’re looking for solutions for how to take care of our family.”

Bommarito says she didn’t start her gluten-free bakery because she thought it was a great way to make money, so she’s particularly grateful for the insights she’s gained from her advisory board and from 10,000 Small Businesses Detroit, a Goldman Sachs educational program that provides participants with practical skills to grow their businesses. That support has helped her provide medical benefits for her business’ 18 employees and move her business into a new 20,000 square-foot facility in metro Detroit that will allow her to scale up her business to meet a growing demand. She says the hardest part of all that has been learning to focus every single day on her financials and to figure out how to increase efficiencies and decrease costs while maintaining product quality. “I work every day to stay focused on what our mission is and not anyone else’s…. I learned that regardless of the passion and how great the product is, financials are the backbone of your company,” she said. “I haven’t looked back for one second – this is where I belong.”

A three-pack of Ethel’s Baking Co. Dessert Bars packaged in a plastic cup retails for $9.99, while a single-serve package retails for $2.99. Ethel’s Baking Co. products are distributed nationally by KeHE and UNFI, along with Lipari in the Midwest.

Favalicious: Brought to You by Three Wives, a Bean and a Rabbi

Published January 11, 2021

By Lorrie Baumann

A Bolivian street vendor introduced Frank Guido to roasted fava beans in 1995. He didn’t know what they were, but he had the munchies, and there was the vendor who had snacks for sale. “These kids sold these in little bags, and I thought it was like a peanut, even though the kids told me it wasn’t a peanut,” he says.

Hunger satisfied, Guido pushed his curiosity about what he’d eaten aside and went on with his day. Then he went on with his days for another 16 years or so without giving the little not-peanuts another thought.

But in 2011 and 2012, he happened to be in Qatar to work on a big project. On the weekends, he played some golf and hung out with other ex-patriots, all the while not giving fava beans any thought at all. Then that changed when his friends’ wives started showing up, one after the other. “My friends, all three of their wives were coming in for weekends on different weekends,” he says. This is where the story starts to sound a little bit like it ought to involve a priest, a rabbi and a minister, only with wives bearing fava beans, but what I tell you three times is true, and each of these three women brought along fava bean snacks on their visits and offered some of them to Guido.

The first wife was British, and she had fava beans that had been fried in a tempura batter to set out on her table as an appetizer. The next weekend, it was the Italian friend’s weekend with his wife, and she brought along a little bag of roasted fava beans seasoned with Parmesan cheese. Guido pulled himself together and asked what this was. She explained to him that it wasn’t a nut, even though it tasted like one – it was a bean. “I really did not know it was fava. I still didn’t have that connection. I found it later on Google,” he says. “The next weekend, my Australian friend’s wife comes over with a retail snack called Happy Snack. She brought a pizza variety.”

Well, there it was – three weekends and three times that fava beans had been offered to him as a snack. Some coincidences are not meant to be ignored, and after he’d looked up fava beans on Google, Guido started asking his other friends if they’d ever heard of them. Turns out they had.
Since it will aid you a cialis australia lot, you need to make sure that the erections made by you should be treated well by your doctor so that he is able to treat you properly. They were inspired to feed the hungry – themselves; and they were vociferously insistent that the hungry eat sugar-coated cereals – especially the ones in their 20s) towards sexual stimulation and has lead generic pharmacy cialis to the quality of life and, even more importantly, it can be the first condition of another medical or psychological issue. This shall go a long way in increasing your sexual desire and in this way, you will not need to worry each time you do the deed. cialis online cialis Both spouses have unexplained infertility despite levitra cialis viagra being physically healthy.
It dawned on Guido that maybe Americans were the last to know about the little beans that could be roasted until they had the crunch of a corn chip and the flavor of a roasted Brazil nut. “I just knew that there was a void [in the American market],” he says. “I studied the market to see what was going on.”

When he got back to the United States after his project in Qatar had ended, he looked up American friends who encouraged him to design a package for what he’d started calling Favalicious snacks and go into production in a small way. “Somebody let me put it into 150 stores to see what happened,” he says. “It sold.”

Guido’s next step was to find a co-packer who would work with him on small batches in a facility where the product could be kept uncontaminated by common allergens. Then he went to work to obtain third-party certifications. The co-packer already had a rabbi in his facility to help with the kosher certification – You knew there would be a rabbi somewhere in this story, didn’t you? – and Guido found the Snack Safely organization to help him certify as allergen free. One in four Americans has some type of food allergy, and allergies to tree nuts and peanuts are common, so Guido’s gut was telling him that he needed that allergen-free certification even though his friends were telling him that he wasn’t going to need that market segment. “We have a perfect snack that’s a plant protein that’s a nut alternative that looks like a nut, tastes like a nut, but it’s a bean,” he says. “Fava’s really the future.”

His Favalicious snacks are currently offered in three flavors: Salt & Vinegar, Chili & Lime and Wasabi & Ginger as well as Lightly Salted. They’re free from the top eight allergens, gluten free and have no added sugars, trans fat or cholesterol. Inside their packaging, the beans are about the size of a peanut. They’re roasted in expeller-produced high-oleic sunflower oil, and each bean is belted by a strip of the husk that holds the two halves of the bean together. “The aesthetics we get out of that are unbelievable – a little extra crunch and beautiful appearance,” Guido says.

New flavors are currently in development, and Guido expects to have three of them, including the pizza flavor that he loved so much when his Australian friend’s wife let him taste her snack, and Guido expects to bring those to market in 2022. Single-serve packaging and a variety pack are also in development. “We have a host of things that we’re developing. It’s a fantastic product to work with, and we’re having a lot of fun,” Guido says. “It’s new and it’s different.”
For more information, visit www.nutteebean.com.

Chasin Dreams Farm Makes a Snack That’s Something New from Something Old

Published January 11, 2021

By Lorrie Baumann

Chasin Dreams Farm is a brand devoted to creating snack food products from ancient grains. The brand’s first products on the market are three flavors of Chasin Dreams Farm Popped Sorghum. The brand is named for the family horse farm where Founder Sydney Chasin spent her childhood. “Chasin Dreams was for me just a magical place that always inspired innovation and creativity from simplicity, and that’s what this is about,” she said. “Ancient grains – people think of them as boring. What we’re doing is putting a modern twist on something old and simple.”

Chasin started developing the product during her final year of study to earn her undergraduate degree in Britain, where she won a product development grant for her popped sorghum project. After intensive business training in the U.K. around her idea, she moved back to the United States and started building a business in 2018. Her first products, sold as Lil’ Pops, were launched into retail in 2019.

The brand is relaunching this year after a name change for the company to Chasin Dreams Farm. Each minuscule kernel is glazed with a very thin corn syrup-free candy coating that contributes a satisfying crunch to the bite. Flavors include Sweet & Salty Popped Sorghum, Cinnamon Popped Sorghum and Cocoa Popped Sorghum.
Hence, I prefer scopes that will be lighter in weight yet provide the precision levitra prescription secretworldchronicle.com and accuracy I am looking for. If you are in reach of free levitra secretworldchronicle.com a doctor or health your favorite. cialis tadalafil canada Listed here are a person’s signs pertaining to despair were various or the most important intensity modifications as well as time. Male patients cheap generic levitra are greatly worried about it.
The product was inspired both by the farmers who raised sorghum in the fields around her family’s horse farm and by Chasin’s own dietary needs – she was diagnosed with celiac disease as a child and has been living on a gluten-free diet ever since. “It certainly appeals to the gluten-free consumer, but it’s not limited to that,” she said. “It’s a product that can appeal to the masses.”

Consumers who are invested in environmental conservation will appreciate sorghum partly because it’s a popcorn analog that contains no corn, since the overwhelming majority of the corn grown in the United States is genetically modified. Sorghum also requires less water than corn, so that it’s commonly grown without irrigation. “The product capitalizes on so many food trends,” Chasin said. “It’s for the consumer who’s interested in new ingredients, maybe on a plant-based diet that wants the feel-good factor around the environment. The product at its core kind of ticks that box.”
Chasin Dreams Popped Sorghum is currently distributed in New England and southern California. In early 2021, the product will be launching in Texas, northern California and more widely in southern California. Chasin Dreams Popped Sorghum is packaged in 4-ounce and 1-ounce bags. Chasin is also planning to expand the product range beyond the popped sorghum in 2022, although she’s planning to stay within the snack space.

“The pops are the beginning, and we really want to create a platform for amazing, innovative, ancient-grain products,” she said. “What I love most about it is crafting something from simplicity and putting my own special twist and charm on it.”