This is Betrous. (Sorry if I’m mucking up the spelling.) I love this guy and I love his falafel. As a student I lived across the street from his truck and would enjoy his $2.50 Falafel with hot sauce, Soda, Baklava combo at least 2 times per week.

If you haven’t tried his truck you should. It’s at 77 Mass Ave, right at the heart of MIT’s campus (we’re at the rear end). Tell him Clover sent you.

I love Betrous’ business. He knows his customers. He cares about his food. He works hard. Now I know exactly how hard. He’s been doing this for years with little attention. What more can you ask for.

I stopped by today to say hi and chat a bit. Here’s my favorite quote from the day: “People ask me… they say do you want to advertise… but I don’t spend money on advertising. Spend it on the food. Food is the advertising.” Couldn’t say it better myself.

Not everyone knows this next part… (after the break)

When Rolando and I were trying to figure out how to develop a menu for our restaurant we really didn’t like the idea of focus groups. I had the idea of hiring a food truck, and using it to do “mini” focus groups for a couple of months. I approached Betrous with this idea, offered him a lot of money. He said no, and now I completely understand why. He loves his business, as I’ve come to love mine. Instead he told me to come back and meet him at the end of the day. He took me for a tour of food-truck-land. Betrous taught me how licensing worked, where to get food, where canteen trucks park, and much more. There’s no way Clover would be trucking without his early help.

So next time you’re over on Mass Ave. say hi to Betrous for me.

We’ve been doing a 3pm special the past few weeks. First, fried pickles, then plantains, and now corn fritters. A bunch of you have stopped by to try them. But there was something missing. By the time dinner rolled around, we would be running low on drinks. I told Chris we needed to do a special drink just for the dinner crowd. I thought homemade sodas would be fun. The next day, we made it happen.

Pete went out and got a ton of watermelon, and blended it up to make watermelon soda. This picture is the base for the watermelon – isn’t it pretty? I brought some ginger, and we blended it with brown sugar to make a ginger soda.

This is the kind of thing that’s fun to do at dinner when it’s not as busy and you have the time to mix up the sodas one serving at a time. If you had sodas on Friday, let us know what you thought. We’ll be doing more throughout the week at dinner.

Last time we made corn fritters we were experimenting with brunch. We were serving them with maple syrup. For those fritters I was using frozen corn (the maple syrup was happening in March).

Now we’re serving these up for the 3pm special. If you don’t know, we serve some sort of snack/ treat starting at 3pm each day. It rotates. Recently we’ve made up fried pickles, plantains. Now sweet corn is coming out of the fields and we thought we’d bring back the fritters.

Tony, I think you have some competition in the kitchen. Sara is one of our regulars. One day she said she was going to make seitan at home. I thought…Good luck!

Seitan is one of the most labor-intensive things we make. We knead wheat gluten and barbecue broth into something like a loaf of bread. We cut the dough into thin slices, and simmer them for an hour or longer in barbecue sauce. Then on the truck we bake the seitan with the cheddar and caramelized onions.

I told Sara the ingredients to buy (wheat gluten, the exact barbecue spices from Christina’s spice shop) and gave her some really detailed instructions on a paper bag.

Actually, it took two paper bags. There were some drawings. There were also some warnings…

Like when you’re mixing the wheat gluten with the barbecue broth you have to mix really, really fast, and then form it into a loaf really, really fast, or else, you end up with a crumbly mess, and not a loaf you can slice. And the water: wheat gluten:spices:salt ratio has to be right. And when you simmer the seitan in the barbecue broth you really can’t simmer it for too long, but if you undercook it you’ll get slices that are way too thick.

So after all this, I was really proud when a few days later, Sara came by with a slice of homemade barbecue seitan. It looked great. Thin, held together well, right amount of spice. We even put it in a pita, tested it side by side with Clover’s, and we couldn’t tell the difference. Great job, Sara!

Alright everybody, it’s working. We’ve launched an entirely new approach to ice coffee. Expect to wait 60-90 seconds. Expect a better cup. That’s right. We think this is tasting straight-up better than the cold brew method. And we’re very happy to announce that caffeine levels are closer to where they should be.

I did some quick estimates and I think I was right about the cold-brew method being over caffeinated. Health associations give guidelines of 200-400 mg caffeine/ day max dose. My estimates (rough):

Assume:

- 2% by weight
- Cold brew takes 100% of caffeine from coffee beans (I still think this is likely close to the fact, but don’t really have any proof)
- I did my math right : )

2 oz espresso: 100 mg caffeine (50 mg/ oz)
10 oz hot coffee: 100 mg caffeine (10 mg/ oz)
10 oz cold brew (OLD Clover method): 283 mg caffeine (28 mg/ oz)
10 oz single cup iced (NEW Clover method): 100 mg caffeine (10 mg/ oz)

We already serve more single-cup drip coffee than anyone in the Boston area. Someday we’ll be able to claim the best cup in the city. We’re close, but we still don’t have filtered water, and I think that’s a bummer. Despite that, I’d put our coffee head to head with anything in the area. We’re proud to be working with great brewers, our staff are properly trained, and the technique has been refined. You don’t hear me bragging often, but this is something I’m really proud of.

Iced coffee? That’s been another story. We’ve been playing with something called “cold brewed” coffee for a long time. Early on we  were getting it really wrong. But now our method is down. It’s deep, tasty, stands up to milk. Only one problem: I think it’s loaded with way too much caffeine. Nobody knows how much, but I think it’s very very high. I’m going to do some calculations soon and will get them to you.

In the meantime, we’re ready to move away from the cold method. We love the taste but I just don’t feel right about the level of caffeine. So starting this week we’re going to be trying a new method: single cup iced coffee. Barth, our friend at Barrington Roasters, showed us the best method for brewing hot coffee. Basically you use a fancy expensive machine to brew concentrated coffee over ice, let the ice melt to get the concentration just right, then pour over ice.

I think we can do the same thing, but one cup at a time. As far as I know we may be the first to do this at a shop. I tried this morning and it was killer. Really really good. So here we come Boston and Cambridge. Come by this week and have us pour you a cup of iced coffee and tell us what you think.

Exciting news: the MIT whiteboard is finally re-painted. Chris did this late Thursday night. We use this special whiteboard 2-part epoxy. It’s the best solution I’ve found, but it has 2 problems:

(1) It oxidizes in the sunshine (which is why the board looked so muddy)

(2) It loses it’s erasability after about 3 months of use

The solution is that we need to re-finish the board once every 3 months. Last time I painted it? 26th of August (you can look for that post). OK, so we’re not quite hitting once every 3 months. Something to improve.

By the way, the observant out there will notice some other changes. With our whiteboard, as with everything at Clover, we make changes constantly. Early on I tried many different whiteboard presentations. We’ve settled on this for the following reasons:

• Dollar signs are LARGE: what are we doing if we’re not proud of our pricing.
• Least ink to achieve the communication
• Short descriptions encourage (force) conversations with staff
• Date must be there every single day (that’s how you regulars know if the morning menu hasn’t yet been updated)
• Credit cards are represented, but with our hand-drawn graphic. I don’t like co-branding. But you need a way to tell everybody that we take plastic. This is my compromise.
• Operating times are included (this is a relatively new addition)
• Logo is written in permanent marker because it’s the one thing that doesn’t change. This too has evolved over time. Of course we could paint it, and many recommend we do. But the sharpie is more in line with our DIY approach to everything. And it’s cheaper and easier to handle. You’ll notice our re-supply van has the same treatment. I think it’s great.
• You’ll notice the logo is now much larger. I think I like the new size/ position. It gives more room for the stuff that changes. And it’s easier to read for the visually impaired : )

I’m a pain when I go into food shops these days. I’m afraid I’m driving the staff crazy, and I know I’m driving my friends crazy. I’m always in research mode. 100% of the time.

Right now I have muffins on my mind. I suspect we can improve ours. But it’s going to take some serious development work. To start with we’re doing what we always do, talking to you all and asking what you think. What do you like about our muffins? What’s letting you down?

So that muffin there, it’s from Peet’s. And the poor guy behind the counter had to dig out the nutrition book from who knows where and look it up for me. Try asking for nutritionals at your favorite fast food shop. You’ll quickly start feeling like you’re not suppose to be asking those questions.

This bad boy: 580 calories, 30 grams of fat. That’s right: 580 calories! You may not know what that means, but I’ve been looking at this stuff a lot. That’s just crazy. That’s more calories and more fat than a Big Mac. No seriously, it is. Look it up. Or one and a half servings of our french fries!! That’s right. Eating that muffin is like ordering our fries, eating them all by yourself, then stealing your friends and eating half of his.

Our banana muffins have around 216 calories, 8 g fat, and 6 g protein. Sorry, haven’t gotten around to putting that up yet. Best of all, they’re 100% whole grains (whole wheat flour, oat bran, wheat germ). But do they taste good? If they don’t we need to change them, I don’t care how healthy they are for you…

It was Rolando’s birthday today. I knew I had to come up with something good. He even told me that much.

So I was thinking and thinking about what type of cupcake to make. We usually get something that represents the employee as well as we can. Let me back up, we have a lot of new customers. Clover gives away cupcakes, for free, to customers anytime a staff member has a birthday. It’s never announced, but if you come by for breakfast you’ll see us getting them ready and have a heads up. They’re always ugly, but they taste good.

We usually try to get close to our employees (Enzo == corn cupcake, Rum buttercream when Hat turned 21, Chocolate and stout for Jeremiah, parsnips for Teasel, etc.). I started thinking about Clover’s food philosophy, which Rolando is responsible for. And at the core it’s about making simple things taste great. Relying on care and quality ingredients. This is sort of radical in a world where chefs define their cuisine by unpronounceable ingredients, exotic combinations, exotic techniques, and of course, complexity. We’re into few ingredients, carefully prepared.

So I made Rolando the original recipe that all of our cupcakes are based on. This is an old depression era recipe from my Grandmother. We’ve been riffing on it for a long time, but I’ve never made the original for Clover. So here it is, a cupcake version of my Grandmother’s “wacky cake.” That’s a chocolate cake with a crunchy coconut topping.