Mystic Brewery happens to hit Clover on the same day as the Bruins play in the Stanley Cup. I know, it’s an exciting night for Boston. I’m asking permission to broadcast the game on a small iPod : )
But I don’t want to detract from the amazing beer that’s about to happen here. 8pm tonight, Bryan from Mystic will be at CloverHSQ with a keg of his brand new Summer Saison. You’ll have time to grab a glass and have a chat even before the first period ends.
Wednesday we launch Mystic Brewery’s Summer Saison.
I sent Kayla to Liquor World to buy a bottle to taste at our manager meeting, but we realized it’s not even on shelves yet! So we tasted Saison Dupont for a reference. This is a beer brewed in Toures, Belgium. When we visited Bryan of Mystic, he told us this beer is basically his reason for making beer.
It’s got a crazy texture, sort of soft and bubbly on your tongue. Kind of like champagne. Perfect for summer. Bryan is going to be breaking open the first keg of his summer saison for Clover customers. Join us?
MYSTIC SUMMER SAISON LAUNCH
with Bryan Greenhagen, brewer
6/19, 8pm-10pm at CloverHSQ (7 Holyoke St)
Tahini is a sauce made from sesame seeds. We drizzle tahini over our fried falafel and fried eggplant.
Tahini is nutty and creamy. I’ve been learning how important it is in the Middle East. It’s an ingredient in hummus and baba ghanoush, but it’s also used as a sauce for meat, fish, and vegetables. You can add parsley, garlic, yogurt. You can make it thinner or richer depending on what you’re serving it with. Claudia Roden has a recipe for a chunkier tahini dip made with walnuts. My Lebanese cookbook has a different tahini depending on whether it’s destined for eggplant, butternut squash, fish, or meatballs.
If you want to make it at home, you need to get your hands on some Tahina (a really thick sesame paste, we love the tahina from Sunshine Bakery in Methuen). Continue Reading →
Some people are very scared of rhubarb. I had a customer who politely declined to sample our rhubarb agua fresca because she said rhubarb was poisonous. Luckily only the leaves are toxic, and you would have to eat 30kg in one sitting to get sick. At Clover we treasure rhubarb. It’s the first fruit of the season. It dovetails with strawberry season. So in this part of the world you see strawberry rhubarb pie.
We’re developing a rhubarb syrup. I thought we’d share the recipe here and invite you to try it at home and give us your feedback. Serve with carbonated water and ice. Or do what Ayr does and make a cocktail with rhubarb and gin. The juniper in gin opens up all kinds of tropical notes in rhubarb.
You’re getting restaurant quantities here. We recommend scaling it down. Unless you’re having a ton of people over for rhubarb cocktails, which is not a bad thing. Recipe after the break. Continue Reading →
We all get excited when parsnips hit our menu. They are the first vegetable to be harvested in New England. That’s because they winter underground. There are 2 crops: autumn and spring. The spring crop is more rare, more work, many farmers don’t bother. But if you can find them they are amazing. The parsnips are like sugar after the winter underground. We’ve noticed you can tell you have a spring dug if there is a little green at the top, not much, just starting to sprout.
If you treat the parsnips right (keep them cool), they are sugary and soft and irresistible. If you let them sit out in warm weather they turn sort of woody in the center. It’s funny, they look sort of gnarly and tough, but they’re super fragile. We get ours from Western Mass and Rhode Island.
We’re about to run through the last of our spring parsnips this year. Look for them in our salads, soups, and our Parsnip Cheddar sandwich, which has been a huge hit. We’re days away from moving on to the next bounty of the season.
That’s garlic mustard. And my hand, pulling it up.
Garlic Mustard is a culinary herb that was brought here to eat by some settlers a while back. Unfortunately, it doesn’t just taste good, it spreads very quickly and chokes out all of the indigenous undergrowth. So some towns, like mine, have organized garlic mustard eradication efforts. There are organized “pulls,” information sessions, folks at the waste station handing our recipes and bags and instruction. You can even call a hotline and have somebody pick up your garlic mustard bag from your house.
Last year I pulled some and brought it in to taste. We made a garlic mustard pesto and it was tasty. This year we decided to go a bit further. I brought almost 100 lbs to the kitchen. Look for it in the our garlic mustard pesto salad. It’s been a big hit. We have a ways to go, but if we’re successful with this one we’ll have less and less garlic mustard each year.
I expect most of you know Rolando, our Executive Chef. Rolando was my first hire at Clover back in 2008. And that experience set the tone for the adventure ahead. A couple months before I hired Rolando I was certain I was going to outsource the menu development to a well known chef. Fast forward a few months and I’d abandoned that path in favor of hiring somebody who could breath life into our menu day-in and day-out.
Rolando and I met almost by accident. I called him asking if he had any former students who may be interested in what I was taking on (he was a professor at Johnson and Wales University at the time). He said “I’d be interested,” and we had coffee the next day and hit it off immediately.
Rolando has been commuting to Boston from Providence for the better part of the past 4 years. He asked me the other day whether we could arrange something that would have him working here part time for a bit so that he can be closer to his family the rest of the week. I think we’ll all be less for not getting to work with him daily, but it just means we’ll have to get a lot out of the days he is here. He’s going to be working a second job in Providence to make this work. We’re hoping it’s a short term arrangement.
We’re learning that storage is as important as growing when it comes to root vegetables. Did you know that parsnips stop growing while they’re under the ground? During this time, all the starches get converted to sugar. If they aren’t harvested fast enough in the spring, they start to grow again and can become bitter and woody.
Hugh of Sugar Mountain has been growing the sweet parsnips you’ve been enjoying in the Parsnip sandwich. They’ve been just beautiful. Then last week we noticed some were tasting like soap. Hugh called. Apparently one of his root cellars was installed improperly, meaning some of our parsnips were bitter and woody. He’s removed all those parsnips, given us a refund on 120lbs, and sending us the remaining ones, which are as sweet as sugar.
We pulled the parsnip sandwich last week when we noticed this problem. Which is why it’s been missing on the menu. We’ll have it back on the menu Wednesday.
Spring pea soup is coming into the chilled soup rotation.
You can make this soup at home if you have a blender. We use caramelized onions, a touch of coconut & soy milks, frozen peas, vegetable stock and mint. It’s garnished with yogurt and pistachios. The secret is to blend it and thin it out so that it’s NOT A SMOOTHIE. You want a nice thin viscosity if you want it to taste good.
We’re doing a bunch of cooking classes this summer, including one on chilled soups. Sign up here.
What do you think of kimchi?
Michael Sutton, veteran of OYa, is running Clover Burlington. He had an idea to do something with kimchi. It’s something we’ve been thinking about for a while, but we never wanted to do it because we were worried about the smell. But Mike said it doesn’t have to be fermented. He made up a batch of fresh kimchi for us to taste. It was really yummy. Maybe a component for a seasonal sandwich?
We're here to make food you love, the kind you talk about and look forward to eating. The Clover Food Lab is serving up a new type of fast food. This food is local, it’s just-cut, when we can it is organic.
You can learn more about
our origins,
our food,
our mistakes,
and everything else about us at this website.
Ayr Muir
Founder and CEO
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