3 August, 2022: Chris (SVP of Food) here. I haven’t written a blog post in several years but I’m hopping back on for a really important reason: I’m hiring an Executive Chef! Everything we do at Clover is focused on making food our customers will dream about. In the early days, what we now call “Food Dev” happened daily at… Read More
29 January, 2014: Our food development process extends to coffee. First off, we don't serve a coffee until we've visited the roaster personally and love what they're doing. There are only 10 or 12 roasters in the country who meet that standard. Second, we go through a sampling process where we taste all the coffees a roaster is currently featuring. We pick… Read More
18 January, 2014: Verve is a roaster from Santa Cruz, CA. Since it's on the West Coast it makes my job a littler tougher ordering stuff on an "as needed" basis. The journey across the US takes a little longer than some off our other roasters from the Midwest or New England so I have to anticipate a little bit,… Read More
1 January, 2014: We ran tostones a couple of weeks ago. It's a ripe, starchy green plantain that is fried twice. When we ordered a couple cases from Russo's, they came in yellow. Right in the middle of what we wanted. Green plantain = starchy (perfect for tostones) Yellow = half starchy / half sweet (perfect for nothing) Black =… Read More
19 December, 2013: Barismo has been nailing it with coffees the past two years. Some of you might have remembered this from several years ago, I know I do when I was pouring it up at HSQ. Gustavo, the owner of the coffee farm came to Clover to talk. This coffee is grown on the isthmus of Mexico and South America… Read More
27 November, 2013: Glad to have Metropolis back on our counter. They are roasting some amazing coffees out of Chicago right now. The Sulawesi Tana Toraja is our favorite bean that they have. It's from one of the highest growing altitudes in Indonesia. It's fully washed, which is the typical processing method for this country (as compared to the natural… Read More
20 November, 2013: Come try our newest coffee. It's an Indonesian coffee from the Wahana Estate. Sumatra is an island in Indonesia. This particular coffee plantation is new. It's only been around for eight years. It's a "natural process" coffee which means after they pick the coffee cherries, they let them ferment in the sun. They rake them every day… Read More
13 November, 2013: I might butcher this a little bit, but it's something we learned from the Mid Isle farmers and I wanted to share it. Potato farming is regulated heavily by the Prince Edward Island government. It's their livelihood. The biggest reason is to prevent disease. When a farm decides to plant a certain varietal of potato, they have… Read More
8 November, 2013: This is one of the most exciting things that has happened to our food sourcing in a while. We've always had different kinds of potatoes for French fries at different times of the year based on the potato season. We didn't know any better, and this was all we had available to us. Prince Edward Island produces… Read More
8 November, 2013: Our original stock recipe was a very light vegetable broth. The stock was light, almost like water, a backdrop for the main show of the soup or other dish. We kept noticing that our soups weren't coming out as full-flavored as we'd like. We decided to revisit the stock, and work to create something more rich and… Read More