It’s heading to the grave of good ideas that just don’t scale up.

I made this amazing salad with ingredients from the Union Square Farmers Market. I wanted to build the salad around Fiore di Nonno string cheese. They make this unbelievable braided string cheese studded with nigella. It’s nothing like the string cheese from the supermarket. I cut cucumbers from Kimballs Farm and cilantro from my friend Steve Parker of Parker Farms. I dressed it simply with olive oil and cider vinegar.

Everyone loved it at the food development meeting, but when we put it into production and scaled it up, something just didn’t work. The cucumbers held up really poorly, and got all limp and tasteless. It tasted like one of these Greek salads you get at pizza places. But I’m not giving up on a salad that features this amazing cheese. My next version is going to have matchsticks of summer squash, which we’re thinking may hold up better than the cucumbers. Stay tuned!