New cheese of the week hitting the menu tonight.
Here’s how many of these items arrived to the table last week! We’ve got golden heirloom tomato chutney with the Selles-sur-Cher, a fregola, orange, and radish salad with the African Pompano, and housemade organic ricotta with meyer lemon jam. Heard that food porn Monday!
Selles-sur-Cher from fromagier P. Jacquin & Fils Depuis 1947 in France’s Loire Valley has an ash-covered rind that develops blotches of gray and blue molds as it ages. The cheese is sweet, nutty, and peppery with mildly tangy acidity. The texture varies depending on ripeness, but it is typically dense and chewy. Bradley’s got it coming on as the cheese of the week tonight. A first for us!
Like many goat cheeses from the Loire Valley, the outside of Selle-sur-Cher is coated in edible ash. The ash is flavorless but adds a stunning visual contrast against the stark white goat cheese.
So much fish came in yesterday that Bradley had to get cutting before he could store it all.
Line cook Trevor shows off the biggest pompano I've ever seen. Trevor is tall, too!
Our walk-in fish drawer couldn’t accommodate all 400 pounds of whole fish! Three sources all came in with a variety of beauties, the most stunning being African Pompano from George Figueroa at Trigger Seafood.
“It’s a pelagic fish that migrates southern waters of the gulf stream in winter,” he explained via text yesterday. ”It falls into the jack and pompano family. Very cool looking. Mostly seen during this time of year.”
Pelagic fish live in open oceans rather than shallow, inland waters. We also received cobia, myriad snappers, and yellow-dappled golden tilefish.
For more photos of what the kitchen was working on yesterday, see our set on Flickr. TBD on what accompaniment Bradley’s got up his sleeve for the cheese of the week and how the fish will become dinner… We’ll tweet what we find out later this afternoon!
