December 15th

First off, I would like to take the time to write about our special we ran last week. I know it is a little late to be writing about something we did last week but due to the popularity of this particular slider I have decided to make an exception. We decided to do Austin's first ever scallop slider (to my knowledge) and it resulted in us running to Central Market 4 times in two days to replenish our supply of fresh scallops. The thought process behind developing this slider all stemmed from a new griddle hand-made and given to us by one of our good friends Cody. We lay it over our two burners during service to provide us with a cooking surface for our vegetarian items. We only use half of this surface for our vegetarian items so after some discussion it was decided the back half was to be used for shellfish since it is one of the more common allergies second only to nuts that we are asked about. Now that that was out of the way, we decided the perfect bivalve to break it in with would be the scallop. We let the scallop speak for itself and only seasoned it with a little salt and pepper. We paired a meyer lemon aioli, fried kale leaves, and powdered bacon with it. The powdered bacon was made using rendered bacon fat and tapioca maltodextrin along with a little sea salt to bring out the bacon flavor. It turned out to be a wonderful balance of flavors. The whole reason we decided to utilize the bacon flavor as a powder was because we did not want our slider to be heavy. The kale was already fried and the aioli also brought a little fat to the party. We used the meyer lemon to balance out the fatty components but we really wanted to include the flavor of bacon in the mix because of its strong flavor affiliations with both scallops and kale. The powder turned out to be the perfect delivery vehicle for the bacon flavor being both subtle and non invasive. Sure everything tastes better with bacon but why would we spend a small fortune on fresh scallops only to make them taste like nothing but bacon. Next slider in the works? Right now we are thinking about crawfish, celery root, and perhaps Buddha’s hand.