we had little expectation that maybe it was going to be a little bit warmer but such as michigan we're we're just happy to be out here and excited to  be opening the season here for the farmers market which is very much ingrained in how we operate as a business at the restaurant infantile we're primarily  an ingredient focused restaurant so we start and end our day with focus on sourcing the highest quality ingredients that we can find and i'll tell you a majority a high majority of the time  those highest quality ingredients come from local sources close to our to our business and greater so for us we operate the pillars of our business based on relationships whether it's with our employees and our staff our growers producers and our guests we feel that true sustainability for us as a business exists  these relationships that we have the opportunity to build you know financial business transactions are momentary and over but relationships we have the opportunity to invest and evolve and that's  that's where we really like to put our energy so we're going to get started on a few elements of prep here to get our museum class together for the dishes we're going to make  everybody say hi to mike micah's mike has been with us and friend bill just celebrated three years this week i'm going to throw a little off and on and there so we are thoroughly saddened to lose his presence with us assault but very excited for his opportunity and we will celebrate his moves and you can go see him there might also spends a good amount of time doing cooking classes right downtown here and the hound of so if you  you have a free evening wednesdays are great saturdays don't don't sign up for the saturday classes ever which means mike isn't at work on saturday but take a look at the at the class schedule that mike teaching there and you'll have a really phenomenal evening enjoying that and then here shortly into the season you can go visit him in zealand that public which i know i will be doing i'll let him cook for me for a change and folks throughout any of this if anybody has any questions comments concerns any of that please don't hesitate we we like to just kind of organically talk about the processes and the food and everything what we're doing well known some of which are lesser known but essentially in the in the commercial fishing industry when a fisherman will go out he will be seeking a very specific species of fish  that he intends to bring bar back to an established market that he is a part of and oftentimes in that process he will procure small amounts of a species of fish that he didn't intend to catch and the historic model was a it's a very obscure not well known variety of seafood and nobody's going to buy it so i'm not going to call back and it just goes into the ocean is waste and what the goal is with with our cookbook is to provide additional resources to folks in an effort to create a bit more of a market for some of these species and they're not all obscure unknown many of the species are really recognizable we had the necessity for the publication to have some usefulness to it we didn't want to or energy towards the consumer being left with you know thirty six species of fish that they can't find anywhere so the bycatch list as it is overall i believe has about one hundred twelve species on the list and we have  one of my favorite type of preparations the ground i walk and then we're also going to do a few variations we're going to do a dash that we're running in the restaurant this weekend with some fresh rhubarb and a bit of pickled blueberry a little bit of butter melt smoked tony  and then we're going to do one of my favorite dishes which is a bit of a sweet crab sauce with some fresh asparagus and a little bit of salt cured asparagus also pretty simple but kind of interesting preparations that will take the opportunity to talk a little bit about as we go through and try to make sure we don't have products blown away all through  folks will do or early taste yes ma'am yeah you can absolutely you know we drive philosophy of coke with what's available and what looks good so for example if you have a recipe that calls for shallots and you go to the store to the market and they just don't look great i find something else  l specifically is going to have a very specific flavor profile to it you can leave it out you could use yeah kind of  as well but yeah if you focus on what's good instead of what's written on the page you'll be better for it but you could typically find shellac most most spots  i know here at the market for certain as well i didn't expect so much when have to get my winter apron on i did years and years and years ago at a restaurant that i worked at in downtown detroit that was kind of focused on classic french preparations so it has a little bit of that in this style jack element for myself and a bit of why we were drawn to it so our first appears we're going to start moderating the heat in our pan to cook our skate wing it's going to be kind of the first step for us and one of the most important elements i think that some folks that are possibly less experienced with some elements of production in the kitchen don't cook seafood as much because they might be a bit intimidated or have had some bad experiences if you can see we're going to be using some straight stainless here to cook our fish we've got both the five ply series in the kitchen  a cookware line just nonaligned really really great heat distribution reactionary time and really good construction but we're not using nonstick i think a lot of people will historically gravitate towards a nonstick pan but if you focus on some very simple elements of preparation to get your fish into the pan and can kind of watch your  he you'll find a great deal of success with it and you won't have the necessity for the for the nonstick with that so well or pans heating i'm just getting some of our garlic in our shell and stuff both the groundwater and the corn and crab are what we just kind of generally refer to as reduction sauces and we do a great deal these at service at the restaurant you'll kind of see it's for its function as we go it's a really great opportunity to build some intensity of flavor very quickly it's not something that has to cook for any extended period of time we do it here it'll start to finish it will be about five to eight minutes  perfect look at the thing that's fantastic use what you have that looks good so we use a philosophy of cooking at the restaurant and throughout that i generally refer to as cooking in the moment and it relates quite specifically to what we discussed earlier in terms of the shall and the substitution we we want to take any opportunity available to us using the small bel we want to take as much opportunity as we have to to be flexible to products that are available things that look good and draw inspiration personally from the weather outside personal experiences if you have a really phenomenal morning say with your family and just prior to for us going into work and cooking we want those we want those personal experiences to drive into what we're creating versus something that maybe was written on a menu a few weeks prior to the result when we have the capacity to drive emotion into our food production for us we think is far superior it's just a good way to to live in terms of creation just about there grown by some the phenomenal humans and just about two weeks ago we launched our seasonal brunch program which we operate now through the end of the season on sundays and tell you one of my personally one of my most favorite things in the world is breakfast so we have a really good time putting together that program  mike here has been a huge part of driving that program for us he manager brunch program for us last season and will will get a couple more weeks of brunch mike before he's off into the wander we've become quite obsessive this winter about donuts oysters civically it's something for me personally that was always a very special thing i have a a bit of a joke that and she said she knows and i have the most phenomenal and wonderful amazing mother and  joke is that my mother was my inspiration to become a chef and you know the story progress is that you know the historic way that that story goes is that mother was an amazing show off and she passed on family recipes and all of these things and then the sun goes on to be to be a chef are involved in food my story is a little bit different my sister and i were incredibly well provided for and needed and wanted nothing but mom wasn't too much of a cook would just say so i was always kind of spend wanting a little bit more and that was a bit of a drive towards how i began to view food and i had these moments and i didn't know it i didn't know it as a child i didn't know until well after i was into my career in cooking in food that the majority of the memories that i held  from childhood all revolved around food we traveled a great deal as a family we we loaded up the motor home every summer and went all across the country  and i had no clue no idea but when i was well into my twenty's i start to reflect on some of these adventures we had and my folks would say do you remember going here and i'd say no and i'd say wait is that the place that we ate this and it's a yeah ok yeah i remember i had no idea but donuts were one of these things that like i said kind of a saving grace the morning that we had stopped on the road and found some really great donuts that was always a celebrated thing i enjoyed that very much so good so i think the wind is corner pan off a little bit but we will get ready here let me as well show everybody a little bit of an example of our skate w mean use this for a very delicate fish very mild really great texture so if everybody can see this here this is our skate wing it's a flat fish and you get this element of this nose the wing or the fillet here that has two sides so there's a bottom and then a top and then a very bizarre kind of a bone that goes right in here  an appropriate fish another flatfish that would be applicable but any kind of a you know mildly flavored later textured fish would be perfectly so we're going to find three nice pieces here that we can do we're going to go through and get a nice syrah on our fish and then again we'll go back and finish each sauce and just give three nice examples of the of the preparation should be really nice so we have the expectation at this point from our publisher that  our that our book will be available in july believe it's launched in july it's called sea robins and triggerfish bycatch and other incidental species of seafood i can find it on winning cookbook guy who's done a lot of projects and we're slowly but surely removing the insanity that we experience through the winner of doing this cookbook project it was far more than what we expected in terms of a commitment time and energy and it was is really really quite demanding  and while we had a good amount of participants and helped mike up pitched in where he had time and availability but for the most part out of necessity for the business  my executive see chef sarah and i did production for the book after work so often i see it started about eleven o'clock and  going till three or four and i just happen to be our opportunity for itself so we're going to start a fish first thing that we want to ensure is that the fish is dry if there's any more easter on it once it comes in contact with the he the moisture is going to steam which is a going to cause the likelihood of it sticking to the pan and be we're not going to get the nice intense year that we're after with the fish it's just going to kind of stick and not take on the color we want and so the next thing for us here is using an appropriate oil for cooking we're going to be finishing this with a little bit of butter but the oil that we're using as an as a high temp well this is a grape seed oil so it will tolerate high temperature cooking it won't smoke up your kitchen or impart kind of a funky burnt flavor to it in any way just slightly necessary protein and it's going to begin to draw moisture out of the fish which will have essentially the same effect as it being wet so in our seasoning of the fish we want to do it the last minute just before we introduce it into the pan to ensure that we're going to have necessary control over cooking process you can s weighing in its whole form it's going to be more common and probably a lot easier to source the fish  we go we sneak in there right we get a minute and then the next element is ensuring that we are heating the oil that we're using to cook the fish and if we have a hot pan and cool oil and that will kind of give us our first opportunity to begin regulating the he we want to get to a point that we know is saved and then we introduce our product and we've been going to kind in a positive light the winds going this way so everyone will be able to smile and experience quite well we arranged that for everyone this morning about a year and a half ago called principle food and drink and quite specifically our market fish program there features bycatch species of seafood as well there and a strong emphasis on sharing and experience in base done if i have an opportunity and i go out to have dinner and presented with a menu it's very rare that i say ok i'm going to have this dish i like to have the opportunity to taste and experience a little bit more than one thing  lot of fun fun down there in kalamazoo very much still operate the business very much of the same ideals that we operate the salt of the earth which is essentially how we arrived to the name of the the second restaurant we tried to understand as we were going through the process of identifying some of the brand identity for the new restaurant i sat down and said ok how is it different from salt or how is it the same and identified our core hospitality and we said ok well these are foundations these are principles and we took that and kind of quickly derived the identity of our second restaurant and that's been a whole bunch of so you can see here kind of moving this around just a little bit but for the most part it's not taken me any effort to get this fish to release always kind of an adage that if you've done a right with the right he in the right circumstances the food will release from the pan when it's ready and if you go in a little too aggressively too soon that's when you're going to have issues with sticking in or tearing or any element like that so we're going to get a little wet here  you can kind of see we've got some really nice karmas ation on the fish nice ear which is what we want know that we're there we're going to add just a little bit of butter here the high he is going to cause some of our milk solids that are present in the bother to add some and the flavor of the butterfat is quite nice as well take her butter a little bit and give it a little base that's another thing that we want to be mindful of of adding the butter here towards the end of the cooking process we added too early there's a good chance that these milk solids are going to burn before the fish will likely go through and cook one additional piece of we can see it again but this is going to be nice i think don't have the intention of adding a great deal of heat but we want some of the complexity of the flavor from the chili to be present in the bath so we're kind of taking the opportunity to remove some of these elements of any as we can scaling is going to wind up kind of hanging out for a minute while we put our sauces together won't just pretend through out that we've got some nice wiper pan out a little bit to get ready for another year our last piece where we started to build our sauce anybody have any questions at this point thought technical difficulties slightly to say a piccata it's got capers beautiful briony salty capers is one of my favorite favorite elements specially with something like this  the dish is going to have a pretty prominent citrus no more element to it thin slices and then i'm just kind of knocking out the lemon seeds here that will kind of fall away quite easily that way we don't have to muster around them in our final dish and we're just going to take a little bit again a grape seed oil we're using this specifically in this instance because it's a very neutral flavored oil has very little flavor to it a quite familiar with it also has a fair amount of sugar in it and what we're going to do here in this is dry out some of the sugars and get a little bit of harmless ation on it which will build a little complexity in the citrus flavor that will find in the final sauce i think is a bit of fun and then we're going to go around and we're going to cut where we were referred to at the restaurant simply as service lemons and we're going to cut right around the center of the lemon and what we wind up are these little wedges that have no seeds and then we easily just squeeze and we're ready to go and then we use the centers here to juice or for another application to pick up on a little bit of these flavors which will be really nice really are our approach of the restaurant with food is to take some very simple preparations and add just some little playful elements of complexity that changes keep us interested in all that that we were working on in that day was a flounder for the cookbook and i was lee flounders one of the characters of the movie and then it made sense that we had a crab element and sebastian right from the movie and we tried to draw some additional references from the movie that would make the dish relevant we had fun with it anyway it didn't it didn't make the book that's for sure and probably appropriately so but you go through the planning stages you have some anticipation of where you're going to prepare and pack your things and then when you have a moment where you kind of look often you say well we're cooking soon fish in a parking not totally disappear but the intention is that the garlic and shell it kind of meld a little bit right into the saw us the final element and then we have a bit of caper here and a couple of forms that we're going to add to the pan really love capers that nice briony salty element that they bring and then we also have some skate wing so we were originally up putting this dish together and with the capers in the ground it was we had a working title for the dish it was going to be called the great escape a caper story something like that it did it didn't get very far until the groans far out away the rust so we're going to primarily lemon juice to this is an acid reduction sauces that we do are typically two one so we're going to add two parts of a meat or vegetables stock to one part acid so in this we've got a little bit of white wine primarily some lemon juice and then we're going to add a little bit of chicken stock in this which  e chicken stock isn't necessary in the form of say someone that might be a pesky tarion or not want that animal protein in there so the secret to doing this reduction sauce appropriately and well is to start with a good amount once it's reduced the flavors will be very intense the acidic elements the wine and the lemon will be just now parker and we tart and a great deal of intensity from the chicken and then what we do is we'll  it with a bit of whole butter and that'll kind of mellow everything out and you'll still get the intensity of some of these flavors  in a really great mouthfeel the restaurant were historically really drawn to to just intense bold flavors it's how it's how i've always enjoyed eating and food and just a nice thing yeah yeah so we are going to start some elements of our next reduction sauce so we will do the asparagus and crab next  don't recall i think possibly we've heard that with the white fish getting some of our michigan fish integrated there as well is give us a little bit a blast a color but again our intention is to give some of the intensity of the flavor from the chili and not necessarily the heat or the spice lovel  any questions comments thoughts stories at the restaurant so we're in a bit of a transition period to here but for the most part this time of year we're closed monday and tuesday we do open seven days a week on june twelfth  so currently wednesday thursday and sunday we're open from five pm till nine with a sunday brunch from ten until two and friday and saturday we open at five pm until ten p then yeah that's right just up the street yeah so we've got a few different elements here for asparagus that we're going to do one of which we just started playing with this season which is kind of fun and we'll show you that here in just two seconds means almost everything has evaporated removing moisture from this or removing water which intensifies the flavor of what's left we're condensing all those flavors and it also act as a base to emulsifier botter so that when we mix our butter and we have something that can hold and suspend it to make a nice kind of thick creamy sauce which is a just a gorgeous really nice fruity flavored chili that's got a little bit of heat to it nothing too intense as we get there and get towards or butter vegetables and at its core what we're doing is we're taking say this very guess and we're tossing it in a bit of olive oil and salt and then we're putting it under vacuum and allowing it to sit or marinate for at least twelve hours we like to try and do it overnight and the result is kind of spectacular everybody can see here this bright vibrant green color from the asparagus and  it hasn't been cooked at all it's completely raw but if i can take this piece of raw spirit as you can see that the element of change here and the flavor you get almost nice salty bit of buy and this is specifically we've taken some preserved lemon so in the winter we preserve a great deal of citrus when it's in the peak season  we preserve that a bit of salt and sugar and then once it's gone through it's preservation process we cook it down intensely and cook it down until it turns to this dark carmel ised paste and it's so intense i mean you smell a little bit and it's just very intense so we've taken some of that carmel ised preserve lemon and a bit of red chili flake in with her olive oil and salt to the asparagus add that element so very can see here with everything that we started with we're almost dry here in the pan so at this point we're going to turn off or he and we're going to add our butter and a good amount says making a fair amount of sauce for us and just as if we were making say a man is or hol type of emulsification the final thickness ever soft will be affected by the amount of butter fat that we add if we had a little bit so incorporating this butter and and while the skate wing is a bit more of a i don't want to say a delicate fish it can absolutely stand up to some some aggressive flavors which is why we like sauce that's just from our reduction the flavor just knots so we're going to take and we like to take these whole carmel lemon slices and put that right in there and the wind is helping us play a little bit which will take it really nice really robust intense nice bold flavors really good so if we go into our next song this is going to be the corn i hope you folks realize that it's very challenging for us as well as maybe for you that we don't get to feed you right now so you'll just have to promise that you'll come into the restaurant and let us cook for you there so our reduction for this corn in crab is going to have some similar elements to the ground it was that we just did it will have the acidic component so it's going to be important in this preparation that we don't add our asparagus until the as the acid will cause the green color to come very grey and drab which is not something that we want so good i'm on a shelf here which is allows us to cook at a little more aggressively without it kharma lising to excessively and you'll see here we're cooking the sauce in the in the pan that had that last round of  skate wing which is nice because we add some of the carmel ization and elements of that flavor in here now we've got our minced up chil what do you think it was that in anaheim anaheim chilling which shouldn't be too aggressive and here we have a bit of a rock crab so we will go back here and start with another splash of white wine and a good amount of lemon juice  with cooking certain elements of fish it it adds a nice complexity of flavor without being overpowering gives you a little bit more flexibility in a lot of ways i believe so we're going to take our crab meat and at this rate and this is a really great summer perhaps just as really have a lot of opportunity with some nice  ps are one of the very first products that we see in the season we get a few small little green things but ramps are really the first prominent  ingredient and personally from from a flavor standpoint it's one of my favorite greedy and so the entire year and when ramp day comes we get very very excited it is a very happy day where we've just come off a winner you know the the the team that works with us at the restaurant are similar us in that we're we're driven or inspired we get excited about fresh amazing and wonderful ingredients so the winter can be hard emotionally for all of us we we have a joke in the winter we have to hide the knives because everyone's so grumpy at the restaurant  because it's week after week of beats and there's only so many beats they can get salt roasted or steamed or baked or pickle their share of ther everything that one would do with and i always feel terrible for the farmer that comes to our restaurant in july and tries to sell us beets we don't we don't like the beets in july we're so excited for everything else so just as before we're doing this this reduction and this is just going to kind of cook down we're going to finish it with a little bit of butter we're going to mince up a little bit of fresh and as long as they don't blow away which they mi really have any questions please feel free this corn or asparagus and crab salad is just a really bright perfect little sauce that is something we enjoy for this time of year and in the summer you get just a little bit of cake from a little bit of chili that's in there michigan fish that are on the official bycatch list but we did get in a fresh lake michigan herring we do a few different crops with harriet in the book one of which happened to in my grandmother's pickled herring recipe that i spent many of my younger years as a boy staring at it in the fridge wondering who would eat it and we've actually put that on the menu at the restaurant for a period of time and had some good success with it we were slightly surprised we would have such a strong respon this is a crab and a spear yes sauce that we're doing to finish the fish little bit of garlic in shallower chicken stock and lemon juice so we're going to take a put it together here but our chive an asparagus is going to go right in here now which we should see released in july and again it is available on amazon for preorders so again here we go we've got this nice creamy saw us with the crab in the asparagus and that's the asparagus and crab here and the skate wing and the sauce again is got some some really bright intensity to it some beautiful flavors very different  is that there so we're going to clear board a little bit and then we're going to go ahead and play we've got all our components ready oh we do have one other component here but i do want to share a little bit so a ramp lisa rajah so we did in our abundance when we get ramps in every year we go through about two three hundred pounds in a season that we and it's got that beautiful garlicky flavor from the from the wild leak and it's just  some fresh freshman from from mud lake farms and bit of parsley and i'll boil garlic really sarah's been cooking more and more with some flavors of tea that we found themselves just kind of unexpected and really really nice raise other elements so we have here a bit of a shared rhubarb that we just put into a little bit of ice water and then give it a the beautiful tartness from the rhubarb and here we have a bit of pickled blueberry so these are from the end of last season that we've really some interesting complexity there in th e then just last night we had one of our producers brought by some really beautiful little baby radishes he knows me too well he said you know i don't think they're necessarily ready to come out of the garden just yet he says but i had a feeling you might want to we have a garden that grows right across the street  on to finish