This is how Chef Gavin Baker describes his dish 'The Platter of Whole Cauliflower Royale w/ Cheese (kale + roasted garlic, cheddar custard, goat cheese crust, hazelnut “parmesan”) Audra from AVL Today commented: "It Came out beautifully plated. No joke, I am still dreaming about that cauli".
"We get these amazing big cauliflowers that are as local as we can find them! We brine them for 24 hours and then we steam them till they are soft. We then make a kale and roasted garlic horseradish Royale, a custard that goes on the inside and then we turn them upside down and fill the nooks and crannies with the custard. The Cauliflower is then steamed again to set the custard and then we reheat them up in the Josper oven until they're hot all the way through and then we cover them with a goat cheese frost.
They are then put back in the Jospar oven until brown around the outside, they are then covered with a vegan Parmesan that we make with nutritional yeast cashews and hazel nuts. Fresh parsley is then sprinkled on top with a big beautiful Cyprus pure mint salt. These are no ordinary cauliflowers, they are really quite special".
Then there is an incredible salad that goes with the cauliflower! There's nothing arbitrary about what we do, the salad is made up of things that can be found within 20 miles of where we are and there's about anywhere from 10 to 20 different things in that salad. This week I think we have Creasy-Greens and Lambsquarters and Woodsorrel and all that's foraged locally. We have a husband and wife team of foragers and they I have a five-year-old daughter, Dustin, Sarah and Lyra at Sustainabillies in Haywood County NC.
We are an Ingredients driven restaurant, we wait to see what they have and then just write the menu based on that.
We have Quick-Weed which just grows wild in every one’s gardens and they usually just get weed-whacked down. It's local, it's viable and just delicious. Now and then we get these crazy Garlic Mustard Greens that grow wild all over the place and as well as truly local lettuces. I call it an 18.9 miles salad on the menu, because that's the distance from us to the foragers house, they collect around their house.
We get 8-9 types of lettuce come in on a daily basis, we are also using Beet-Greens. Everything that we do has been totally thought-through and cared about".