How a Friendly Toast chef develops specials
The Friendly Toast changes its specials every eight weeks. Its special for June and July is something called a Faux-ke Poké, a vegetarian take on a Hawaiian poké bowl.
It looks exactly like poké but is made up of marinated pink pineapple, mashed avocado, pickled red onion and diced cucumber. It clearly doesn’t taste like authentic poké — no raw tuna — but it plays sweet, rich and acidic flavors off each other. In addition, each major ingredient has a different texture. On top of everything, in celebration of Pride Month, the colors — purple, green, red, and pink — are colors of the Pride rainbow flag.
How does a dish like this come about?
Justin Fischer is The Friendly Toast’s Director of Culinary Operations. Among other duties, he is in charge of recipe development for the chain’s 12 locations, which include its original spot in Portsmouth as well as locations in Bedford and Nashua as well as in Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts. He said this particular dish developed from one particular ingredient: pink pineapple.
“It’s this fantastic ingredient that I really wanted to work with,” Fischer said. “We’ve got a few distributors we work with. If I tell them, ‘I’ve got this fantastic ingredient; can you find it for me?,’ they’ll get it. Each of the pink pineapples came in its own individual box!”
Costa Rican pink pineapples have a firm texture, and a color much like that of raw tuna, though obviously they taste very different. The pineapple, which gets its pink color from lycopene, an enzyme that helps give tomatoes their color, has a sweet, perfumy taste that Fischer decided to pair with the richness of lightly mashed avocado.
“Once we added the avocado, we needed a little acidity, which we got from the pickled red onion,” Fischer said.
One of the constraints Fischer and his team work under is to keep new recipes simple to prepare and use ingredients that Friendly Toast kitchens would mostly already have in rotation.
“Originally, we tried this [dish] as a spring roll,” Fisher said. “It was good — everyone liked it — but there were a lot of steps to teach the staff at all our locations.” So the development team worked to reconfigure the recipe.
The decision was made to add more sweetness and some umami (savoriness), so maple and soy sauce were added to the dish’s marinade. Spiciness was added through an aioli flavored with Korean chiles.
“We had a spicy salmon roll toast [on the menu already],” Fischer said. “That had been one of our first attempts to make a poké-inspired dish, and we had developed the gochujang aioli for that.” Wrapping the poké spring rolls in rice paper and deep frying them had been complicated in terms of adding more steps to their preparation, and had changed the temperature, but the fried rice paper had added a welcome crunch and flavor, so as the dish developed, the team decided to fry it on its own and serve it on the side of the poké as a garnish. Traditional poké has sesame, salt and green onions, so this interpretation is sprinkled with everything bagel seasoning, which adds yet another layer of flavor, color and texture.
At the same time that Fischer and his team were developing The Friendly Toast’s spring and summer specials, they were also reconfiguring all the restaurant’s recipes to eliminate peanuts and tree nuts.
“It’s really important to us that everyone can try our food, so we spend a lot of time thinking about allergies,” said Fischer. The chain announced earlier this month that it was eliminating nuts from all its locations. “The Friendly Toast has transformed its kitchen protocols and menu to include safe meals for children with food allergies,” it announced in a press release on June 12, citing CDC data that one in 13 American children has a food allergy.
The Friendly Toast
4 Main St., Bedford, 836-8907, and 225 DW Highway, Nashua, 864-0051, thefriendlytoast.com
