That’s Chris tasting daikon radish straight from the field at Michael Docter’s farm in Hadley, MA. It was a really really good crop, better than Michael had expected. And this created a big problem. This November, there were 10,000 pounds of beautiful spicy sweet daikon lying under the soil. But there are not a lot of restaurants in Boston that would know what to do with that much daikon radish.

Unless Michael could find someone who would buy all the radishes, it would make more financial sense to compost most of the crop in the field than to pay for them to be harvested. Normally this would be a perfect conundrum for us.

Some of you (especially those of you who have attended a Food Development Meeting) know that the way food gets on our menu is really different than other restaurants. We let farmers tell us what to cook. So when a bumper crop appears, we get to work thinking up ideas.

The problem with daikon radish? When you pickle it, it tastes amazing, but when you take the lid off the container, it emits a horrible smell. There are entire threads on the internet dedicated to solving this problem, and there are no solutions, at least not any we can find. It is so bad that we had to pull the plug on a radish sandwich we ran a while back that was otherwise delicious.

But we brought home some daikon anyway and Enzo started experimenting. At a Food Dev meeting a few weeks ago, we got something we think you might like. We are lightly roasting, then marinating the daikon. There is a daikon spread. A slaw. And there are a few other surprises in the sandwich including something crunchy. We’ll be testing v1 of the Daikon Radish Sandwich for a week starting this Wednesday at CloverHSQ. Stop by and give us your thoughts.