by Nicholas Oconnor, Prepared Food & Cheese Category Manager
This month I am excited to deliver a brief report on some of the new additions to our prepared foods program and let everyone know what is happening now and in the very near future with our Hot Bar menu at the Willy Street Co-op!
We’ve received a lot of useful feedback lately from customers about the hot bar. We love to hear what you’re interested in seeing on the hot bar and what kind of things folks think are missing. Some examples of the feedback we have received are: small alterations to current recipes, requesting a wider variety of proteins, or using fewer allergens in our dishes, like omitting dairy or wheat.
Protein Variety
With regards to protein variety on the hot bar, we’ve had several customers request to see more vegan options on the hot bar. Well, I am happy to say that new dishes and options are on the way. We will be using a multitude of ingredients to accomplish this task, such as including jackfruit, seitan, as well as our locally made tofu from Simple Soyman.
New Vegan Options
Another exciting avenue we will be exploring is to repurpose some of our current recipes and make them with vegan ingredients. We will be taking recipes like our Sweet and Hot Chicken, Orange Chicken, and Curry Squash & Chicken, and reworking them to be made with vegan proteins.
Don’t worry—if you like the original recipes, we will still offer those.
Adding Proteins Too
Conversely, we will be working to also expand the variety of proteins in some of our classically vegan/vegetarian dishes to also have a meat option. Similar idea to what we did with our Roasted Vegetable Lasagna and Beef Lasagna, which is now one of our more popular dishes that we have to offer. We will also be looking for opportunities to take dishes like Mongolian Seitan and turn it into Mongolian Beef, so our meat-eating customers can experience this delicious dish too.
I hope you are as excited as we are to try all the great new food that our cooks and bakers work so hard to make for us at our Production Kitchen.
Menu Themes
Lastly, I would like to mention in case you didn’t already know, we run a different menu theme each day of the week. You can expect a set of dishes that coincide with this menu theme at all three of our stores, plus a few additional dishes that tend to be our more popular dishes, to help fill in the gaps.
You can see the weekly hot bar menu at willystreet.coop/hot-bar-menu.