People always ask us why our basil chicken salad tastes so good. The main reason? It is made completely from scratch. We cut everything fresh that goes into the salad AND we even oven roast our own tomatoes. That last part made us understand why sun dried tomatoes are so darn expensive. It takes A LOT of tomatoes to make a small container of sun dried tomatoes. The second reason? We use homemade aoili as the binder in our salad rather than store bought mayo. What is aoili? Ours is egg yolk, basil, olive oil, salt/pepper and garlic. It is more sauce-like than mayo like and tastes like heaven. Third reason – we hand-pull apart every chicken breast that we use in the salad. This is completely a pain (literally – 170 degree chicken gets your fingertips uncomfortably hot almost instantly – the secret is tripling up on gloves and the burning in your fingertips becomes manageable) but pulled chicken just tastes better than shredded or diced chicken in our opinion. It also tends to stay a bit juicier. In the end it takes us about an hour to make 20lbs of chicken salad. I think most restaurants would balk at taking this much time to do it, especially when we could buy pre-made stuff from our food vendors. But if we bought it, we wouldn’t know exactly what was in it (all good stuff in our case) AND it wouldn’t taste nearly as good!
We use aoili as a spread on our sandwiches. What is aoili you ask? Basically it is olive oil mixed with an emulsifier (egg whites or garlic in our case). We make ours from scratch every day or so. They BLOW AWAY any sandwich spread you are used to. We have three different sandwiches on the menu right now – a basil chicken (featuring the best (and healthiest) chicken salad mix you have ever tasted, a chipotle steak (flavored with a chipotle aioli) and an arugula mozzarella one. We only use whole, freshly grilled meats in our sandwiches. No cold cuts or processed meats here! When you try one, I think you will agree that we have just raised the bar for sandwiches in Boulder!