You have no idea how badly I wanted to call this 'Studio 54 at Lindera Farms', but I was assured nobody would get the reference and somehow I would still be sued.
Following the release of our Essentials Collection, designed with everyday use in mind, we wanted to tackle something on the waaaay other end of the spectrum: micro-batch vinegars.
My favorite time in kitchens was one that for most line cooks is few and far between; submitting a recipe or idea for your chef and colleagues to critique. One unsung peril of cooking is that when you're cooking a dish every night, doing the same prep day in and day out, it gets pretty monotonous.
For me, the best way to combat that feeling was by perpetually generating new ideas to try out; corn dumplings made entirely from corn and corn starch, fermented...everything, new applications for edible clay, anything I could do to distract myself intellectually was a god sent reprieve from the boredom. Naturally this made me a terrible line cook; but I had some good ideas! Making our own vinegar program for instance (nobody ever actually took me up on that one).
Those experiences carried over into Lindera, where we're constantly playing around with new ideas, sending them to colleagues and our chef customers, getting feedback. In pursuits like those, you're taking advantage of produce at its absolute peak and highlighting it, and selling a few bottles, then moving on to the next thing. You see some fun new ingredient at the farmers market, or find a new set of flowers while foraging, get inspired, and voila: we'd have a new product. We'd make a few bottles, bring them to the farmers market, sell out, then it would be on to the next thing. But, when you're running an eCommerce site, you have to think about scale: you can't be that whimsical and exciting.
Or can you?
Probably not, but we're going to find out with our new collection: The Studio At Lindera Farms! A rotating collection of micro-batch products we'll be releasing every month (well, most months, anyway.) The quantities will vary, but all will be limited edition with no more than 100 bottles being made.
Let's be clear: these are not experiments. You are neither a focus group nor a guinea pig. These are little batches of products we've been making for friends, family, and colleagues, and now we're sharing them with you too!
Sometimes this will be total whimsy; something that we make once for the site and then never again. Other times, maybe we'll bring it back the following year. It just depends on how much you like it, and frankly whether we're sick of it or not. It's no way to run a rail road, but we hope you'll have as much fun with these as we have making them.
