There’s just something about dining al fresco. For our Chefs and Culinary Team, cooking al fresco is just as nice – especially when it’s fresh ingredients right from local farms cooking over an open fire. Our Executive Chef, Andy Teixiera, and his team were able to break out of the winery kitchens to cook al fresco on a few lovely occasions this summer.
Each summer, Wishing Stone Farm (Little Compton, RI) invites their favorite chefs from RI restaurants to come cook at their farm for an incredible farm to table experience – right there on the farm where we source produce year-round. At our feature in July, family-style courses were hitting the tables including a plethora of local seafood, churrasco skirt steak and utilizing all of the incredible tomatoes from the farm for a crispy mozzarella dish and tomato sorbet intermezzo. Our pastry chefs escorted around platters with an array of sweet treats – and what’s an open fire session without s’mores? Check out the housemade marshmallows and accoutrements!
Cochon555’s Heritage Fire event at the end of August is whole-animal, live-fire culinary experience in support of heritage breed farming and Piggy Bank charity. For our second year participating, Chef Andy featured a whole striped bass that truly impressed the guests and onlookers at Gurney’s Newport Resort. Our Pastry Chef Colleen Mulry was also a featured chef, preparing desserts over open fire – including peach and corn cobbler with fire roasted peach chutney, pork fat corn spoonbread, pork sand and peach honeycomb candy plus seared blueberry buckle with ginger pate de fruit, rum foam and blueberry gel. WOW! (Photos courtesy of Max Flatow / Cochon555)
To squeeze in one more al fresco dinner of the summer, we hosted our own the very next day with our Inaugural Vine Dinner on a beautiful Sunday evening. The tables sprawled on our meadow lawn surrounded by our vineyards made for a wonderful ambiance. It was truly a gathering of food made with love, sold out at 60 guests. Course after course of delicious seasonal items were cranked out of our outdoor kitchen and Chef Andy’s outdoor grill set-up. Sweet chili pork belly, scallops, and assorted shellfish – all fire-roasted, were part of the first “course”. A cucumber sorbet with mint provided a nice intermezzo before the whole roasted striped bass, farm vegetables and 30 hour smoked long ribs hit the table. Grilled watermelon, our Pastry Team’s signature sweet treat boards and more housemade s’mores capped off the evening – grilled with barrel staves brought to the table by our chefs. (Photos courtesy of David Dadekian / Eat Drink RI)
