The dates are charred with a blow torch. The burning of the interior and exterior smells of a campfire and toasting marshmallows. In our first use of the toasted sweet we paired it with Fourme d' Ambert blue cheese, nasturtium leaves, buds, flowers and stems and oxalis pods and leaves. The combination of blue cheese and dates is not anything new, in fact it is classic for a reason, it's delicious. It serves as a benchmark for what we know and how we taste. The burning of the dates is the variable in the preparation and it allows us to see how the charred flavor adds or subtracts from a dish.
Knowing that the flavor of charred dates makes them tastier now frees us to substitute them in other classic preparations and utilize them in new ones.
